Muzzled in Beijing

>> A new report by Human Rights Watch
says the Chinese government is breaking
its promises on media freedoms in the
run-up to the 2008 Games

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Journalists have been feasting on the upcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics. The angles the Games offer are just too tempting to pass up: pro-Tibet and Falun Gong dissenters, expropriation of entire neighbourhoods to make way for Olympic venues, air pollution, China’s ever-growing economic and diplomatic muscles—hundreds of millions of gallons of ink and megabytes and broadcast seconds have been used by journalists to talk about the country. The world’s press corps already has advance teams in the country digging up stories, and the noise coming out of the Middle Kingdom will reach deafening levels in just eight short months.

So the Chinese are, predictably, antsy. Not known for their reputation as welcoming to nosy foreigners, the Chinese government has been making life harder than usual for many reporters who have travelled and worked there in recent months. In a new report, well-respected international watchdog group Human Rights Watch is warning journalists that their freedom of movement is still at risk, despite recent proclamations by the communist government saying new, more liberal rules were put in place on Jan. 1, 2007, that would ease travel restrictions.

Phelim Kine, a Canadian-born researcher at HRW’s Hong Kong office who was in Montreal last week to discuss the media in China, says, “Beijing is not Athens or Barcelona or even Seoul. It is intrinsically hostile to the concept of free speech.” That hostility runs the risk of boiling over next year, when an estimated 20,000 journalists and technicians arrive in Beijing to cover the games.

Spin and silence

The report, “You Will Be Harassed and Detained: China Media Freedoms Under Assault Ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games,” is interesting reading (see for yourself at china.hrw.org). Numerous journalists are interviewed, many of them confirming that the new laws adopted earlier this year aren’t being observed. And not only in remote and potentially embarrassing regions like Tibet, or the Muslim-dominated Xinjiang province in the country’s west. One journalist complains of harassment even while touring a factory in Shanghai.

“The rules say journalists can talk to any consenting interviewee, when previously they needed approval from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” says Kine in a boardroom of Montreal human rights organization Rights & Democracy. “If you didn’t have that approval, the authorities could take away your notes, your camera and your story would be ruined. The new rules were designed to put an end to the regulations, to end the paralysis.”

They didn’t. The report quotes many foreign journalists, most of whom withheld their names for fear of reprisals, who say they were constantly followed by plainclothes policemen, taking pictures of them and even, at times, abducting them. Reporters covering touchy topics like protests, AIDS and cancer villages and environmental degradation are regularly abused despite assurances from Beijing that the situation is improving. Local journalists, says Kine, don’t even get that assurance, and work under the same nightmarish conditions as they ever did.

Kine’s fear, he says, is this kind of behaviour will continue during the Games. “This is the first time an Olympics have been held in a totalitarian country since 1936,” he says (the 1980 Moscow Games don’t count, he says, because most Western countries boycotted them following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). “Our fear is that this will hurt journalists’ ability to accurately report on modern China.”

China was granted the Games in 2001 on the promise, says Kine, that it would increase its democratization and freedom of expression. But as the clock ticks down to the torch-lighting ceremony next Aug. 8, it’s clear to human rights observers that these promises will turn out to be empty.

What was most disturbing for Kine, however, was the Canadian Olympic Committee’s apathy. Olympic organizers, in China or Canada, don’t seem to care about media freedom. Kine met with the COC last week in Toronto to discuss the situation, but says his reception was distinctly chilly. “Our message was anything but welcome,” he says. “The impression I got was that they didn’t see there was a problem and were choosing to deny our research.”