The expulsion of three Wall Street Journal reporters from Beijing at such a crucial time is no coincidence.
The question is, what will it take for Canberra to respond in kind and stand up to Chinese press censorship?
The reporters — former Fairfax staffer Philip Wen and Americans Josh Chin and Chao Wang — were given five days to leave after Beijing took offence at a WSJ article titled “China is the real sick man of Asia”.
That the expelled journalists had nothing to do with the article — an opinion piece by a US academic about China being “humbled” by the coronavirus crisis — has raised the issue of reciprocity.
Just how will the US and its allies respond to Beijing accelerating its crackdown on foreign media?
This is the first direct expulsion since 1968, and the first multiple expulsion in living memory. Typically, Beijing simply revokes press credentials or does not renew visas of reporters it considers troublesome. That tactic has claimed multiple journalists over the past several years.
The line has hardened since Xi Jinping took the reins as leader in 2012. The aim is to create uncertainty amongst the foreign press corps which numbers several hundred media representatives.
The endgame for Beijing is to force self-censorship, to browbeat the foreign media into pulling punches as they report on China, particularly on its senior leaders and their families who have traditionally been the absolute no-go area.
The crackdown started in February 2011. At that time messages circulated Chinese on social media about marches for a so-called “jasmine revolution” in the wake of the Arab Spring.
As it turned out, the main event of the supposed jasmine revolution was a non-event. Protesters were massively outnumbered by onlookers, including journalists, senior diplomats, police and plain-clothes operatives.
Several journalists were assaulted by secret police. The non-revolution prompted action by authorities. Every member of the foreign press corps was called into the immigration office for an interview recorded on video.
I happened to be one of the first (likely by dint of my publication, The Australian, or my nationality). It was very uncomfortable and the choice of location made it clear what might be at stake.
In the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, authorities had almost completely relaxed restrictions for foreign media travelling around China. The sole exception was Tibet and the Tibetan areas of Yunnan, Sichuan and Qinghai provinces, home to about half the ethnic Tibetan population.
Parts of Xinjiang have also been systemically designated forbidden territory since sectarian riots in 2009. On a December 2009 trip, two colleagues and I were given a round-the-clock guard for five days “for our protection” as we moved around Kashgar, home to hundreds of thousands of increasingly persecuted Muslim Uighurs.
Journalists reporting there and in other ethnically sensitive areas are now monitored, detained and generally obstructed even in allegedly “open” areas.
There has also been an escalating trend of detaining journalists for no reason in provincial areas; they are often roughed-up, with equipment confiscated or smashed.
The emergence of the coronavirus COVID-19 has created a new set of problems for journalists. It has become clear that censorship and a crackdown on free speech on Chinese social media — including censoring several medical professionals, one of whom has since died of the disease — played a role in ensuring the disease spread much faster and wider than it should have.
Beijing is responding by doubling down on its latest attack on freedom of speech. And as usual it’s not just foreign press being made to suffer. Academics such as Tsinghua University professor Xu Zhangrun, who criticised Xi over the coronavirus crisis in an essay, have been put under house arrest, had social media sites shuttered and access to the internet blocked.
Activist and legal scholar Xu Zhiyong, who was freed in 2017 after a four-year jail term, was detained at the weekend after more than two months on the run for slamming Xi’s mishandling of the epidemic and other crises. At least two Chinese journalists reporting from the virus front line have disappeared.
In the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing war with the truth, foreign journalists are being punted out — and Chinese citizens are paying with their lives.
And yet Western countries, including Australia, have opened their doors to scores of Chinese media, taking the high road on press freedom. Will Australia act? And what will the US do, beyond its current push against Chinese state-run media?
I put a series of questions to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. It had not responded at time of publication.
Michael Sainsbury was a correspondent in Beijing for The Australian and then the Daily Mail from 2009-2013 and served as Secretary of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China during 2012-2013
That China does not believe in a free press is a well known fact. All that changes over time is the specific form of control and which reports are suppressed in the belief that China’s National demands it. I would not bother to comment at on Sainsbury’s article, except that it represents a continuation of his attempts to paint China in a worse light than it need be painted. As a person who has visited China, I would expect that he knows that Chinese police routinely rough up people who do not matter but more importantly, low level officials always try to prevent anyone from rocking the boat and too often fail to use their own initiative to deal with new problems. Local officials therefore suppressed a doctor’s report on the new virus for these reasons and were later sacked because they had not helped to control the virus outbreak and setback efforts to control it, though we have no way, unlike Sainsbury, of telling how much they set it back. Sainsbury seems obsessed with blaming Xi for everything and he is described as making himself President for life, which he has not, since he has only opened up the possibility that he can serve more than two terms. Making a fetish of leaders is something that China could have gone beyond more than it has but I am worried more about the tendency of more local officials to try only to carry out orders from above and to not rock the boat, when that is exactly what needs to be done. I doubt though that these paint China as black as possible stories will work, although I was amazed, even shaken, to hear that Australians are avoiding Chinese restaurants, since they don’t seem to understand that infections are not transmitted just because the coronavirus outbreak is in China and Chinese restaurants in Australia offer Chinese cuisine. The Australians staying away apparently do not understand that the virus is not transmitted from Chinese style food or do not understand that not all Chinese restaurant owners and staff have recently travelled to Wuhan or anywhere else in China. perhaps with that level of irrationality among the Australian public, Sainsbury’s “get Australia in line with US confrontation of China” reporting has more of a future than I think.
Yeah I tend to agree. This coverage is the same kind of thing you could read in the Australian. China bashing, how novel. And anyway liberal democracy is hardly working out so well for Australia in terms of free media – a handful of oligarchs own most of our media.
No more free media in Australia. The Government can send the AFP after anyone who opens up something the Government doesn’t want opened up and the High Court has just said that’s fine according to existing law. What we’ll have now is the kind of ‘free media’ some of our neighbours have where mild criticism of the Government is tolerated and brushed off and the journalists don’t dig too deep if they know what’s good for them.
Well, it’s very much the Chinese Australian community who have stopped going to Chinese restaurants. It’s hardly a particularly Australian thing, seems to be happening everywhere. Apparently a big topic of conversation on WeChat. Who’d a thunk it?
Right on DB. The irresponsible attempts by some commentators here to either downplay the inability of the CCP to stop the virus in its earliest stages are most disappointing. Best article I’ve come across so far is by the pandemic expert Laurie Garrett at:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/15/coronavirus-xi-jinping-chinas-incompetence-endangered-the-world/
If it does become a worldwide pandemic, I think the virus should be renamed the Xi-Virus.
I’m so peak Crikey’d.
See. Our governments aren’t that different.
Hard to assess who is the bigger Yank water carrying Sinophobe – Sainsbury, or that gawd awful Hartcher at UnFairFacts.
One wonders when some of these local Yank boosters and urgers might get around to mentioning “Crypto AG”, and it’s place in the annals of democracy suppression, all the way through to orchestrating coups and assassinations around the globe.
A ‘private enterprise’, “Crypto AG”, although it wasn’t.
2 outfits smart enough not to buy what they were selling?
The Russians and Chinese.
Good judges.
Sad story, for all the reasons expressed in prior comments here. WSJ, The Australian, Daily Mail are hardly role models for a free press operating as they do as amplifiers for the sinophobic views of corrupt and indulgent oligarchs.