Journalists cover the opening of the third plenary session of the 12th Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in Shanghai in 2014. (Johannes Eisele/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)
BEIJING — As President Xi Jinping pays a much-anticipated state visit to the United States this week, Beijing wants to show Washington that it is playing nice with the Western media. For the first time in nearly three years, China will grant fresh work visas to two reporters from the New York Times.
“Foreign media welcome,” the state-run China Daily proclaimed in a front-page banner headline Saturday, quoting Xi talking to visiting News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch.
But although Xi reportedly told Murdoch last week that news outlets abroad can “boost mutual understanding and cooperation,” the Wall Street Journal’s English- and Chinese-language Web sites remain blocked here, as do those of the New York Times, Reuters and Bloomberg News.
And around China, suspicion of foreign journalists remains high. Efforts to prevent them from reporting freely are common, as a recent trip to the Chinese city of Horgos on the border with Kazakhstan demonstrated.
A Washington Post team was expressly told we were not welcome there, with Yang Jihong, the local propaganda department director, instructing police to detain us until three colleagues arrived to “escort” us around a free-trade zone straddling the border.
“You can’t interview traders,” insisted one of those officials, a man who said he was not carrying any identification but whose black T-shirt somewhat incongruously proclaimed the word “Happiness” in English. He did not let us out of his sight for the next several hours, before ordering us to accompany him in a police car to have our press cards and passports checked for the fifth time.
“If you compare the lot of a foreign correspondent in China in the 1990s with today, then obviously a great deal has changed for the better,” said Jo Floto, president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC). “But since the [2008] Olympics, progress has stalled and, on some issues, gone into reverse.
“As a resident international journalist, you are still very likely to experience harassment by the security forces during your time in China. Our members continue to report the intimidation of their sources, interviewees and local staff by the police or their proxies.”
The New York Times’s problems date to
a 2012 article about the wealth of then-Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. Authorities retaliated by denying visas for new journalists trying to enter China, although the Times was allowed to renew visas for employees already here.
The Times staff members who are now promised visas are being allowed in on the condition that two other reporters leave the country. It is too soon to say whether the latest move represents a permanent reprieve for the Times or a temporary measure to take the issue off the agenda during Xi’s state visit.
Recently, other Times journalists, as well as a senior executive, were denied short-term visas to enter China on reporting and business trips.
“We’ve been working closely with the Foreign Ministry to resolve this problem and have recently seen some progress,” Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha said, adding that the newspaper hopes “to resume a normal rotation of correspondents in and out of China as soon as possible.”
The Washington Post has not experienced problems obtaining Chinese journalist residence visas since correspondent Andrew Higgins was denied one from 2009 to 2012. But the day-to-day experience of reporting in China is increasingly challenging.
On reporting trips to the troubled western region of
Xinjiang and to
Inner Mongolia in the past year, Washington Post teams were followed, detained and prevented from talking to local residents.
A survey in the FCCC’s latest annual report, issued in May, found that of 117 reporters who responded, 96 percent said working conditions for foreign media did not meet international standards, while 33 percent said conditions had deteriorated in the past year.
Foreign journalists are sometimes criticized for painting too negative a picture of China, of paying too much attention to human rights abuses and of missing the longer-term trends that have helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the past three decades.
But in Horgos, The Post was trying to report on a story the government should have welcomed: Xi’s initiative to revive ancient trading routes to Central Asia under the banner of a new Silk Road. Still, the “Happiness” man and his colleagues could not shake off their suspicion of the Western media.
Simon Denyer is The Post’s bureau chief in China. He served previously as bureau chief in India and as a Reuters bureau chief in Washington, India and Pakistan.
By Rohantha De Silva and K. Ratnayake -22 September 2015
- Sep 22, 2015
September 22, 2015
22/09/2015
POSTED: 22 Sep 2015 
NEW DELHI: With Sri Lanka rejecting the US draft resolution on human rights violations and war crimes in the Island nation, it is reliably learnt that India will support a resolution, which has the ‘widest possible consensus.’
( September 22, 2015, Colombo, Sri lanka Guardian) Former President and Kurunegala District MP Mahinda Rajapaksa today asked the Government to reject the OHCHR report on Sri Lanka.
(Lanka-e-News -21.Sep.2015, 11.30PM) The parliament of the united government that comprises about 90 ministers who don’t even know what their areas of official operations , duties and tasks , without a gazette notification defining them is to meet tomorrow. This is something unprecedented in Sri Lanka’s history. 
Zionist Jewish settler thugs supported by lawless Israeli government, its military and police, entered Islam’s third holiest Masjid Al Aqsa last week and started desecrating the masjid and beat innocent Palestinian men and women at prayer.
Jonathan Steele-Tuesday 22 September 2015
European ministers agree a plan to share out 120,000 asylum seekers across the EU, despite opposition from former communist countries.
