China Fails On Its Promise Not To Restrict Journalists Leading Up To The Games

On this day of the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, there is little disagreement that China has not made good on its promise that “there will be no restrictions on journalists reporting on the Olympic Games.” The government has grown increasingly obsessed with controlling its global image, and has used security concerns as a convenient excuse for its crackdown on the local and foreign media.

The near-total shutdown of coverage of the March riots in Tibet and the harassment and detention of journalists — foreign and Chinese — covering the increasingly politicized aftermath of the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan were just the beginning of a series of problems.

In May, apparently unnerved by the Tibetan unrest and fearful of protests in the heart of the capital, China informed broadcast officials that it would bar live television shots from Tiananmen Square during the Beijing Olympics. The Chinese government eventually backed down in the face of objections from international broadcasters who had paid hundreds of millions in rights fees and were counting on eye-pleasing live shots from the landmark site.

In May, CNN cemented its "blacklist" status in China when commentator Jack Cafferty called the Chinese “thugs and goons". He later clarified that he meant the communist regime-- but it was too late to mollify the Chinese public. Craig Simons, the Asia bureau chief for Cox Newspapers, said that a cab driver this month had asked him if he worked for CNN. Simons said he did not. The cabbie declared that he would have refused to carry him if he had. “We were on Second Ring Road, in heavy traffic, and he said he’d pull over right there and drop me on the shoulder,” according to Simons.

In July, Chinese police stepped in to stop a live broadcast from the Great Wall on Germany’s ZDF TV network. ZDF’s East Asia correspondent, Johannes Hano and his crew had spent months requesting and receiving the necessary permissions to stage the broadcast. But in the middle of an interview with David Spindler—a Great Wall expert from the U.S.—German morning-show audiences saw police stick their hands over the camera lens. “They told us, in the U.S. there’s no Great Wall, so there couldn’t be a U.S. Great Wall expert,” Hano said. After a frantic telephone appeal to the Foreign Ministry, the Germans were allowed to do the rest of their live segments for the morning program.

It wasn't long after that incident when Chinese police were forced to apologize for roughing up two Japanese journalists in the western region of Xinjiang. The apology came after border police clashed with the Japanese journalists who had arrived in the Muslim-majority region after an alleged terrorist attack left 16 police dead.

A photographer for the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper was forcibly detained and kicked by police in the city of Kashgar. A reporter for the Nippon Television Network was also detained and treated roughly by Chinese police who pushed his face to the ground. Kashgar police also entered a photographer's hotel room and forced him to delete photos he had taken of the scene of the attack. 38-year-old Masami Kawakita said he was taking photos at the scene when he was grabbed by paramilitary policy and carried into a government facility nearby. Police at one point held him to the ground, placing a foot on his face pinning his head to the ground, and also kicked him once, before he was released after two hours, he said.

And just the day before the opening ceremony, the Chinese authorities detained a plane containing U.S. journalists for over three hours. Typically, the White House press corps are able to disembark the plane right after landing, board buses and head to their hotels and work areas while U.S. State Department officials process immigration and customs details. Instead, the journalists were held on the plane with no explanation-- and afterward, each piece of luggage was individually searched.