The Meaning of China’s Crackdown on the Foreign Press

By Evan Osnos

The Chinese government is threatening to expel nearly two dozen foreign correspondents, working for the Times and Bloomberg News, in retaliation for investigations that exposed the private wealth of Chinese leaders. 

It is the Chinese government’s most dramatic attempt to insulate itself from scrutiny in the thirty-five years since China began opening to the world. 

We won’t know if it’s prepared to follow through on the threat for another week or two, when correspondents’ annual visas begin to expire. 

So far, it has declined to renew them. 

Unless the government changes course, reporters and their dependents will be required to leave the country before the end of the year.
But following through is only part of the point. 

The real purpose is intimidation: to compel foreign news organizations to adopt a more compliant posture in their daily decisions, small and large. 

In attempting to shield themselves from the gaze of the world, the new generation of Chinese leaders has unwittingly provided one of the clearest views yet into their thinking, and their self-perception, as they confront the challenges that will define China’s future.
Before the government threatened to expel the foreign staffs of the Times and Bloomberg, there were already signs that a strategic change was underway. 

As I wrote last month, news organizations are facing a time of reckoning in China. 

The American correspondent Paul Mooney was denied a visa in November, joining a list of other journalists, including Andrew Higgins and Melissa Chan, who have been prevented from entering the country, or forced out, in the past two years. 

Chan, who was working for Al Jazeera English, was the first foreign correspondent expelled in thirteen years. At the time, we did not know what to make of the news; we now know that Chan’s expulsion, in May, 2012, was a milestone, not an aberration.
The present threat to expel journalists unwinds a decision, made five years ago, to signal greater openness to foreign correspondents. 

In 2007, as a condition for hosting the Olympics in Beijing, the Chinese government removed restrictions barring Beijing-based journalists from leaving the capital without prior written permission. 

It was a largely symbolic restraint—reporters travelled anyway—but removing it was symbolic as well, and that was the intent: it was designed to show the world that the host of the Olympics was confident and strong enough to bear whatever journalists might uncover in their wanderings.
Two things seem to have compelled the government to reverse course. 

In 2011, the uprisings in the Arab world unnerved the Chinese government by raising the prospect that the combination of technology, information, and dissatisfaction could undermine even a government that appeared secure to itself and outsiders. 

“If we waver,” Wu Bangguo, a senior official, told a meeting in Beijing in March, 2011, “the state could sink into the abyss.” 

The Arab Spring created a climate of sensitivity, but it was the events of the following year that tipped the balance. 

In 2012, the Times used Chinese records to calculate that the family of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had acquired a fortune of $2.7 billion during his time in office. 

Bloomberg produced a similar story on the incoming President, Xi Jinping. 

In retaliation, the government took steps to punish the bottom line of both companies: it blocked a Times Web site aimed at Chinese readers, and it ordered financial customers not to buy any new Bloomberg terminals. 

Those measures remain in place.
Before President Xi and the fifth generation of Communist Party leaders took office, last November, China-watchers wondered if he would address his people’s growing appetite for information by giving them a bit more space and bit more truth—to let them blow off steam, and satisfy their sense of slow and steady progress, as a way of preventing more radical change. 

The leaders are choosing the opposite tack: they are seeking to create more economic opportunity but less political and intellectual opportunity. 

Over the course of the past six months, they have narrowed the range of free expression on the Internet and tightened their hold over professors and activists who criticize the government. 

Attempting to chill the activities of the foreign press is the latest step. 

They are betting that their people will tolerate a narrower realm of ideas than they enjoyed a year or two ago. 

That is a risky bet; taking things away from people who have come to expect more does not generally relieve the source of pressure.
China is gradually losing interest in soft power. 

The Party spent much of the past decade seeking to project a more attractive and welcoming image to the world; it placed billboards in Times Square, expanded the reach of its news outlets to broadcast more of its views to Africa and Latin America, and built hospitals, roads, and soccer stadiums in developing countries. Those efforts will continue, but the leadership is signalling that it has concluded being liked is less important than simply surviving. 

I spent some time with a senior Chinese diplomat recently, and when I asked what motivated the threat of expulsion, the diplomat said that the Times and Bloomberg were seeking nothing short of removing the Communist Party from power, and that they must not be allowed to continue. 

That argument surprised me: I had expected a bland procedural defense—this was a blunt expression of fear.
The government is adapting a policy that it has used with other businesses, but it is one that misunderstands the incentives for news organizations. 

For years, China expected foreign companies not to publicly voice their complaints about hacking, or intellectual-property violations, in order to protect their broader interests in the country. 

But over the years, that strategy failed: foreign companies began to complain openly, and the United States government took up their cases. 

News organizations have little reason to keep quiet; unlike a company selling industrial equipment, a company selling news depends, for its survival, on the perception of objectivity and credibility. 

Staying silent was not an option.
In a visit to Beijing on Thursday, Vice-President Joe Biden took up the cause of the foreign correspondents, and in doing so he officially, and rightly, ended the practice of keeping these issues unspoken. 

We will soon know if the Party is prepared to deliver on its threat. 

The deeper meaning of these efforts, however, is already clear. 

The new generation leading China fears that the effort to itemize its financial gains is a story so deep and dangerous that it is worth sacrificing China’s broader goals, at home and abroad, in order to prevent it from being told.

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China to Foreign Media: Get in Line or Get Out

Chinese leaders are showing that they're ready completely shut China off from the rest of the world (again).
By Tyler Roney

It’s no secret that China bans foreign news portals that offend its oh-so delicate sensibilities, swiftly and without mercy or explanation. 

This week has seen The Wall Street Journal and Reuters‘ Chinese websites blocked. 

There is, so far, no explanation for China’s blocking of these sites — could be anything from the Tiananmen attack reporting to Paul Mooney’s rejected visa — but signs point to a bleak future for foreign media in the Middle Kingdom.
This news comes as Bloomberg is under scrutiny for censoring sensitive stories to be able to report in China; their site has been blocked since July 2012 for running a story on Xi Jinping’s family wealth. 

This is not totally dissimilar to the censor’s axe that is still chopping on The New York Times‘ neck (Chinese and English language websites) for a story about Wen Jiabao’s family wealth. 

The message from China’s censorship czars is clear: get in line, or get out.
Annoying as it is that none of the above hyperlinks — online portals for some of the most widely-respected news organizations in the world — can be accessed in China without a VPN, everyone, from publishers to Hollywood, is struggling to keep up with China’s censorship whims. 

But the outside media — often the boogeyman in the Chinese government’s eyes — is under increasing pressure to keep the CCP’s propaganda gods happy.
However, not everyone is taking this new round of blocks lying down. 

Yesterday, it was announced that a group of activists behind GreatFire launched a mirror site to make sure the website is still accessible in China. 

Charlie Smith (a pseudonym) told Mashable: ”We were really upset by the news on Friday of these two blocks.” 

The activists entreated in a blog post, ”Mr. Xi Jinping, we hope you are listening. Just let this episode slide. Pretend it did not happen. Do nothing to stop this.”
But this sort of half measure provides for a dreary future for foreign journalism in China. 

NPR quoted Orville Schell, a journalist who runs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, as saying, “Every media outlet must cover China to be in the big top…If they get precluded, and this is true of individual journalists as well, whole careers can be completely destroyed if you can’t get access.” 

This is just as true for Paul Mooney as it was for Melissa Chan from Al Jazeera who got the boot for her excellent reporting back in 2012.
However, China is fast running out of things to block; the age-old method of censoring websites that offend is simply not enough because there’s not enough left to block — what with every major news organization trying keep the dragon at bay. 

But for organizations like Bloomberg that are already blocked in China, how much worse could it possibly get? 

A lot worse. 

Though China’s famous, paranoid online censorship grabs headlines, there is a lot more it can do to punish and bully news organizations and their journalists. 

Gady Epstein reports for the Economist: “They instead use forms of pressure that attract little attention, such as delaying visa requests interminably, while making clear that the media outlet’s future coverage should be ‘more objective.’”
When asked by The Diplomat what the greatest threat facing Chinese journalism is, Veteran Chinese journalist Wen Tao — who himself spent time in detainment for his relationship with famous artist and dissident Ai Weiwei — said: “It’s not self-discipline; it’s censorship.” 

However, as shocking as China being severed from the rest of the world is, it’s not the journalism conversation that’s being had on the ground. 

Right now, China is openly talking about the supposed blackmail journalism of Chen Yongzhou who was taken in by police, urged free by his newspaper and then confessed to his crimes via television. 

While this is a problem, it amounts to navel-gazing about the state of journalism in China while the elephant in the room eats state-censored newspapers from the coffee table.
Chinese leaders are showing that they’re not afraid to completely shut China off from the rest of the world (again) in their latest bid to control perception of current events — largely because the news organizations have a lot more to lose. 

With that in mind, and the knowledge that there is almost no way to effectively fight back against such blanket censorship, there could be darker days ahead.

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What Will It Cost to Cover China?

By Evan Osnos

The Chinese Communist Party generated hopeful headlines this month by acknowledging that it faces a time of reckoning: to prevent economic peril and rising unrest, the Party promised to overhaul the economy, to allow more parents to have two children instead of only one, and to end the arbitrary “reëducation through labor” system, among other changes. 

This is an attempt at political inoculation—the Party is betting that giving its people a heavier dose of autonomy will raise their immunity against the full infection of democracy. 

In case there was any confusion about the goal, the Party reiterated its determination to fortify its control of the country and to ward off the influx of values and information that it finds threatening.
Journalism on China is facing a time of reckoning as well. 

The foreign correspondent Paul Mooney, an American who has covered China for the past eighteen years, for Newsweek, the South China Morning Post, and others, has been denied a visa. 

To anyone familiar with his work, the reason is no mystery—it’s outrageous, but familiar. 

He has been one of the most diligent and capable investigators of abuses of power. 

Mooney joins a list of other foreign correspondents—including Andrew Higgins and Melissa Chan—who have been denied entry, or have been forced to leave, in the past two years, because the Chinese government objects to how they do their work.
But the most lasting story about press freedom this week may turn out to be one not yet published. 

Unnamed journalists at Bloomberg News have accused their employer of withholding investigative pieces for fear of offending Chinese authorities. 

For a year, reporters who previously produced award-winning reports from China had been probing ties between a businessman and top leaders in Beijing. 

Then Matthew Winkler, the Bloomberg editor-in-chief, reportedly told his staff that the Party would consider such a story off-limits; in interviews, Bloomberg journalists said that he compared the situation to Nazi-era Germany, where news organizations had censored themselves to maintain access to the country. 

At the same time, Bloomberg has suspended one of its China specialists, Michael Forsythe, the author of the unpublished investigation. (On Tuesday, Forsythe confirmed that he has left the company.) 

And Amanda Bennett, the former executive editor for projects and investigations, whose unit produced many major China pieces, left Bloomberg on Wednesday, saying that she was “most proud of the groundbreaking” work they had published on the family wealth of Chinese leaders.
For thirty years, China’s economy has been growing and transforming, and the foreign press corps has grown and transformed with it. 

In the late seventies, after the Cultural Revolution, when the first American correspondents were permitted to settle in the country, China was so exotic that practically everything was news. 

As recently as a decade ago, the government officially barred journalists from leaving the capital without permission (though they did it, anyway), so reporters often had to rely on furtive dashes to the countryside and scattered glimpses of élite political intrigue. 

They did not have to worry about censorship, per se; unlike Chinese journalists, who could lose their jobs or go to jail if they violated a taboo, foreign correspondents sent their stories over the transom to their publications abroad. 

Sometimes Chinese Embassies noticed a critical piece and pushed it back to the Foreign Ministry, which would summon a reporter and issue a warning against further “misunderstandings.” 

But real consequences were rare.
Today, the story is at once more accessible and more dangerous. 

To cover China is to chronicle the world’s second-largest economy, a rising superpower, and one-fifth of the world’s population. 

China is so central to our economic lives that journalists have had no choice but to engage China with greater technical analysis and precision.
Beginning in 2012, Bloomberg, the Times, and others elevated their reporting on Chinese politics by rooting through documents in order to unravel the hidden beneficiaries of China’s new wealth. 

The rewards were clear: they have ushered in a golden age of foreign correspondence in China, and they have received nearly every honor that the industry offers.
There have been clear costs, too: the Chinese government blocked the Times’ Web site to limit the spread of its stories and to threaten the advertising revenue generated by the Chinese-language service launched in June, 2012. 

In the case of Bloomberg News, it blocked the Web site and ordered Chinese financial institutions not to buy Bloomberg’s terminals. 

And, crucially, it has stopped issuing visas to new journalists applying from those institutions.
Taken together, this is the Chinese government’s broadest effort in decades to roll back unwelcome foreign coverage—and that raises the stakes for news organizations that are struggling to figure out how to handle China. 

Make no mistake, this is not a simple choice. 

At a time when news organizations find their business models under assault, the prospect of taking an expensive stand against a foreign state is unappealing, especially when it might mean giving up their dreams for future growth in China.
But this is a new incarnation of an old and weighty responsibility. 

As foreign correspondents, we have always borne the task of recording the events that journalists in their native countries are not permitted, by circumstance or by force, to record themselves.

In the past, that has often meant documenting war and dissent. 

But in China today it also means documenting the world’s most rapid accumulation of assets, the unwritten rules, the sorting of winners and losers. 

It is a story about power, and it will have global consequences for years to come.
If China denies access to correspondents because of the quality of their work, their colleagues have a responsibility to report that fact as diligently as we have reported on China’s progress over the years. 

Some are calling for countermeasures, such as declaring China’s barriers to journalism trade violations. Others would revive calls to restrict the number of Chinese journalists allowed into the United States.
Bloomberg’s hard-won reputation for groundbreaking work in China took years to establish. 

In the days ahead, reporters and subscribers will be watching to see how the company handles this reckoning: Will it run the stories that it says are active? 

Will it discuss its practice of coding sensitive articles to prevent them from appearing on Bloomberg terminals in China? 

Are there other countries where it exercises that kind of limited distribution?
The story is about more than Bloomberg; it’s about documenting the emerging contest over the values that China will project as a great power. 

The leaders who met in Beijing this month were deciding not simply what reforms to undertake but what of kind of country they want to leave for future generations. 

It is a story that nobody can afford to ignore.

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Chinese leaders control media, academics to shape the perception of China

How Chinese officials shape and limit what Americans learn about China.

By Fred Hiatt

Paramilitary policemen stand in formation as they pay tribute to the Monument to the People's Heroes on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, November 17, 2013. China's new national security commission will enable the government to speak with a single voice when it comes to dealing with crises at home and abroad, state media cited President Xi Jinping as saying.

It’s well known that Chinese censors shape and limit the news and history their people can learn. 

What may be more surprising is how Chinese officials shape and limit what Americans learn about China.
Last month, a cultural attache in the Chinese embassy in Washington invited Perry Link to attend a Forum of Overseas Sinologists in Beijing in December.
Given that Link is one of America’s eminent China scholars, this might not be surprising — except that he had not received a visa to enter China since 1996 for reasons the Chinese have never explained.
Link replied that he would be interested in attending, but would he receive a visa?
Absolutely, he was told.
You’re sure? Link e-mailed back.
Of course, the attache replied. 

Just send your passport, “and I can help you to finish the visa application.”
Link sent his passport and application, and on Nov. 8 received the following message: “After review, I’d like to inform you that you will not be invited to the forum.”
The Lucy-and-the-football quality of this exchange is striking, but Link is far from the only foreign scholar to be blacklisted. 

In 2011, 13 respected academics who had contributed chapters to a book on Xinjiang, a province of western China that is home to a restive Muslim minority, found themselves banned.
Link, who has forged a distinguished career at Princeton and the University of California at Riverside can survive a visa ban. 

But for a young anthropologist seeking tenure, the inability to do field research could be terminal. 

And because China never explains its refusals or spells out what kind of scholarship is disqualifying, the result is a kind of self-censorship and narrowing of research topics that is damaging even if impossible to quantify.
“The costs to the American public,” Link told me, “are serious and not well appreciated... It is deeply systematic and accepted as normal among China scholars to sidestep Beijing demands by using codes and indirections. One does not use the term ‘Taiwan independence,’ for example. It is ‘cross-strait relations.’ One does not mention Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who sits in prison... Even the word ‘liberation’ to refer to 1949 is accepted as normal.”
Academics understand the code, he added, “but when scholars write and speak to the public in this code, the public gets the impression that 1949 really was a liberation, that Taiwan independence really isn’t much of an issue, that a Nobel Prize winner in prison really is not worth mentioning.”
Increasingly, foreign journalists are subject to similar pressure. 

Paul Mooney, a veteran Asia journalist for Reuters, recently was denied a visa, with no reason given, according to the agency. 

Knowledgeable China hands for Bloomberg News, the New York Times and The Washington Post have met similar fates.
Bloomberg provides a telling case. 

Last year it published groundbreaking investigations on the wealth that China’s elites are accumulating. Corruption is a sensitive issue for Communist Party leaders, and, given Bloomberg’s business interests in China, the journalism took courage.
After the reports, Bloomberg’s Web site was blocked to Chinese viewers, and journalists were denied visas. Recently, according to the New York Times, Bloomberg spiked an investigative report about a billionaire’s connection to Chinese leaders, with its editor in chief arguing that it was important to maintain his reporters’ access to the country.
The editor denied the report, telling the Times that the stories remain “active and not spiked.” 

Until they appear, Chinese officials are emboldened to believe that their hardball tactics can succeed in shaping what Americans read — and don’t read — about their country.
Visa denials are only one way the Communist Party attempts to influence how China is depicted. 

American universities increasingly depend on money-making campuses in China and on Chinese students paying full tuition here. 

Hollywood rewrites scripts to ensure access to China’s screens.
As Sarah Cook of Freedom House writes in her recent 67-page report, “The Long Shadow of Chinese Censorship: How the Communist Party’s Media Restrictions Affect News Outlets Around the World”:
“In many cases, Chinese officials directly impede independent reporting by media based abroad. However, more prevalent — and often more effective — are methods of control that subtly induce self-censorship...”
Many Chinese-language newspapers outside China have become more pliant because of pressure on advertisers or threats to relatives of journalists still inside China.
But what the Communist Party sees as propaganda success may not help the country in the long run, for at least three reasons.
Debates overseas on the most contentious issues — Tibet, Taiwan, the one-child policy — are waged by the sharpest partisans, while China scholars who might bring more nuance to the discussions stay silent.
The leaders’ desire to have China be seen as a confident new power on the world stage is undermined by their apparent fear of honest scrutiny.
And stifling scholarship and journalism doesn’t just harm Americans’ ability to understand the complexities of the world’s most populous country, it also limits information and analysis for China’s decision makers. 

In the end, that can’t be an advantage.

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China’s Intensifying Suppression of Foreign Journalism

By refusing to grant visas to foreign correspondents and by pressuring publications to spike critical stories, Beijing has made it increasingly difficult for reporters to operate in the country.

By Matt Schiavenza

Conditions for foreign journalists in China are arguably worse now than they've been in decades.

In his 18 years as a journalist in Beijing, during which he worked for publications like Newsweek and the South China Morning Post, Paul Mooney went through the same ritual each time he changed employers and needed a new visa. 

He would prepare five clips of his work, carefully selected to avoid sensitive issues, and send them to the Chinese consulate. 

And, each time, the consulate approved his application.
In February, Reuters offered Mooney a job as a features reporter based in Beijing, and, as usual, the journalist prepared his five clips for the consulate. 

But this time, Mooney endured a difficult interview. 

The consulate had prepared specific questions about his work, even mentioning a 2010 interview he gave with Jeremy Goldkorn of the popular blog Danwei. 

Mooney was also asked for his opinion on Chen Guangcheng, Tibet, and other controversial issues. 

“Clearly, they had done their homework,” he said.
A few weeks after submitting his application, Reuters checked with the consulate about Mooney's visa and was told that it was still under review. 

Subsequent checks—done every few weeks—received the same answer. 

Finally, Mooney’s visa was ultimately rejected, and his career in China appears to be over. 

“I am very disappointed,” he told me.
Mooney is only the latest example of a disturbing trend: China’s crackdown on foreign journalists. 

Last year, Melissa Chan, a Beijing-based reporter for al Jazeera, suddenly had her visa canceled, forcing her to leave the country. 

And after Bloomberg News and The New York Times published investigative reports into the wealth of two of China’s top leaders (current president Xi Jinping and former prime minister Wen Jiabao, respectively), the two websites were immediately blocked — and neither company has been able to secure visas for new journalists ever since.
Mooney's visa rejection wasn't even the most depressing China censorship story from the weekend. 

The New York Times reported on Friday that Bloomberg News spiked a long-running investigative report into Wang Jianlin, the founder of the Wanda real estate empire and China’s wealthiest citizen, out of concern that publishing the story would jeopardize Bloomberg’s ability to maintain operations in the country. According to the Times article, Bloomberg News editor in chief Matthew Winkler compared the situation to Nazi Germany, where reporters engaged in self-censorship in order to protect their access. 

Bloomberg’s decision to cave marks a disturbing milestone in Western coverage of China.
The reason for the crackdown is this: In China, the subject of official wealth—and of the murky connections between big business and politics—is a potential source of instability in a country where so many people struggle to get ahead. 

And while only a small percentage of the population can read English-language newspapers, Melissa Chan told me that the Times and Bloomberg exposés still resonated inside China, where many people learned about the stories from relatives in the Chinese diaspora.
Even still, for a Chinese government concerned about soft power, and whose state-owned media companies have recently opened large bureaus abroad, this crackdown is puzzling. 

The fact that China makes life difficult for foreign journalists is more damaging to the country’s international public relations than reports on the cozy relationship between money and politics, an issue in just about every other country in the world. 

So why does China bother?
The simple answer is this: because it can. 

Over the past decade, many Western media companies have increased their coverage of China through expanded bureaus and dedicated sections; in the last two months, for example, both The New York Times and BBC launched blogs devoted to the country. 

This investment reflects China’s growing significance as a player in international affairs—China is clearly a subject that demands attention. 

But as a result, this has given China more leverage over the foreign media than it once had.
Paul Mooney told me that he doesn’t believe China will ever manage to squelch all foreign coverage of the country, and in many ways this is truly a golden era for China reporting; from major newspapers to personal blogs, people are providing more valuable insight into the People’s Republic than ever before. 

But only major, well-funded publications have the ability to underwrite the sort of ambitious investigative reports that shed new light into the inner workings of the Chinese government. 

To see Bloomberg News, one of these organizations, reportedly cave to pressure (to protect its access to the country and its lucrative news terminal business) is depressing, especially since, as Emily Parker, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, told NPR, the Bloomberg incident is likely not isolated.
The implications of this trend go far beyond just the media. 

For years, foreigners have employed a comforting fantasy about China’s trajectory, which is that as the country grows wealthier and more powerful, its norms regarding press freedom will coalesce with “ours.” 

And, in a roundabout way, technology has brought about this process: Platforms like Sina Weibo and WeChat, as well as the explosion of cheap smartphones among China’s middle class, have eroded Beijing’s ability to monitor all forms of speech and expression in the country. 

But, according to Mooney, who has written about the country since the early 1980s, the Chinese government has become more reactionary and conservative with each successive change in leadership. 

Far from leading to liberalization, China’s continued growth has only convinced the Communist Party that their approach to media control has been correct all along.
For journalists operating in China, this is chilling news. 

Unlike their Chinese counterparts, foreign writers have traditionally been able to report whatever they’d like, and, for the most part, this privilege still exists. 

But the recent crackdown has changed the equation. 

Journalists who report on human rights issues, like Paul Mooney, now face the prospect of expulsion from the country, or worse; the family of Mike Forsythe, the Bloomberg journalist who reported on Xi Jinping’s wealth, reportedly received death threats following publication. 

Given these possibilities, it wouldn’t be surprising if a new generation of China-based reporters practiced self-censorship, however subtly, in order to preserve their livelihood.
As for Mooney, his career will continue—Reuters is apparently deciding on a new assignment for him. 

But China’s refusal to grant him a visa—ironically, on the country’s “Journalist’s Day”— marks an abrupt end to a career spent illuminating the country, and its most contentious, sensitive issues, to foreigners.

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Q&A: Paul Mooney on reporting in China

It's time for foreign governments to adopt a tit-for-tat policy in approving visas for Chinese journalists and to speak out forcibly about the abuse of foreign correspondents. 

By Bob Dietz

I've known Paul Mooney since we worked together at Time Warner's Hong Kong-based magazine Asiaweek, which closed in December 2001. 

After that we'd overlapped in Beijing for several stints. 

A lot has been written about China's refusal to give him a visa to let him go back to Beijing to work as a features writer for Reuters --- a dream job for a reporter with as many clips as he has built up over the years. 

He's been quoted widely about what happened, but I haven't seen his full account anywhere else. 

So here is an email exchange with him from today (I've dropped a reference to some foreign journalists Mooney named who are also having visa problems and most likely wouldn't want to be mentioned):

Q: Paul, why were you refused a visa to China? You worked there for years, the most recent stint was for the South China Morning Post.
A: I don't know the exact reason for the rejection of my journalist visa. 

China didn't give a reason, which is puzzling. 

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) issued a faxed statement to one news organization afterwards saying that the decision was in accordance with Chinese laws and regulations. 

But if that's the case, why is the government too embarrassed to say what laws or regulations were violated?

Q: How did the refusal to give you a visa play out? Was there much animosity on the Chinese government's part? Or was it more a case of them just not responding, using no response as their response? How did you manage to stay so long in China, anyway? They're known to be tough on issuing visas.
A: Reuters offered me a position as a features writer in Beijing in February and they submitted my visa application in early March. 

I had an interview with the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco in April, which is a now part of the process of getting a journalist visa. 

After that, the ministry provided no information at all. Nothing. So there was no animosity, from what I know. 

Reuters checked with MoFA from time to time to see about my visa, but the answer was always that they were working on my background investigation, which didn't make much sense as I'd lived in Beijing for 18 consecutive years. 

From their monitoring of me during my more than two decades of reporting on China, they knew quite a bit about me. 

I assume that MoFA, which actually lacks any real power in things like this, was waiting for security agencies to give their approval for my visa. 

When MoFA informed Reuters on November 8, which is Journalists' Day in China, by the way, that they would not grant me a visa, no reason was given, and that's because they don't have a valid reason for doing this. 

In the entire 18 years that I worked as an accredited journalist in China, and during the past eight months, no one from the government had ever made any critical remarks about my work, although, as I said, I'm sure they were not happy with my reporting. 

The purpose of not giving any justification for the delay in granting a visa is part of their program of intimidation, a way for them to make journalists squirm.
While working in China, I had to renew my visa every year, and each year I expected to have trouble -- but I never did. 

Things are different now, however. 

The situation around the country is getting worse and the Chinese leadership is getting increasingly nervous. Their decision to keep me out of China now is an indication of how much the Chinese leadership has regressed in recent years. 

This is the worst atmosphere for freedom of expression that I can remember since the early 1990s. 

Also, I believe that they think refusing to renew the visa of someone inside China is far more sensitive than not issuing a visa to someone who is applying from outside the country -- I was forced to leave China in September 2012 because I was not able to get a new journalist visa before my previous visa expired. 

Once I was in the US, Beijing was less afraid of the fallout from not giving me a visa.

Q: What's it like working as a journalist in China these days? Do you have a sense of increased surveillance? Are other people in the same sort of situation you were in, on tenterhooks, worried about being allowed to stay? Are they being called into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to be lectured more often? How about staffers who work for well-known companies? Stringers? How closely knit is the foreign press corps now?
A: I believe it's gotten much worse, but that's been the trend for several years now. 

Beginning about three years ago, they began delaying annual visa approvals until the final week of December -- visas must be renewed by the end of each year. 

I know of two people who didn't get their renewals until December 31, which puts a great deal of pressure on journalists and their organizations. 

If his or her visa is revoked, a journalist has less than a day to pack up and fly out. 

This is childish. 

And Chinese staff are often under pressure as well, with security agents frequently inviting them to tea or lunches, where they are asked, with veiled threats, to report to the police about what their bosses are doing. 

It frightens many of the staff.
When I renewed my visa two years ago, they asked me to bring my wife for the meeting with the police who oversee visa renewals. 

I balked, saying my wife is not a journalist. They insisted that she come in. 

At the Entry and Exit Bureau, the police in charge of foreign journalist visa approvals took us into a small back interrogation room where they asked us intimidating questions. 

I'm used to such treatment, but it frightened my wife. 

I can take any kind of abuse, but my family is off-limits. 

The following year, a police officer responsible for monitoring me told me when I renewed my visa that he'd been tailing me, and he described the Chinese friends he'd seen me with. 

These are pure scare tactics and really outrageous. 

I've not heard of people being called in more often for lectures, so I can't comment on that.
On the night that Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize, I was invited to a dinner with some rights lawyers and other activists who were celebrating the news. 

More than 40 police stormed into the restaurant and dragged the 17 participants to police stations. 

I was held for more than three hours and interrogated. 

I believe that the plainclothes officers who tried to first interrogate me were members of the notorious National Security. 

They refused to identify themselves and I refused to answer any questions, which upset them. They took off in a huff. 

Uniformed police with identification badges then interrogated me, trying to get me to reveal information about the people attending the dinner. 

I refused as there was no legal obligation for me to answer these questions. 

In the end, I agreed to sign a statement saying I'd neglected to carry my passport with me, which is a law in China for foreigners. 

When I was allowed to leave at close to 11 pm, one police officer said to me, "We know where you are in case we need you." 

I interpreted that as a threat.
While visiting AIDS villages in Henan province in August 2012, I was harassed by local officials and police everywhere I went. 

In one case, Party officials entered the home of AIDS victims where I was conducting interviews. 

As I didn't want to get my sources into deeper trouble, I left immediately. 

In some villages, I was advised not to even try to enter. 

One AIDS activist who helped me meet people received a call from her local officials as we were driving in a car. 

They ordered her to return to the village immediately, and when she went back, they questioned her and asked why she was helping a foreign journalist. 

I worried about her safety. 

In the city of Zhengzhou, capital of Henan, I barely escaped my hotel after AIDS activists informed me the police were going to my hotel to detain me.
In Kashgar, in Xinjiang Province, police forced me to check out of my hotel and to stay in a hotel they designated. 

Foreign journalists in China all have journalist visas, and our arrival is immediately reported to local security people as soon as we check in. 

During my three days there, police stayed with me from morning to night and prevented me from reporting. 

I was not allowed to leave the hotel on my own or to take photographs other than tourist shots. 

On the fourth day, they escorted me to the train station and put me on a train to Urumqi. 

I was prevented from doing any reporting while I was there. 

This despite new rules implemented during the Olympics that made it possible for journalists to travel outside our home cities without government permission. 

Tibet is the one exception to this rule -- foreign journalists cannot travel to Tibet unless they have special permission, which is difficult to get. 

I applied several times, and was refused permission each time.
In two other incidents, when I was reporting in Tibetan areas, someone entered my hotel room when I was outside reporting and they took things from my room. 

I interpreted this as a signal to let me know that they were watching me.
I always worried about my photographs being erased from my camera cards, and so I often switched cards, and I frequently put my photos into the cloud so I'd still have copies. 

Likewise, with my notes. 

I often wrote on scraps of paper that would be easier to hide, and I had a habit of typing my notes up and sending them to various email addresses so I wouldn't lose them.
Traveling was always stressful, and when I returned home to Beijing, I often breathed a sigh of relief for getting home without incident, and I wondered if my luck would not run out the next time. 

My family always worried about me when I traveled in China and so I would keep in constant contact.

Q: We're getting lots of questions along the lines of "Is China cracking down on foreign media?" The FCCC (Foreign Correspondents' Club of China) released a report in mid-2013 that things were either bad or getting worse for foreign correspondents. Have you noticed a disintegration, or has it just been as difficult for years? Has it gotten worse under the Xi government?
A: I left China in September 2012, before Xi Jinping came to power, so I can't speak from personal knowledge. 

However, based on what I mentioned above about people being forced to wait long periods to get visa approvals, my own situation, and based on the steps China has taken to retaliate against media organizations that they don't like, I feel the situation has gotten much worse. 

One can also see this in the crackdown on freedom of expression among Chinese citizens. 

In the past few months, some 300 Chinese rights lawyers, activists, dissidents and others have been detained or arrested, including a 16-year old middle school student who was briefly detained for several days under the new law prohibiting the spread of so-called rumors.

Q: The FCCC also had reports of physical assaults and harassment of foreign reporters. It's a problem, but is that really the primary issue for foreign reporters? Are journalists walking around afraid of getting roughed up?
A: There have been physical assaults on journalists, but only occasionally. 

That said, it's something one fears when reporting in out-of-the-way areas or when doing sensitive stories. Despite this happening rarely, I was always conscious of the possibility.

Q: Let me ask, as a former working journalist who hasn't been able to get a visa into China for a while now, to a guy who is still making his living writing and reporting: What are you going to do next? Your expertise is China, it seems like any employer would risk antagonizing China if they were to hire you, especially to cover anything China-related.
A: I've spent the last 28 years writing about Greater China: Taiwan between 1985-1990, Hong Kong 1990-1994, and Beijing from 1994 to 2012. 

I've occasionally done reporting in Mongolia, Vietnam, and South Korea, but I've always considered myself a "China person." 

In some ways, I'm more that than a journalist. 

A lot of people are assigned to China for a few years and then move on to another place. 

I thought I'd write about China until I couldn't hold a pen and notebook anymore. 

I'm 63 now and expected I would do another seven years of the rough reporting around difficult parts of China. 

I didn't expect my China career to end this way. 

Reuters has kindly offered to see if it can find another suitable position for me. 

Right now I have no idea where that will be. 

Once a journalist is banned from China, it normally takes three to five years to be allowed back in to work. Some people are never allowed back in. 

I have no idea when or if I'll ever return to China.

Q: Is there much interaction between foreign journalists and local Chinese reporters? Are they two separate universes, or do they overlap? Do you get a sense of how they are feeling about the media environment these days? Do you feel they speak frankly with you?
A: These are two separate universes. 

I had far more local reporter friends in Taiwan and Hong Kong than I had in China, despite spending triple the years in China. 

The more experienced foreign correspondents who are knowledgeable about China, and who speak good Chinese, have more contacts with Chinese journalists and they benefit from these contacts. 

I've learned a lot from my friendship with Chinese colleagues. 

I wish there was a lot more interaction. 

I've heard that the government has a regulation forbidding Chinese journalists to mingle with Western reporters, and this may explain the reticence I've seen among some Chinese. 

There's a real risk for Chinese journalists who are willing to have interactions with foreign reporters. 

The Chinese reporters that I've become friends with have spoken to me frankly. 

I have great admiration for many Chinese journalists who have risked their jobs and security to write the truth. 

Despite the controls on the media, there are more and more Chinese journalists who are bravely pushing the line. 

Even in places like CCTV and the People's Daily, the main propaganda arms of the Party, there are a growing number of Chinese journalists who are privately critical of the controls on the media. 

The many Chinese journalists who dare to push the line, despite the risks, are one of the things that give me hope for the future of China. 

I have tremendous respect for them.

Q: And the classic interview-ending question: Is there anything I have missed? Something you want to say that I haven't touched on?
A: The treatment of foreign journalists in China, from visa intimidation to harassment and threats, is outrageous, and it's gotten worse in recent years. 

It's time for foreign governments to stand up to China on this issue. 

In my country, the United States, there are more than 700 Chinese correspondents working -- many of them propagandists or actual intelligence agents. 

This number far exceeds the number of American journalists in China. 

Yet, Beijing continues to limit our access. 

As far as I know, Chinese journalists in the United States are treated with respect and are not made to wait excessively long for visas. 

Nor are they threatened, intimidated, or prevented from doing their work. 

It's time for foreign governments to adopt a tit-for-tat policy in approving visas for Chinese journalists and to speak out forcibly about the abuse of foreign correspondents. 

Some China experts don't think this is a good policy as it would mean we were limiting the freedom of the media. 

But this is already happening in China. 

There's no doubt in my mind that if the United States, for example, sat on the visa applications for senior correspondents from CCTV, the People's Daily or Xinhua News Agency, that Beijing would stop its unacceptable behavior and that the result would be more freedom for the media.

China has made great strides over the past few decades and people now refer to it as a super power. 

It's time for Beijing to abandon its childish policies and act like a responsible state. 

These are not the policies the world expects from a leading power and they show an extreme lack of confidence.

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The Deep Insecurity Behind China's Attacks on the Foreign Press

By Joshua Keating
An Amnesty International member covers her mouth during an event in Sydney on July 30, 2008 as part of a campaign to end internet censorship in China.

Just as I was leaving China, two stories came out underlying the increasing frustration of foreign news agencies trying to cover the country. 

The New York Times reported that Bloomberg had made the decision not to run an investigative report on the political influence of a Chinese entrepreneur over fears that the agency might be expelled from the country entirely.
Bloomberg has been at odds with the Chinese government since running an investigation on President Xi Jinping’s personal wealth last year. 

The Bloomberg website is currently blocked in China, though the company’s television station and electronic terminal service are still available.
China also rejected the visa application of veteran China reporter Paul Mooney who had been waiting eight months to begin a new assignment, reporting on the country for Reuters. 

The rejection follows similar actions against reporters from the Times and Al Jazeera.
They also come shortly after the release of a widely-publicized report by the Center for International Media Assistance and the National Endowment for Democracy on “the various ways in which Chinese Communist Party (CCP) information controls extend beyond mainland China’s borders.” 

These included visa denials, the blocking of offending websites, punishing the business interests of new outlets that publish unflattering stories, and physically intimidating foreign reporters as well as their Chinese employees and sources. 

It’s now evident that the loosening of restrictions in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics has been reversed.
During my trip, my fellow U.S. journalists and I encountered frequent complaints from the Chinese officials and reporters we met with that foreign press coverage of China is too negative. 

Even if that were true – from corruption, to pollution, to human rights abuses, there’s a lot of bad stuff happening in China that should be reported on – the ease with which the country seems to have its feelings hurt seems absurd for one of the world’s most powerful countries. 

If you’re going to be a superpower, people are going to write nasty things about you.
As the CIMA/NED report notes, China’s economic growth and increased global influence have been accompanied by “a deep sense of CCP insecurity.” 

This insecurity definitely seemed evident in the over-the-top response to a recent Wall Street Journal editorial calling for the U.S. to recognize Japan’s claims to the Senkaku islands. 

If the U.S. State Department issued a condemnation every time a foreign newspaper wrote something it didn’t like about U.S. foreign policy, it would have time for little else.
And given the small number of people in China who read the English-language websites of publications like the New York Times and Bloomberg, and the fact that people who are interested in getting the information they publish have many other ways of finding it, blocking them just makes China look very petty without accomplishing very much.
Inflicting punishment on foreign news outlets also isn’t a great longterm strategy to improve the tone of coverage of your country. 

Beijing might have gotten the Bloomberg piece spiked – reports on corruption among the country’s senior leaders seem to be a red line — but given that the price for it was a front-page New York Times article in which Bloomberg editor Matthew Winkler is quoted on a conference call comparing the country’s censorship regime to Nazi Germany, it’s hard to say they’re winning the battle of perception. 

If you don't let foreign outlets cover your country, you don't get to complain that their coverage is too negative.

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Bloomberg blocks report to stay in China

Bloomberg was opening a “hornets nest” by withholding information that could be important to its clients.
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Hong Kong

Matthew Winkler, Bloomberg editor-in-chief, said the Chinese Communist party had made very clear that printing stories about the financial assets of its leaders was off-limits.

Bloomberg News has been accused of quashing a story that alleges financial ties between China’s richest man and relatives of top Chinese Communist party officials because of fears that the government would prevent it from operating in China.

An investigative team at the agency spent the past year probing links between the businessman and several current and former members of the Politburo Standing Committee – the body that ultimately rules China.

One person familiar with the circumstances said senior Bloomberg editors blocked the story at the eleventh hour. The person said Matthew Winkler, editor-in-chief, told the reporters in a conference call on October 29 that Bloomberg could not risk jeopardising its position in China by running the story.

Bloomberg denied that the group, whose main business around the world is selling financial data, had spiked the story. 

“The reporting as presented to me was not ready for publication,” Mr Winkler told the Financial Times, adding that Laurie Hays, a senior editor, and other top editors agreed with that assessment.

The person familiar with the discussions dismissed Bloomberg’s comments that the story was not ready for publication, saying it had been approved and just needed a Chinese government response. “We had crossed the Rubicon,” the person said. “The story was fully edited, fact checked and vetted by the lawyers.”

Mr Winkler declined to comment on whether he said on the conference call that the Chinese government would kick Bloomberg out of China if it printed the story.

“It’s not appropriate for me to comment on a private, internal conversation,” Mr Winkler said.

On Sunday, Mr Winkler sent an email to Bloomberg editorial staff stating that there had been “misleading” reports in rival media about its reporting in China.

“I want to assure you that there has been no change in policy on how and when we publish our stories,” Mr Winkler said in the email.

In the October conference call, Mr Winkler compared the situation with Nazi-era Germany where some media undertook self censorship to remain in the country, the person said. A Bloomberg spokesman did not challenge the veracity of the comment about Nazi-era Germany when asked by the FT.

Reuters reporter denied China visa

Reuters over the weekend said the Chinese foreign ministry had rejected a visa application for Paul Mooney, a veteran China reporter who wrote widely about human rights in China while working for the South China Morning Post, writes Tom Braithwaite in New York.

The reporter has called on western governments to retaliate against Chinese media organisations.

Mr Mooney, whose request for a visa was turned down after an eight-month wait, said reporters from Xinhua, People’s Daily and CCTV should be blocked from working in the US.

“Unless western and foreign governments stand up and have some kind of reciprocal policy, China is going to continue to do it,” he said. “I believe there are more than 700 Chinese reporters in the US and they don’t have to jump through the hoops that we have to and it’s not fair.”

“It’s up to the US government, the British government to retaliate, to reciprocate,” he said, naming Xinhua, People’s Daily and CCTV as examples of large Chinese media organisations active overseas.

He said he disagreed with the comments attributed to Matt Winkler, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, that operating in China, like Nazi Germany, required some concessions to be able to stay in the country.

“I don’t agree with that,” he said. “If they do that, they win. These kind of intimidation tactics win. If everyone stands up and continues to report the reality are they going to close down The New York Times, The Financial Times and Bloomberg? I don’t think so.

Mr Mooney’s visa rejection was first reported by the New York Times.

Several people familiar with the story said it focused on Wang Jianlin, the founder of Dalian Wanda, a real estate group, who recently paid $28.2m for Picasso’s “Claude et Paloma”. Forbes ranks Mr Wang as China’s richest man with $14.1bn.

​A spokesman for Wanda declined to comment. The FT itself has seen no evidence to indicate links between Mr Wang and party officials.

Mr Wang got his start in Dalian, the northeastern city where Bo Xilai, the jailed former high-flying Chinese politician, served as mayor for a number of years. The other major Dalian property developer, Xu Ming, was detained in connection with the Bo scandal and was not seen until he appeared in court in August during the Bo trial.

Bloomberg’s decision not to print the story comes as China becomes even more aggressive in clamping down on the foreign media. Bloomberg’s website has been blocked since last year when it published an exposé on the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s president. It is also having trouble getting journalist visas for reporters.

Censors have also blocked access to the website of the New York Times, which published a similar story last year about then Premier Wen Jiabao. The paper has had difficulty obtaining some journalist visas since then.

Jonathan Fenby, former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and author of The Penguin History of Modern Chin a, said Bloomberg’s move to spike the story “brings into question the service that you [Bloomberg] are supplying”. He added that the company was opening a “hornets nest” by withholding information that could conceivably be important to its clients.

In the conference call with four reporters and editors in Hong Kong who worked on the year-long investigation, Mr Winkler said the Communist party had made very clear that printing stories about the financial assets of its leaders was off-limits, the person familiar with the story said.

The person said that senior editors in the US had given strong support all along to Michael Forsythe and Shai Oster, the two reporters who led the large team chasing the story. But, in October, they suddenly changed their mind, and said the story was not fit for publication.

“They said they were putting it on the backburner, but it was blindingly clear that it was being killed,” the person said.

On September 18, Ms Hays wrote an email to the reporters in Hong Kong which said the latest version of the story was “almost there” and that once she and other editors, including managing editor Jonathan Kaufman, had taken a close read, they would review it with the company’s lawyers.

Nine days later, Mr Kaufman emailed the reporters to say the story was “terrific”. In the email, which was obtained by the FT, he wrote: “The story is terrific. I am in awe of the way you tracked down and deciphered the financial holdings and the players. It’s a real revelation. Looking forward to pushing it up the line.”

I want to assure you that there has been no change in policy on how and when we publish ourstories

- Matthew Winkler, Bloomberg editor-in-chief in email to staff

However, four weeks later, Ms Hays called the reporters in Hong Kong to tell them that the story was going to be put on the “backburner”, according to the person familiar with the situation. The spokesman declined to comment on the emails, or say why Mr Winkler felt compelled to refer to self-censorship if editors had simply decided that the story was not yet ready for publication.

The spokesman also declined to say why Bloomberg had allowed the reporters to pursue the story for so long if they had harboured concerns about the potential impact on the company’s ability to operate in China.

The person familiar with the dispute said the journalists on the conference call with Mr Winkler “appreciated his honesty” but disagreed that Bloomberg would be thrown out of China if the story was published.

The dispute emerged in public on Friday after the pro-democracy Taiwan arm of a Hong Kong media group released an animated video that ridiculed Bloomberg and Mr Winkler for spiking the story and the New York Times published a story on Saturday.

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Western Media In China: Adjusting To The 'Anaconda'

China has growing leverage over those who rely on the country for revenue or their livelihoods. All American organizations — including universities, publishers and Hollywood movie studios — are under pressure not to offend the Chinese Communist Party and will curtail their behavior to avoid conflict.

by FRANK LANGFITT

Bloomberg staffers say editors spiked a story that exposed financial ties between a tycoon and family members of top Chinese officials.

Last weekend was a bad one for foreign reporting in China.
Staffers at Bloomberg News accused their own editors of spiking an investigative story to avoid the wrath of the Communist Party, and the wire service Reuters confirmed Chinese officials had denied a visa application for a hard-hitting reporter after an eight-month wait.
Bloomberg staffers told The New York Times that editors had spiked a story that exposed financial ties between a tycoon and family members of top Chinese officials. 

Sources said Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler defended the decision, comparing it to foreign correspondents who self-censored to avoid getting kicked out of Nazi-era Germany.
Winkler denied the accusations, saying the story — and another about the children of senior Chinese officials employed by foreign banks — are still active.
Contacted by NPR, a Bloomberg spokesman would only say: "We have high editorial standards and these stories were not ready for publication. Any suggestion they didn't run for any other reason is absurd."

The Financial Times, however, published contents of an email it obtained suggesting Bloomberg editors were keen on the investigation as of late September.
"The story is terrific," wrote Bloomberg Managing Editor Jonathan Kaufman, according to the FT. 

"I am in awe of the way you tracked down and deciphered the financial holdings and the players. It's a real revelation. Looking forward to pushing it up the line."
Allegations that Bloomberg was spiking an expose appear to have first surfaced publicly in an unlikely place, a satiric, online Chinese-language video.
Next Media Animation, a Taiwanese company known for videos that mock the Communist Party, put out a scathing one on this episode.

A Broader Issue
But Emily Parker, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank, says accusations of self-censorship go far beyond this one case.
"I think there is going to a tendency to really pounce on Bloomberg and to say: 'Shame on them and how could they do this?' " says Parker, who has written about self-censorship in China and has just finished writing a book on the Internet and social media in China, Russia and Cuba. 

"I don't really think that's the most positive way to discuss this story, because I think what's clear is that this is a much larger phenomenon."
Parker says all kinds of organizations — including universities, publishers and Hollywood movie studios — are under pressure not to offend the Communist Party and will curtail their behavior to avoid conflict.
Parker says Perry Link, a well-regarded China scholar at the University of California, Riverside, described it best in a 2002 essay for the New York Review of Books.
"The Chinese government's censorial authority in recent times has resembled not so much a man-eating tiger or fire-snorting dragon as a giant anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier," Link wrote.
Link said the anaconda didn't have to set limits, or even move — its mere presence was enough to make people limit their own behavior.
"Everyone in its shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments — all quite 'naturally,' " Link wrote.

Repercussions For Sensitive Stories
Sometimes, the anaconda strikes.
Both Bloomberg and The Times did prize-winning investigations last year documenting more than $3 billion worth of hidden wealth controlled by the family members of top officials.
China's government was furious. 

It responded by blocking the companies' websites — costing The Times millions of dollars in advertising revenue on a new Chinese-language platform — and denying some visas.
Bloomberg also lost money on its core business, selling financial information through the firm's computer terminals.
"I think as China gets more powerful and as more and more people have vested interests there, it's going to be harder and harder to kind of speak out independently," says Orville Schell, a journalist and author who runs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. 

Schell says China has growing leverage over those who rely on the country for revenue or their livelihoods.
"Every media outlet must cover China to be in the big top," Schell says. 

"If they get precluded, and this is true of individual journalists as well, whole careers can be completely destroyed if you can't get access."

A Visa Denied
The most recent correspondent to be precluded is Paul Mooney, who had worked in Beijing for 18 years, reporting on staff for various publications, including Newsweek and Hong Kong's South China Morning Post.
Earlier this year, Reuters hired Mooney, who's written extensively on sensitive issues, such as human rights, child labor and conditions in Tibet.
Mooney says Chinese officials spent an hour and a half interviewing him as part of his visa application at the consulate in San Francisco. 

They asked about his views on Tibet. 

They even quoted from interviews he'd given.
At the end, Mooney recalls, they said, "'We hope that — if we give you the visa — that you'll report more objectively in the future.' And to me, this is outrageous that a government would suggest something like this to a foreign reporter, that we have to report the way they want us to report. Otherwise, we won't be welcome."
Chinese officials told Reuters last Friday — which happened to be National Journalists Day in China — that Mooney would not get a visa. 

They gave no reason.
Mooney has company. 

Last year, China expelled Melissa Chan, a reporter for Al-Jazeera English, who had embarrassed the government with reports about secret detention centers, known as black jails, and forced abortions.
Mooney thinks his visa rejection will affect other reporters.
"They are all going to be thinking about this when they go out and do their next stories that if I write about sensitive political issues, am I going to get my visa renewed?" Mooney says. 

"I think it's going to send a chill down some people's backs."
Mooney says one solution to the pressure foreigner reporters face in China lies with foreign governments. 

In 2011, more than 800 Chinese nationals came to the United States on international journalist visas, known as I visas, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
"If the U.S. government reciprocated by sitting on a handful of visas for Xinhua News Agency, or CCTV or the People's Daily," says Mooney, "I'm sure that within a week all the problems we're having with visas would be solved."
In 2011, California Republican Dana Rohrabacher introduced a bill to that effect, but it hasn't gone anywhere on Capitol Hill. 

Mooney says when he raises the idea of visa reciprocity, U.S. diplomats are reluctant to retaliate against Chinese reporters. 

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Visa Terrorism: Reporter for Reuters Won’t Receive China Visa

The visa process is used by the Chinese to intimidate journalists and media organizations.

By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — The Chinese government has rejected the visa application of a veteran American journalist who had been waiting eight months to begin a new reporting job in China for Thomson Reuters, the company said.
The reporter, Paul Mooney, said the Chinese Foreign Ministry told Reuters on Friday that it would not grant him a resident journalist visa but declined to provide a reason. 

Mr. Mooney returned to the United States last year after the expiration of his previous visa, which was sponsored by The South China Morning Post, a newspaper based in Hong Kong.
The rejection comes at a time of rising tensions between foreign news organizations and the government, which has been using its economic clout, the issuance of visas and Internet controls to express displeasure with coverage it deems unflattering.
“China has been my career,” Mr. Mooney, who has spent three decades covering Asia, the last 18 years based in Beijing, said Saturday in a phone interview. 

“I never thought it was going to end this way. I’m sad and disappointed.”
The websites for Bloomberg News and The New York Times have been blocked in China for more than a year following the publication of investigative articles by both news organizations that detailed the wealth accumulated by relatives of top Chinese leaders. 

Since then, employees for both Bloomberg and The Times have been awaiting residency visas that would allow them to report from China.
Such tactics appear to have had an impact. 

On Saturday, The Times detailed a decision late last month by Bloomberg to withhold publication of an investigative report, more than a year in the works, that explored hidden financial ties between one of China’s wealthiest men and the families of senior Chinese leaders. 

Company employees said the editor in chief, Matthew Winkler, defended the decision by comparing it to the self-censorship by foreign news bureaus that sought to remain working inside Nazi Germany.
Mr. Winkler and a senior editor denied that the articles had been killed and said they would eventually be published.
The Chinese government’s rejection of Mr. Mooney’s visa request will certainly add to the anxieties of foreign reporters in China, many of whom complain of cyberattacks, police interference and intimidation, especially during the annual visa renewal process, currently underway, which sometimes involves interviews with Foreign Ministry officials or public security personnel.
In a statement, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China said, “Such delays and lack of transparency merely add to the impression that the visa process is being used by the authorities to intimidate journalists and media organizations.”
Last year, Al Jazeera English shut its Beijing bureau after the authorities refused to renew press credentials and the visa of its China correspondent, Melissa Chan. 

Although they did not explain the reasons behind Ms. Chan’s expulsion, the first from China in 14 years, it was widely seen as retaliation for her hard-hitting coverage of Chinese society.
An American currently based in San Francisco, Ms. Chan said the Chinese government’s recent efforts to bully some of the largest foreign news organizations would have an insidious trickle-down effect on smaller media outlets, especially those from Southeast Asia and Africa that cannot afford to lose what may be their sole correspondent in China. 

“It’s got to have a chilling effect that leads to some level of self-censorship,” she said in a phone interview on Saturday.
Mr. Mooney said he suspected that the government’s decision to deny him a visa was punishment for his persistent coverage of human rights abuses in China. 

In April, after submitting his visa application to the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco, he was summoned for an interview, where he was questioned about previous articles and asked to explain his position on delicate issues like Tibet. 

The interview ended with a barely veiled threat.

“They said, ‘If we give you a visa, we hope you’ll be more balanced with your coverage,’ ” he said he was told.
Mr. Mooney, 63, now living in Berkeley, Calif., said Reuters told him that it would not continue pressing China over the issue.
Barb Burg, a spokeswoman for Reuters in New York, said, “We are in the process of considering other posts for Paul within Reuters.” 

Calls to the Foreign Ministry in Beijing went unanswered.

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