Fighting Joe Biden vs. kowtowing David Cameron—a lesson from two China trips

By Heather Timmons and Lily Kuo

David Cameron plays ping pong with primary school kids during his trip to Chengdu. 
US vice president Joe Biden spent less than 48 hours in China this week, but managed to criticize its new air defense zone, China’s treatment of foreign journalists, and general lack of democracy. 

In contrast, David Cameron, who was in China for three days this week, played ping pong with school children, opened a Sina Weibo account and publicly avoided controversial topics. 

When he returned home he even said British schools should start teaching Mandarin.
The two visits couldn’t have been more different. 

Still, both approaches reaped scorn from media mouthpieces of the Chinese government as well as the general public, raising the question—What is the right diplomatic way to appeal to China? 

It appears no one really knows.
At the beginning of Biden’s China trip, the vice president was referred to as an “old friend” in China. 

But he made little effort to keep that name, expressing Washington’s ”firm position and expectations” on China’s air defense zone, which covers territories that both the Chinese and Japanese claim.
China’s foreign ministry said that Xi Jinping responded by saying the zone follows international law and that America should take an “objective and fair attitude.”

An editorial in the state-run Global Times further belittled Biden’s address in which he urged students to “challenge” government: “The episode of Biden propagating ‘democracy and freedom’ is just a ‘routine performance’ of any visiting American officials.”
Parts of the Chinese public, once taken with the vice president’s so-called “noodle diplomacy” of earlier visits, were not pleased either and took to Chinese social media to criticize Biden. 

One Sina Weibo user commented (registration required), “This old guy propagates the so-called universal value, and encourages the people to turn against their government… The police should arrest him.” 

Another said (registration required), “He harbors evil intent in his heart.”
Cameron, who arrived with over 100 businesspeople in hopes of drumming up trade and investment, aimed for charming China. 

He strolled along Shanghai’s riverside,chatting with Lisa Pan, vice president of one of Asia’s largest mobile gaming companies, Rekoo. 

While meeting Chinese officials pushed for for an EU-China free trade deal that few in the EU want—as well as Chinese investment in a British high-speed rail project that many in the UK don’t want.
Once again, the Global Times ran a scathing editorial, saying the Cameron administration should acknowledge “that the UK is not a big power in the eyes of the Chinese... It is just an old European country apt for travel and study.” 

On his newly opened Sina Weibo account, Cameron offered to answer questions from the Chinese public. He received questions that ranged from mocking—”Do you feel ashamed that London’s title of the foggy capital was stolen by Beijing?” to the offensive—”How many homosexuals are there in the UK?”
Cameron has promised to answer the questions in a video in a few days, but odds are the answers aren’t going to make anyone in China happy either.

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Salesman David Cameron makes up to China

Britain and Western European nations are moving towards a phase in their histories where all remnants of the ‘civilizing mission’ in their foreign policies are being wiped out by the hard realities of economic decline.

By Sreeram Chaulia

After straining relations with China by meeting exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama in May 2012, UK Prime Minister David Cameron effected a volte-face this week on an unabashed commercial visit that kept sensitive human rights issues at bay.
Gone is the defiance from Downing Street, which had previously rebutted Chinese demands for an apology after Cameron met the Dalai Lama by asserting that British leaders have the sovereign right to“decide who they meet and when they meet them.” 

Instead of that nonchalance and combative tone, the latest sheepish message from the UK government on the eve of Cameron’s business-centric three-day trip to China was that he had “no plans to meet Tibet’s spiritual leader again".

Correcting errors
The cost of offending China in terms of lost economic opportunities to Britain stared hard and cold at Cameron as he made this about-turn. 

Given that Cameron’s Conservative Party is a big champion of British private sector interests, there must have been immense pressure on him to discard the Dalai Lama and all the high moral ground that Britain and other Western powers occupy while dealing with authoritarian regimes.
The Chinese government had signaled last year that Cameron must “correct the error” about the Dalai Lama or pay a heavy price. 

Amidst rumors that the British premier had been “banned” from entering China, his originally scheduled tour of the country in late 2012 was postponed. 

Between that diplomatic setback and the latest warm reception Cameron got in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu, the United Kingdom underwent a major course correction.
However much the British government denies it is jettisoning its advocacy on behalf of self-determination and human rights of Tibetans in China, the absolute silence Cameron has maintained on issues that might irk his hosts in Beijing shows that the UK has decided it can no longer afford to press for ideals in its foreign policy.
When faced with a cold shoulder from a China that Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg acknowledges to be “the great economic superpower of today,” the UK felt that politics of the soul matter less than that of the stomach.

Exports as panacea
Though there is fresh market chatter about a rebound of the British economy from the crisis that began in 2008, Cameron’s austerity and business-friendly policies have undoubtedly worsened the plight and delayed a sound recovery. 

With a domestic macroeconomic policy aimed at hurting the poor and succoring the financial oligarchs in the City of London, revving up consumer spending and confidence has been a Sisyphean task for the British government. 

Hence the onus being placed by Cameron on energetically tapping into the two biggest export markets in the world— China and India.
Both the frequency of high-level engagements with China and India, and the composition of delegations that accompany British leaders when they woo these Asian powerhouses suggest that the UK is banking on them in particular to reach Cameron’s target of achieving exports worth 1 trillion pounds (US$1.64 trillion) a year by the end of the decade.
This week, Cameron brought in tow with what the BBC termed as the “largest UK trade delegation ever to visit China,” with executives of giant banking, pharmaceuticals and energy companies leading the retinue to try and prize open doors for their goods and services to reach the Chinese consumer.

Banking on Chinese reforms
Even as the UK itself is struggling to reorient from an over-financialized economy back to a manufacturing-based one, Cameron and the bevy of businesspersons who traveled with him to China have placed high hopes on an ambitious structural overhaul of the Chinese economy that is being attempted by President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang.
The timing of Cameron’s trip would have been helpful to test how deep the economic opportunity lies, following the recent Third Plenum of the 18th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee and its promise to undertake “comprehensive and far-reaching reforms.”
Western observers are salivating at the prospect of greater market-based incentives and freedoms being permitted by the CCP. 

Despite being a darling of Western investors, China has not been viewed as a level playing field for foreign players due to the inherent systemic privileges and protections enjoyed by its state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
If the Chinese leadership successfully runs the gauntlet of reforming its economy away from over-dependence on exports and investment and towards consumption by the growing middle classes, Western countries like Britain will smell a chance of a generation of breaking through and cashing in.

Beggars can’t be choosers

In Shanghai, the British Prime Minister defended his drug manufacturing colossus, GlaxoSmithKline, as “a very important, very decent and strong British business”. 

Such comments flew against ongoing high profile prosecution by Chinese authorities of this company for engaging in bribery in the healthcare sector.

Glaxo’s honchos were quoted in The Financial Times that they “hope Mr. Cameron’s intervention will help bolster their case” with the Chinese government. 

But with the CCP leadership intent on teaching a lesson to Western companies that are alleged to be cheating and overcharging Chinese consumers, the pressure will be on Britain to ensure that its corporations behave ethically in a country where foreign businesses are forever under the scanner for misdeeds.
These days, one does not hear British politicians complaining in the usual Western tone of contempt and frustration about the difficulties and obstacles posed to their companies in China’s regulatory snake pit. 

The bilateral relationship is now so asymmetrical in Chinese favor that everything and anything a British Prime Minister says in China is measured by the yardstick of whether it might upset the hosts and ruin the dreams of British companies. 

Presumably, if a Labour Party government were ruling the UK today, it would not have been as amenable to the lobbying interests of British corporations that desperately want a larger share of the Chinese pie.
As the old adage ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ aptly sums it up, an economically struggling UK has lost the leverage to try and hold China to account either on human rights or on the ambience for doing business. Cameron reckons that he might as well shut up, appease the Chinese and get on with bagging whatever economic deals they find it beneficial to grant.
Even a hitherto taboo area like Chinese companies acquiring majority stakes in Britain’s nuclear power plants, which fall under the category of critical national security infrastructure, is now up for grabs. 

Cameron really means it when he proudly proclaims, “no country in the world is more open to Chinese investment than the UK.”

Realist turn of declining powers
It is not unsurprising to see the UK abandoning the human rights and democracy-promotion components of its foreign policy towards China in order to satiate the hunger of British corporations. 

The precedent of British Petroleum (BP) influencing the decision to release the convicted Lockerbie bombing perpetrator, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, in 2009 and send him back to Libya is an open secret.
Britain and Western European nations are moving towards a phase in their histories where all remnants of the ‘civilizing mission’ and the ‘white man’s burden’ in their foreign policies are being wiped out by the hard realities of economic decline.

Salesman David Cameron walks along the Bund with Lisa Pan, vice president of Chinese mobile gaming company Rekoo, in Shanghai December 3, 2013. 

Throughout the Cold War and even after it, Western European powers have embraced and worked with authoritarian regimes even as they put on a grand charade of promoting human rights. 

Now, ground down by a long economic depression, the preaching content in their foreign policies is losing its decibels.
The economic realism which Cameron displayed by promising to “respect” and “understand” China is a sign that the much-touted civilizational values-based leadership of Western Europe has met its nemesis at the hands of a new multipolar world order. 

The rise of China, and of other emerging economies like the BRICS formation, is setting a limit to Western liberalism and forcing a more hybrid international normative environment in which self-interest is speaking louder than altruistic universal principles.

Gateway to Europe or getaway?
One of the carrots the British Prime Minister has dangled on his China visit is that he would deploy his“full political weight” behind a proposed comprehensive China-European Union Free Trade Agreement. 

He even critiqued fellow EU members who “want to shut China off behind a bamboo curtain of trade barriers.” 

This was a jibe at France, Italy, Spain and a few Eastern European countries that are directly competing with Chinese state-subsidized manufacturers.
Cameron’s positioning of Britain as a more “complementary” economy with China, compared to some of its European peers, may be factually correct. 

But it further enables Beijing to divide the EU right down the middle as it did recently in the case of tariffs on Chinese solar panel imports. 

With Germany and Britain seemingly more complaisant towards China, while other European industrial exporting nations are less sanguine about Chinese predatory export policies, the idea that the UK can be a gateway for Chinese businesses to the rest of the European common market is not persuasive.
Right wing political pressures within the UK for a ‘Brixit’, or exit of Britain from the EU, and the heat Cameron’s Conservative Party is facing from the anti-EU UK Independence Party, render his ‘full political weight’ in the EU unappealing to China. 

Cameron’s pledge of a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU if he gets re-elected in 2015 has lost Britain a lot of its attraction in economic terms globally, from the United States all the way to China and India.

Age of salesmanship
Eleanor Byrne-Rosengren, a critic of Cameron’s abandonment of the Tibetan cause, has caustically described him as a “salesman” rather than a “statesman.” 

Why should we even expect a middle power that is predicted to be pushed out of the ranks of the top 10 economies of the world in the near future to exude statesmanship?
The empire on which the sun never set is long gone. 

The idealistic bullhorn which was used for partisan purposes on rival states has now been cast aside. Cameron has brought Britain down from its historic pedestal of moral self-importance to bow to reality.

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China's 'UK Is No Big Power' Snub To Cameron

As David Cameron hails "indispensable" ties with China, its state media reminds the PM the UK is only fit for "travel and study".
http://news.sky.com

Taxi! David Cameron is bid a speedy farewell from China
Chinese state media has dismissed the UK as "just an old European country" that is only fit for studying and travel amid David Cameron's visit to the country to strengthen ties.
An editorial in China's Global Times, which reflects the thinking and opinions of the country's leadership, questioned Mr Cameron's sincerity.
"Beijing needs to speed up the pace of turning its strength into diplomatic resources and make London pay the price for when it intrudes into the interests of China," it said.
In a highly contemptuous passage, it pointed out that the "UK is not a big power in the eyes of the Chinese".
The tone is sharply at odds with the comments made publicly by China's leaders during Mr Cameron's visit.

Prime Minister Li Keqiang described the UK-China partnership as "indispensable" in comments echoed by Mr Cameron.
During his visit, Mr Cameron told businesses in Shanghai: "My government is committed to working with the Chinese government in a way of mutual respect and understanding to deepen these relations and remove barriers to trade and investment and partnership between our two countries."
It came as the Prime Minister announced that deals worth £5.6bn had been signed during his trip and that 1,500 jobs would be created as a direct result.
The Chinese Prime Minister also indicated that China was ready to help Britain build its high-speed rail line, a project currently being funded wholly by the Government.
Mr Li said: "The two sides have agreed to push for breakthroughs and progress in the co-operation between our enterprises on nuclear power and high-speed rail.
"The Chinese side is willing to not only participate in but also purchase equities and stocks in UK power projects."
Mr Cameron's visit has been dogged by his refusal to raise the issue of China's human rights record, particularly on the subject of Tibet.
The Prime Minister angered Beijing when he met with the Dalai Lama last year, a subject referred to in less than glowing terms in the Global Times editorial.
The piece also questioned how Mr Cameron can be in China talking about improved ties between the two countries when his Navy Chief of Staff was in Japan supporting the country over a territorial dispute with the Chinese

"Perhaps there is no need to talk about 'sincerity' in terms of Sino-British relations," it said.

"What Cameron does is out of his own political interest and the UK's national interest.
"His visit this time can hardly be the end of the conflict between China and the UK.
"Beijing needs to speed up the pace of turning its strength into diplomatic resources and make London pay the price for when it intrudes into the interests of China."
It added: "The Cameron administration should acknowledge that the UK is not a big power in the eyes of the Chinese.
"It is just an old European country apt for travel and study. This has gradually become the habitual thought of the Chinese people."
The editorial signs off with the stinging comment: "Finally, let us show courtesy to Cameron and wish him a pleasant trip."
Sky's Asia Correspondent Mark Stone, who is covering the Prime Minister's trip, said: "Today's editorial in China's Global Times gives a clear hint about how Mr Cameron has been received in China so far."

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David Cameron will be China's strongest advocate in western world

PM calls for new trade agreement as he flies into Beijing hoping to appease leaders angry at Dalai Lama meeting last year
By Nicholas Watt in Beijing and Rowena Mason

David Cameron at Heathrow airport with some of the delegation flying with him to China. 

Britain will act as China's strongest advocate in the west, David Cameron has declared as he flew into Beijing pledging to lead a "dialogue of mutual respect and understanding".
In a sign of Downing Street's determination to appease Beijing, which was furious when Cameron met the Dalai Lama last year, the prime minister said no country was more open to China as he called for a new EU-China free trade agreement.
Writing in the Chinese weekly news magazine Caixin, Cameron said: "Put simply, there is no country in the western world more open to Chinese investment, more able to meet the demands of Chinese consumers, or more willing to make the case for economic openness in the G8, the G20 and the European Union. And there is no country more ready to forge a dialogue of mutual respect and understanding that can address issues of concern and advance our shared interests in the world."
The PM's effusive praise for China came as he landed in Beijing at the head of Britain's largest overseas trade and ministerial mission, designed to restore full relations after his meeting with the Dalai Lama.
The delegation includes the architect Zaha Hadid, ex-England footballer Graeme Le Saux, Arts Council England chair Sir Peter Bazalgette, the chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover, Ralf Speth, and Karren Brady, vice-chairman of West Ham United.
But Cameron came under fire from Labour for including figures close to him in the delegation. 

On the trip are his stepfather-in-law, Viscount Astor, representing Silvergate Media; the Tory peer Lord Chadlington, who helped to house the Camerons when the PM first fought the parliamentary seat of Witney; and the Tory donor and peer Lord Leigh of Hurley, of Cavendish Corporate Finance.
Jon Ashworth, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, said: "Whether it's dinners for donors or jetsetting trips for his friends, David Cameron rarely misses a trick to favour those close to him. Meanwhile, everyone else is offered no respite from the everyday reality of the Tory cost of living crisis."

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Britain wins little reward from China in retreat on Tibet

European countries think Cameron mishandled ties with Dalai Lama

By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing

David Cameron meets the Dalai Lama at the Houses of Parliament

Britain has “sold the store”, “surrendered” and “totally capitulated” in its efforts to get back into the good graces of the Chinese leadership, in the words of several senior Beijing-based diplomats from Asia and Europe.
Diplomats can be a catty bunch and there is more than a whiff of hypocrisy from the representatives of countries that have themselves gone to great lengths to ingratiate themselves with an increasingly powerful China.
But, as Prime Minister David Cameron arrives in Beijing on Monday to begin his first state visit in more than two years, it is hard to avoid the perception that the UK, like most other countries, is struggling to come to terms with a more assertive China.
British diplomats insist the UK’s position has not changed on human rights or on Tibet but European diplomats and human rights groups say London has clearly downgraded these issues over the past year. What Britain has got in return is not entirely clear.
The UK was thrown into the diplomatic deep-freeze in May 2012 after Mr Cameron and Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister, posed for smiling photos with the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibet, during his trip to London.
China reviles the Nobel peace prize-winning lama as a “wolf in monk’s robes” who is bent on Tibetan independence. 

Beijing views any official meetings with him by foreign leaders as part of a Western plot to split China.
The feeling among other European countries, in particular, is that the UK mishandled the initial meeting with the Tibetan leader and then gave in too quickly and completely in its efforts to make up with Beijing.
Mr Cameron’s decision earlier this year to emphasise Britain’s opposition to Tibetan independence in the House of Commons made the UK look weak when it did not yield an immediate thaw. 

Subsequent lobbying to arrange official visits before the end of the year looked over-eager.
The fact that trade and investment between the UK and China did not seem to be affected in the wake of the Dalai Lama meeting has only added to the perception that London is trying too hard.

British exports to China have doubled to £15.9bn in the past five years and last year, even after the May meeting, the UK ranked fourth as a destination for outbound Chinese investment, behind only Hong Kong, the US and Kazakhstan.

That was up from the UK’s position at No 8 in 2011 and No 21 in 2010.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, European diplomats say that British euroscepticism has made it less able to come to a unified position with other European countries when dealing with China on issues such as meeting the Dalai Lama.
That leaves the UK exposed to more pressure from Beijing, which is adept at exploiting rifts and rivalries within the EU.
A wider question can be asked in all of this that has been around for as long as liberal democratic political systems have had foreign policies: does it do anyone any good to lecture authoritarian regimes on universal values?
To Chinese ears, something is faintly ridiculous when the UK, which China blames for the 19th century opium wars, colonialism and “100 years of humiliation”, comes to Beijing with sermons for communist officials about human rights.
As Boris Johnson, London mayor, put it in his inimitable way during a visit to China in October: “I don’t walk into a meeting and say, ‘I say, you chaps, how’s freedom doing?’.”
The business community looks at the potential opportunities in China’s enormous market and asks how useful British finger-wagging is.
“If defending the rights of the Dalai Lama puts the UK behind the French and other countries in the relative pecking order in the eyes of the new Chinese leadership, then that is a big mistake and very depressing for Britain,” one Western financier told the FT this week.
The answer, of course, is that abandoning the defence of universal values in the hopes of more market access or better political relations is an even less effective way of earning the respect of China’s leaders or anyone else.
To be fair, it is not just the UK that appears increasingly reluctant to bring up such issues in the face of China’s growing market demand, power and influence.
Given Beijing’s willingness and ability to inflict diplomatic and economic pain, it is quite likely that the ageing Dalai Lama will never again be granted an audience with a European leader in his lifetime.

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The Art of Self-Censorship

Bloomberg Code Keeps Articles From Chinese Eyes

By EDWARD WONG
A Man Under the Influence: Matthew Winkler, the editor in chief of Bloomberg News.

In early 2011, during a period of heightened tension between the Chinese government and foreign journalists, Bloomberg News created coding to give editors the ability to categorize stories under a new class, called 204. 

Such stories would not show up on Bloomberg terminals in mainland China. 

Managers did this after Chinese officials stressed to top editors in Hong Kong that the license granted to Bloomberg by the State Council allowed the company to publish only financial data and news on its terminals, not political news, employees said.
Within Bloomberg, the code has its critics. 

“I think of this as self-censorship,” said one journalist, who added that editors choose to apply the code to any article that might offend senior Chinese officials. 

The code’s defenders, though, explained to their colleagues in internal conversations that Bloomberg must abide by the definition of its State Council license — or at least by the narrowest definition put forward by Chinese officials. 

Two Bloomberg spokespeople have declined to comment on the code.
The use of Code 204 was first reported by The New York Times this month in articles that looked at another accusation of self-censorship. 

Specifically, top Bloomberg editors decided in late October not to publish an investigative article on China’s wealthiest man, Wang Jianlin, and his financial ties to the families of party leaders. 

Several Bloomberg employees said Matthew Winkler, the editor in chief, justified killing the article by saying in a conference call that Chinese officials would not tolerate articles on the assets of the leadership. 

How has Code 204 been used, and what are some of the articles that Bloomberg editors have decided to keep off mainland China terminals? (Bloomberg L.P. has 2,000 to 2,500 terminals in China, a tiny fraction of the total worldwide, according to Norman Pearlstine, the company’s former chief content officer, who gave the estimate at a talk in New York this month.)
“It’s very loosely applied,” a former employee said of Code 204.
A person with access to a terminal in mainland China ran a check on a handful of Bloomberg News articles to see whether they could be seen inside China. 

One article missing from those terminals is the June 2012 investigation into the assets of close family members of Xi Jinping, who became the Communist Party chief last November. 

Before it ran, Chinese officials pressed Bloomberg to kill it; Bloomberg defied those admonitions and suffered the consequences — state enterprises stopped buying terminal subscriptions, Bloomberg’s website was blocked in China and applications by Bloomberg journalists for new residency visas have not been approved. (The Times was similarly punished after it ran an investigative article on the Chinese prime minister’s family in October 2012, though it does not sell financial data terminals.)
The Xi article was the first installment in an ambitious three-part series called “Revolution to Riches,” which looked at the wealth of the party’s revolutionary families. 

The second article in the series, an examination of the family wealth of China’s Eight Immortals, some of the party’s most revered leaders, also cannot be seen on mainland terminals.
By contrast, an article early in 2012 about the assets of family members of Bo Xilai, a senior party official who had by then become embroiled in a murder scandal, does show up on the terminals.
The sensitivities around reporting on Mr. Bo took sharp turns in 2012. 

Chinese officials clamped down on articles about him and his family when the scandal first emerged in March 2012. 

Chinese news organizations were generally not allowed to report on Mr. Bo, and his name was banned from the search engines of China’s biggest microblogs. 

But as the party began to control the narrative surrounding the scandal, officials largely stopped trying to restrict coverage of Mr. Bo.
It is unclear whether Bloomberg editors took all this into account when deciding to keep their story on the Bo family, first published in April 2012, on the mainland terminals.
An article that is missing from mainland terminals is the one that, more than any other, might have helped catalyze the creation of Code 204. 

It is a story about political protests that ran on Feb. 21, 2011, and it is what prompted Chinese officials to cite the terms of Bloomberg’s State Council license to top editors in Hong Kong, employees said. 

The article was a lengthy explanation written from the Beijing bureau about calls on the Internet for peaceful “Jasmine Revolution”-style protests in China modeled after the uprisings in the Middle East. 

It even had the Chinese words for Jasmine Revolution — 茉莉花革命 — in the text. 

Chinese officials, fearful that word of the protests would become widespread, had been trying to block any websites and mobile phone text messages that used those words.
Soon after the conversation with Chinese officials, Bloomberg editors deleted the story from the Bloomberg website, even though the site is global and not China-specific, employees said. 

This prompted an outcry from Bloomberg journalists in China, and editors later restored it, though it cannot be found with the site’s search engine. (A version of it shows up in a Google search.) 

Employees said they recalled that it was possible to read the article on the mainland terminals. 

But as of last week, the article could no longer be found there. 

Editors might have applied Code 204 to the article after the code’s creation, which occurred in the wake of Bloomberg’s conflicts with Chinese officials over Jasmine coverage. 

One person said he believed there was a way to apply Code 204 retroactively to articles, so that stories that appear on mainland terminals upon general publication can later be taken off.
An article published on Feb. 23, 2011, about a letter on a Chinese-language website operated from the United States, Boxun.com, calling for more Jasmine rallies, is also missing from both mainland terminals and the Bloomberg website. 

As with the Feb. 21 article, it appears on terminals outside China.
There are some Jasmine-related articles, though, that show up on mainland terminals — for example, one published on March 1, 2011, in which a Chinese foreign ministry official said police officers had “properly handled” foreign journalists at a Jasmine protest site in central Beijing.
One Bloomberg employee said the existence of Code 204 can result in writers internalizing self-censorship. The code then becomes unnecessary because the writer has already decided to withhold information in order to ensure that terminal users in China can read the story, he said.
“If you wanted your story not to go by that code, then you don’t make sensitive references,” he said. 

“This where the self-censorship gets self-reinforcing.”

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Britain goes soft on rights to woo China

Britain has downgraded human rights as an issue when dealing with China, a move which has made it harder for other countries to talk tough on the subject.
By Kiran Stacey in London and Jamil Anderlini and Lucy Hornby in Beijing

Stella Shiu, right, at the site of the proposed £175m Wirral project with Lindsey Ashworth, development director

Britain has been accused of softening its stance on human rights in China to attract foreign investment, despite doubts over the credibility of some of the groups who have offered to fund big projects.
As David Cameron, prime minister, prepares for a long-awaited visit to Beijing, a Financial Times investigation has raised questions about a project with Chinese backing in northwest England.
The FT has identified several anomalies with Sam Wa, a Chinese company that has proposed an investment in the £175m development on the Wirral.
The investment has been championed by UK Trade and Industry.
Stella Shiu, Sam Wa’s chairman, was declared bankrupt by a Hong Kong court in 2008, after which she changed her name, it has emerged.
Several companies registered on the Chinese mainland under her previous name have since been dissolved.
Richard Ottaway, chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, told the FT: “UKTI has got to justify its actions, it has got to explain why it recommended investment from this group.”
The deal between Peel Holdings, the company leading the Wirral redevelopment, and Ms Shiu’s company was originally signed in the presence of senior UKTI officials, including Lord Green, trade minister.
It was touted as an example of the kind of deal that is being promoted by Mr Cameron as he focuses Britain’s relationship with China firmly on securing trade between the two countries.
The prime minister will travel to China next week for the first time since the new Chinese leadership took over, ending a year-long diplomatic stand-off over his decision to meet the Dalai Lama in 2012.
He will take a large trade delegation with him, including dozens of executives from blue-chip companies and others from small and medium-sized businesses.
But the trip comes amid mounting concern that Britain is so keen to sign new deals that it is failing to carry out enough due diligence on prospective investors.
One of the biggest projects to have attracted Chinese backing is a £1bn property development in London’s docklands.
But Advanced Business Park, a Chinese company planning an office complex on the site, has only one completed project to its name: a development located on the far outskirts of Beijing in the city’s least affluent district.
John Spellar, a Labour member of the all party group on China, told the FT: “UKTI and the Foreign Office have to be careful and undertake due diligence to make sure of the bona fides and assets of any potential investors.”
Senior diplomats in China believe Britain may be going too far in trying to encourage inward investment into the country.
“Total capitulation” was the way one senior Beijing-based Asian diplomat described Britain’s climbdown over the Dalai Lama debacle.
“The whole situation has been poorly handled – 18 months ago Mr Cameron was the great defender of human rights speaking truth to China and saying the UK will act on principle, but now it seems to be about business and nothing else,” said Kerry Brown, an associate fellow at Chatham House and a former British diplomat.
“There’s a strong case to engage with serious Chinese companies and to welcome their investment, but some of the companies people like Boris Johnson are talking to have no record abroad at all. It all seems extremely unsophisticated.”
One senior European diplomat said it was clear from internal European meetings that Britain had downgraded human rights as an issue when dealing with China, a move which has made it harder for other countries to talk tough on the subject.
Most of the dozen or so senior diplomats who spoke to the FT on the matter said Britain’s willingness to downgrade human rights was unlikely to help it deal with Beijing, which would only sense weakness in its about-face.
Another European diplomat said that by agreeing to allow more Chinese investment in its telecoms, nuclear and banking sectors as a way of getting back in Beijing’s good graces, the UK had given far more than any other European country would consider.
“It certainly appears that they have sold the store and what are they actually getting in return?” asked one senior diplomat in Asia.

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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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Bloomberg News Suspends Reporter Whose Article on China Was Not Published

By EDWARD WONG and CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

Michael Forsythe was based in Hong Kong and has written award-winning investigative articles on China. He says he sourced his Xi Jinping assets story from public documents available in China and Hong Kong.

BEIJING — A reporter for Bloomberg News who worked on an unpublished article about China, which employees for the company said had been killed for political reasons by top Bloomberg editors, was suspended last week by managers.
The reporter, Michael Forsythe, was based in Hong Kong and has written award-winning investigative articles on China. 

He met with supervisors and was placed on leave, said two Bloomberg employees with knowledge of the situation, which was supposed to be private. 

The move came days after several news outlets, including The New York Times, published reports quoting unnamed Bloomberg employees saying that top editors, led by Matthew Winkler, the editor in chief, decided in late October not to publish an investigative article because of fears that Bloomberg would be expelled from China.
The article, about a Chinese tycoon and his ties to families of Communist Party leaders, was written by Mr. Forsythe and Shai Oster. 

Last week, after the allegations of self-censorship were published, reporters and editors in the Bloomberg bureau in Hong Kong who had worked on the unpublished article were called into a series of meetings, Bloomberg employees said. 

They were asked questions about the news reports face to face and through conference calls with top editors and executives based in Hong Kong and New York, the employees said.
On Wednesday, Mr. Forsythe, who joined Bloomberg in 2000, was asked to go to the floor where human resources offices are, and he did not return to the newsroom, employees said.
Two representatives of Bloomberg News declined to comment on Sunday. 

Mr. Forsythe has also declined to comment.
The Times’s account of the unpublished article appeared online on Nov. 8 and cited Bloomberg employees who said that Mr. Winkler had conveyed his decision about the article in a conference call on Oct. 29 to Mr. Forsythe, Mr. Oster and two other Hong Kong-based journalists, after the text had already been through a series of late-stage edits in which no big objections were raised, and had been approved by a lawyer.
In the call, Mr. Winkler defended his decision by comparing it to the self-censorship by foreign news bureaus trying to preserve their ability to report inside Nazi-era Germany, according to the Bloomberg employees familiar with the discussion. 

“He said, ‘If we run the story, we’ll be kicked out of China,’ ” one employee said.
The Financial Times and Next Media Animation also reported independently on the accusations of self-censorship. 

The Financial Times published what it said were excerpts from emails from top Bloomberg editors in New York to the reporters that expressed strong support for the story in September. 

An email dated Sept. 18 from Laurie Hays, a senior executive editor, said the story was “almost there.” 

An email nine days later from Jonathan Kaufman, a managing editor, said: “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.”
The suspension of Mr. Forsythe was first reported on Friday night by The New York Post.
Last Thursday, Norman Pearlstine, who recently left the post of chief content officer at Bloomberg L.P. to rejoin Time Inc., was asked about the news reports at a public talk. 

Mr. Pearlstine said that he had spoken with Mr. Winkler and had heard that “the story was just not ready for publication and they’re still working on it.”
Bloomberg L.P., the parent company of Bloomberg News, receives much of its revenue from selling subscriptions for its financial-information terminals. 

After Bloomberg News published an article in June 2012 on the family wealth of Xi Jinping, at that time the incoming Communist Party chief, sales of Bloomberg terminals in China slowed, as officials ordered state enterprises not to subscribe. 

Officials also blocked Bloomberg’s website on Chinese servers, and the company has been unable to get residency visas for new journalists.
Mr. Forsythe was a lead reporter on the article about the Xi family and other articles in the 2012 “Revolution to Riches” series, which received a George Polk Award and awards from the Asia Society, the Overseas Press Club and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.
Last Wednesday, Amanda Bennett, until recently the executive editor for projects and investigations at Bloomberg, said she was leaving the company. 

She told Talking Biz News that she was “most proud of the groundbreaking” article on the Xi family. Bloomberg employees said that the investigative unit Ms. Bennett had run would soon undergo major changes.

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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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Bloomberg boots ‘China leak’ scribe

By Keith J. Kelly
People walk past the Bloomberg building in New York.

Bloomberg L.P. has put a reporter suspected of leaking news about a controversial China story on unpaid leave, The Post has learned.
Michael Forsythe was escorted from Bloomberg’s Hong Kong office on Nov. 14, sources said, after he was fingered as the person who leaked embarrassing claims about how the news and data giant spiked a story that could have angered leaders in China.
An unidentified journalist, in a story in the New York Times Nov. 9, claimed Matt Winkler, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, spiked the story because he feared angering the Chinese government could get the company’s profitable data terminals kicked out of the country.
Winkler has strenuously denied the charge.
Forsythe has been placed on unpaid leave of absence, sources said.
A company spokeswoman declined to comment on his status.
Morale in Bloomberg’s newsroom, already under pressure as news spread Friday of the action against Forsthye, is expected to take another leg down next week as, insiders said, layoffs are looming.
The cuts to reporters and editors, which may run as high as 50 to 100, may start as early as Monday, the sources added.
They would be the largest in Bloomberg history.
The cuts will come from projects & investigations, sports and the culture section, known as “muse,” according to several insiders.
The Washington bureau is expected to absorb some of the deepest cuts.
The story that gave the far-flung media company another black eye ran on Page 1 of the Times.
Based on interviews with several unidentified Bloomberg journalists, the story claimed a year-long investigation into financial ties between Chinese political leaders and one of the country’s wealthiest individuals was being spiked.
Winkler, according to sources quoted in the Times story, said, “If we run the story we will be kicked out of China.”
Winkler insisted in the Times story that their version of the discussion was not true and the stories were held for journalistic reasons. 

In his weekly notes distributed Friday, Winkler again defended himself.
“As everyone knows we have been the focus of media attention because of our reporting on China. We were accused of withholding production of recent reporting because of external or internal pressure. 

It isn’t true.”
By Friday, word was spreading inside the media empire that Forsythe, believed to be one of the main reporters on the China story, had been escorted from the Hong Kong office because he was suspected of being a source of the embarrassing leak to the Times.
A Bloomberg spokeswoman declined comment on Forsythe, whose phone was still active at Bloomberg.

He had not returned an email by presstime.
He is expected to be dismissed, sources said.

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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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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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