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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The Transparent Chinese

By MURONG XUECUN
Murong Xuecun, the pen name of Hao Qun, is the author of “Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu.” This article was adapted from a speech delivered in New York on Nov. 14 at a symposium on surveillance, co-sponsored by PEN America.

BEIJING — About once a month, Hao Jian is politely asked by the police “to have a cup of tea.” 

He knows it wouldn’t be prudent to say, “No thank you.”
A government critic and professor at the Beijing Film Academy, Mr. Hao signed Charter 08, a 2008 manifesto modeled on Charter 77, the 1977 document that helped usher in the end of one-party rule in Czechoslovakia. 

He has participated in forums about democracy and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, where his cousin died from a bullet wound.
The police tap his phone, read his email and follow him. 

On special occasions, like for several months after Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, the government forbids him to leave China. 

“To me, your life is totally transparent,” a police officer told Mr. Hao during one of his recent chats.
Among my acquaintances and friends like Hao Jian, dozens are compelled to lead transparent lives. 

And in addition to government critics, the authorities watch organizers of church services held in private homes, Falun Gong practitioners and simple petitioners. 

No one knows how many people are under surveillance. 

We can’t even be sure which agency oversees that daunting task.
The Edward J. Snowden affair finally raised a chilling question for the whole world: How much privacy do citizens have to give up for the sake of public security? 

For us Chinese, this question is slightly different: How much privacy do we have to give up for the sake of the government’s security?
China is blanketed with surveillance cameras. 

They have been installed on most streets, in supermarkets and in classrooms. 

The official purpose of this growing network — known as Skynet — is often described as “law-and-order management.” 

But high-profile crimes — like the murder of an infant in a stolen car in Jilin Province earlier this year — suggest that the cameras have little to do with fighting crime: The costly camera network was criticized by the public for failing to find a suspect in that case.
By contrast, the surveillance system worked perfectly when targeting Li Tiantian, a Shanghai-based human rights lawyer. 

According to Ms. Li, security officials tried to show her boyfriend video footage of her walking into a hotel with other men, suggesting she was unfaithful. (He refused to watch it.)
The main purpose of the surveillance, of course, is control and intimidation. 

For almost a decade, “weiwen,” or “maintaining social stability,” has been the government’s public mantra, but this pursuit is simply a way to justify the Communist Party’s hold on power. 

“Stability” has been deemed more important than education, health care and even national defense. 

In the 2012 government budget, expenses for domestic security exceeded $111 billion, compared with a defense budget of $106 billion.
Wang Lijun, the former police chief of Chongqing who is in prison for seeking refuge in a U.S. Consulate in 2012, among other crimes, gave a glimpse of how the surveillance power is abused. 

He boasted in 2010 that his city’s surveillance system had identified 4,000 “unwelcome” people who had entered Chongqing around the time of Chinese New Year. 

Most of them were found and forced to leave the city within hours.
Yet most Chinese citizens seem unconcerned about living transparent lives. 

Even on social media, the most open opinion platform in China, few people question the legality and necessity of the extensive surveillance network. 

A survey conducted in 2012 among students in Central China Normal University showed that only about 55 percent of them were opposed to the installation of cameras in dormitories.
As an outspoken writer, I have become paranoid. 

I often suspect that I am being followed and videotaped, but I have no way of proving it. 

I occasionally turn around to see if the police are nearby. 

When I sit down at a café with friends, I often cannot help checking under the table for a listening device.
My internal battle to fight off the constant fear of not knowing what could happen to me at the hands of the government affects my judgment. 

I don’t know if this has affected my writing. 

Intuition tells me it hasn’t, but I have trouble trusting my intuition. 

It is the breakdown of trust — trust of oneself, trust of others — that is the worst consequence of living a transparent life.
At a party a few months ago, I witnessed one friend accusing another of being an agent for the Communist Party. It was not an isolated incident. 

I cannot avoid the thought that among my acquaintances someone is spying on me. 

I tell myself to be sincere with everyone, but my sincerity is frequently mixed with caution.
People under surveillance often cannot help look for ulterior motives behind ordinary social interactions. 

We are cautious when interacting with strangers. 

If a conversation with a stranger is inevitable, we tend to avoid speaking our minds. 

We fear whatever we say may be used against us. 

A friend recently told me that he has not made a single good friend in the past few years because it is difficult for him to trust people.
The Chinese government talks about building a “harmonious society.” 

But how can a society become truly harmonious if surveillance cameras are everywhere and everyone has to live with suspicion and fear? 

What kind of lives can we lead without trust?

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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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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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The Senkaku Boomerang

Japan needs U.S. support against Chinese bullying. The more explicit the Obama Administration is that the Senkakus are Japanese, the likelier Beijing is to back down.
The Wall Street Journal

Japan Coast Guard vessel PS206 Houou sails in front of Uotsuri island, one of the disputed islands, called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, in the East China Sea on August 18, 2013.

China's leaders may have thought that by frequently dispatching ships and planes into Japan's territory around the tiny Senkaku Islands they would cause Tokyo to bow to their demands. 

Instead, their strategy of harassment and intimidation has accomplished the opposite—and then some.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has rallied Japanese to defend their territorial sovereignty, and he may succeed in reinterpreting the Japanese constitution to allow Japan to come to the military aid of its allies. 

The threat to the Senakakus has strengthened Tokyo's alliance with Washington, with the two countries agreeing earlier this month to bolster their military ties, including the deployment of U.S. P-8 maritime surveillance planes in Japan and stationing a second missile-defense radar.
Japan has also strengthened its ties with Southeast Asia.
Smaller regional powers have come to see Tokyo as a potential defender, along with the U.S., of the peace against a hegemonic Middle Kingdom.
In an interview with the Journal last week, Mr. Abe, fresh from a successful tour of the region, signalled his willingness to take up a greater leadership role and issued a warning to Beijing.
"There are concerns that China is attempting to change the status quo by force, rather than by rule of law. But if China opts to take that path, then it won't be able to emerge peacefully," he said.
Mr. Abe's remarks were followed by more clear-eyed talk from Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera, who on Tuesday accused China of endangering the peace by sending its coast guard vessels into the Senkaku waters more than once a week: "I believe the intrusions by China in the territorial waters around the Senkaku islands fall in the 'grey zone' (between) peacetime and an emergency situation."
Japan has begun conducting amphibious exercises that simulate the kind of operations that might be needed to defend or retake the Senkakus.
It is expected to create a new unit tasked with such missions.
The danger now is that the chances of accident, miscalculation or even a shooting incident grow with each Chinese foray near the islands.
That's what makes Japan's demonstration of political resolve and military capability all the more important, but Japan cannot be left on its own.
The U.S. took the Senkakus from Japan after World War II and returned them in the early 1970s, effectively settling the question of their sovereignty for American purposes.
The more explicit the Obama Administration is that the Senkakus are Japanese, the likelier Beijing is to back down.
In the long term, there may be a possibility for Japan and China to resolve their differences by freezing the status quo and deferring resolution of the dispute to future generations.
That was the view Deng Xiaoping had of the matter, and current leader Xi Jinping would do well to follow in those footsteps.
The alternative is to further alienate China from its neighbors, and further call into doubt the promise—and the hope—that China's rise will be peaceful.

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Xia Yeliang: The China Americans Don't See

   

A Peking University economics professor who was sacked for his political views explains the underside of elite Chinese higher education. 
 By DAVID FEITH

The 21st-century romance between America's universities and China continues to blossom, with New York University opening a Shanghai campus last month and Duke to follow next year.
Nearly 100 U.S. campuses host "Confucius Institutes" funded by the Chinese government, and President Obama has set a goal for next year of seeing 100,000 American students studying in the Middle Kingdom.

Human Rights Watch Director of Global Initiatives Minky Worden on China's latest human rights hypocrisy
Meanwhile, Peking University last week purged economics professor Xia Yeliang, an outspoken liberal, with hardly a peep of protest from American academics.
"During more than 30 years, no single faculty member has been driven out like this," Mr. Xia says the day after his sacking from the university, known as China's best, where he has taught economics since 2000.
He'll be out at the end of the semester.
The professor's case is a window into the Chinese academic world that America's elite institutions are so eager to join—a world governed not by respect for free inquiry but by the political imperatives of a one-party state.
Call it higher education with Chinese characteristics.
"All universities are under the party's leadership," Mr. Xia says by telephone from his Beijing home.
"In Peking University, the No. 1 leader is not the president. It's the party secretary of Peking University."
Which is problematic for a professor loudly advocating political change.
In 2008, Mr. Xia was among the original 303 signatories of the Charter 08 manifesto calling for democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law in China.
"Our political system continues to produce human rights disasters and social crises," declared the charter, written primarily by Mr. Xia's friend Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace laureate who is currently serving an 11-year prison term for "inciting subversion of state power."
Mr. Xi, 53, says he had a mostly apolitical youth in Anhui province, west of Shanghai, where both of his parents were shipyard workers for China's navy.
He never considered himself a communist and says he always felt drawn to the West, thanks partly to foreign picture books from his childhood.
He imagined life as a painter or translator, and after graduating college in 1984 went to work as an interpreter for the government's Foreign Affairs Office.
His political awakening came later, in 1987-89, when he studied management at the University of Toronto, visited several European democracies—and read Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose."
Friedman's writing helped make Mr. Xia a classical liberal and, by the mid-1990s, a student of economics. Today he cites F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, James Buchanan and Gary Becker among his intellectual idols.
The list also includes Xiakuai Yang, the Chinese economist—and Mao-era political prisoner—who convinced him that China cannot thrive without imitating the institutions, and not just the technologies, of the West.
Institutions like multiparty constitutional democracy, which Mr. Xia and his Charter 08 comrades demanded five years ago.
The following year, Mr. Xia went out on his own to condemn government censorship in an open letter to Communist Party propaganda chief Liu Yunshan, who now sits on Beijing's seven-man supreme decision-making body.
Last year the professor helped start an online petition demanding an investigation into the suspicious death of democracy activist Li Wangyang, and more recently he has taken to Weibo (China's Twitter) to criticize new President Xi Jinping and his signature "Chinese dream" vision of party-led national greatness.
Such is the context for Mr. Xia's firing, but Peking University insists that the matter is purely academic.
"Xia Yeliang's teaching evaluation scores were for many years in a row the lowest of the entire university," school officials said this week, adding that 25 professors have been similarly fired since 2008.
"Slander," replies Mr. Xia, who says that his evaluation scores were stronger, and that in any case the school's dismissal process was a sham based on "no written rule."
Mr. Xia says he first heard of the dismissal proceedings in June, when the party secretary of the school of economics gave him a dressing-down over the telephone: "You could make suggestions and recommendations and we can send that to the leaders," Mr. Xia recalls being told, "but you don't have to say it this way in public. This is ruining the image of the party and the government."
He had been hearing similar messages since 2009, when university authorities warned him to "take good care" of his position on the faculty (as he told the Associated Press at the time).
The state-run Global Times newspaper, for its part, denounced the professor last month as an "extremist liberal... advocating freedom and democracy," even as it too claimed that his professional troubles are entirely nonpolitical.
This claim would be easier to credit if Mr. Xia hadn't already endured years of intimidation and abuse, on campus and off: blacklisted from providing commentary on state television, fired from two research institutes, tailed by plainclothes police, detained and interrogated repeatedly, harassed by nighttime phone calls, kept under house arrest for days, constantly monitored and occasionally hacked online.
With these measures failing to silence him, denying him a livelihood is an obvious way for the government to escalate.
And why wouldn't Peking University play enforcer?
Well, perhaps the school could be discouraged if it had to pay a price—within China, where it still maintains some reputation for relative liberalism, or more likely abroad, where it has established lucrative partnerships with Western universities that supposedly cherish liberal principles.
These include Columbia, Stanford, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, Penn State, UCLA, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics and the University of Toronto.
But as he waited between his June conversation with the Communist Party secretary and the university's ruling, only Wellesley College in Massachusetts took up his cause (with 40% of professors calling to make his fair treatment a condition of the school's continued ties with Peking University).
No other Western schools have raised their voices in the days since his ouster.
"I don't want to encourage them to cut off the exchanges and the cooperation," says Mr. Xia of Peking University's partners in the West.
"I don't want to be blamed by people from both sides. I think that they have the freedom to choose."
OK, but if he were among the deciders?
"If I were working in the U.S., I would say always take academic freedom as a basic principle. I don't want to sacrifice the principle to have some kind of cooperation or exchange."
He continues: "Some American faculty members and leaders like to favor the Chinese Communist Party and the government. Because those guys, when they come to China, sometimes they are treated as honored guests."
That includes, he says, fat speaking fees, grand banquets and five-star accommodations.
Of the Wellesley faculty, Mr. Xia says, "I'm very grateful for their support."
Yet clearly it wasn't enough.
"If Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Columbia [and] Chicago did the same thing," he notes, Peking University might have held off: "The top leaders would seriously consider it."
Even now some outside pressure might help: "I don't know whether they could call me back or not, but they might try to make some kind of compensation."
Mr. Xia speaks pointedly about the broader matter of China and the West.
Westerners have a mistaken impression of his homeland, he says, "because the Chinese economy looks so good, and people are getting a better material life. But I think that we have very huge social costs. With pollution, with poisonous food, with a very bad, party-controlled ideological education system. I think that it's very dangerous."
He is scathing about what he sees in universities: "The nature of the scientific research in China is just unbearable. We expend huge expenditures for scientific research, but there's very little real scientific research done."
Some 70% of research funds, he says, goes to personal use—"travel, hotels, meals, computers, mobile phones, iPads, printers, all things you can imagine"—and professors routinely falsify invoices.
"Universities have the same problem" as the China Railway Construction Corp., he says, where officials were recently disciplined for spending $135 million on receptions for guests last year.
Which brings us back to the U.S.-China academic romance.
Chinese universities, Mr. Xia argues, "need famous foreign brand names to protect their very vulnerable capabilities for research and teaching."
The Chinese may "boast" that Peking University is one of the world's best, "but no people really believe that." 
Nowadays in China, he says, "the middle-class and rich persons and officials' children—they're sent to the U.S. to study. They know which schools are good and which are worse."
President Xi and his disgraced former rival, Bo Xilai, chose Harvard for their children.
Western academic ties provide China with "a kind of coating or makeup," says the professor.
"Because in Chinese universities we don't have real freedom of academic research, so there's no way to train great masters. Whether it's in science or in humanities and arts—no way."
Asked about China's prospects for change in light of recent events, Mr. Xia surprises with some optimism. Waiting for a Chinese Gorbachev would be like "Waiting for Godot," he argues, but there are stirrings from below, including the Internet's power to educate citizens, expose officials and organize movements; the increasing willingness of business leaders to challenge the political status quo; and the roughly 200,000 local-level protests a year against injustices such as unpaid military compensation, environmental degradation and illegal land seizures.
"Within 10 to 15 years," he believes, China's Communist Party will collapse. 
"I'm very optimistic about that."
The professor's personal situation is another story.
He'd like to continue teaching, "but I don't think any university in China would dare to accept me."
His wife works as an accountant—at Peking University, of all places.
And he accuses the administrators who fired him of threatening her job, too, by warning that his treatment could worsen if he spoke out publicly.
"I feel sorry for my family members," he says.
"In China if you want to make institutional change, you must prepare to sacrifice or pay some high cost."
It's admirable, then, that on Thursday Wellesley College said it wants to host Mr. Xia as a visiting scholar through its aptly named Freedom Project.
The brave economist could be a powerful presence in an American academy that often checks its principles at the door when it enters China.

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