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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The Long Shadow of Chinese Blacklists on American Academe

Giving clear punishment for unclear reasons will cause any person to be cautious and to censor what one says on politically sensitive topics. 

By Perry Link

Perry Link is Chancellorial Chair Professor for Innovative Teaching Comparative Literature & Foreign Languages in College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at University of California, Riverside and Emeritus Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University.

A blacklist somewhere in the Ministry of State Security in Beijing bears my name. 

I study Chinese language and literature, and since 1996 have been denied visas to the People’s Republic.
The news media have recently reported on China’s decision to deny visas to American journalists and put pressure on companies like Bloomberg and The New York Times because of their reporters’ critical coverage of China. 

Such efforts have raised the question of whether the Chinese government is engineering American perceptions of China. 

The problem exists—and has far-reaching implications—in academe as well.
I do not know why I am barred from entering China. 

There are many possible reasons; I speak and write often in support of human rights in China and in criticism of the Chinese government. 

But no one in the government will say exactly where or when I crossed a line.
Giving clear punishment for unclear reasons will cause any person, whether directly involved or merely an observer, to be cautious and to censor what one says on politically sensitive topics. 

The Chinese Communist Party has used this technique on its own people for decades. 

I wrote about the problem in a 2002 essay in The New York Review of Books that I called “The Anaconda in the Chandelier.”
I miss going to China. 

My latest book, An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Harvard University Press, 2013), draws examples from many kinds of language, including alleyway brogue and graffiti at tourist sites—things that not even Google, but only on-site observation, can yield. (My on-site data are all from 1996 or earlier.)
But—by a wide margin—this is not the most painful part of being on a blacklist. 

The worst part is that I become a tool of the Chinese government and there is nothing I can do about it. Long-term blacklistees, like me and my friend Andrew J. Nathan, a political-science professor at Columbia University, have become known in China studies as examples of what happens to you if you cross a line. Since my blacklisting I have had countless inquiries, especially from younger scholars, who are invariably polite but always want to ask, one way or another, “How do I not end up where you are?”
Here are some examples:

• Two assistant professors who were blacklisted a few years ago, apparently for having attended a conference on the Chinese region of Xinjiang (for the Chinese government, a politically sensitive “minority peoples” area), approached me for advice. Both were preparing to travel to Chinese consulates (in New York and Chicago) for interviews with Chinese officials about their visas. In the interviews the officials advised both, in general terms, to be more careful in what they said and wrote. “Do not hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” Both young scholars felt humiliated and outraged, but neither would say anything in public, and both asked that I keep their names confidential. Both soon faced tenure decisions and felt that their careers could be at stake. One of them later did get a visa to go to China.
• In the late 1990s, a graduate student at Princeton (where I taught most of my career) asked me for advice on his dissertation topic. He wanted to write about Chinese democracy, but his advisers in the politics department were cautioning him that this might not be a wise career move. What if it cost him his access to China? The young man decided to write on something else. I wanted to nudge him back toward his first love, but could not in good conscience do it.
• A bright undergraduate at Princeton, who had studied Chinese language with me, was delighted when she told me she had secured a summer internship with Human Rights Watch. A few days later she heard about the blacklist and came back to me. “Do you think I should still do it?” she asked. “Of course you should,” I said. In this case, the student was being far too fearful. The anaconda in the chandelier was looming too large. A stint with Human Rights Watch would not ruin her future, I said. In the end, she declined the internship.
• Another smart Princeton undergraduate, then president of the student body, came to me for advice because the Chinese government had invited the student-body presidents of all the Ivy League schools for a three-week junket in China. He wanted to go, and I encouraged him, but he was extremely worried about how to behave. Can I mention the Tiananmen massacre? Can I even say the words “Dalai Lama”? Can I talk about my friends from Taiwan? Here, too, the anaconda loomed, and was causing much deeper self-censorship than was necessary.

As these examples show, blacklists induce self-censorship not just in people who are blacklisted but, far more broadly, in people who merely fear that they might be. (Actually, for people like me on long-term blacklists, fear gradually subsides. A knife fallen loses the deterrent power of threatening a fall—or, in the Chinese farmers’ proverb, “Dead pigs aren’t afraid of hot water.”)
But if the circle of affected scholars extends beyond those who are blacklisted, another affected circle, wider still, is the general public. 

I have a dear friend, a distinguished historian, who declined a few years ago to go on the PBS NewsHour to talk about the Falun Gong religious movement (another topic super-sensitive to the Chinese government). She wanted to preserve her research access to China, so for that evening, anyway, PBS viewers did not get the best commentary they could have had.
This might be called a “direct cost” to the public, and such costs are real; but they are far smaller than the indirect costs that are embedded in the ways China scholars, wary of the anaconda in the chandelier, shape their speech on sensitive topics. 

One avoids a term like “Taiwan independence”; one speaks instead of “cross-strait relations.” 

The word “liberation” appears as shorthand for the Communist victory in 1949. 

One does not mention Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who sits in prison, at all.
It would be unfair to say that Sinologists are naïve about their verbal accommodations. 

Most of them are not. 

Their ways of speaking are a sort of professional code that insiders understand and that, with time, comes to seem utterly normal. 

But when scholars use their code to write and speak to students and to the public, which they often do, wrong impressions are communicated. 

Listeners understand that 1949 really was a liberation, that Taiwan independence really isn’t much of an issue, and that a Nobel Prize winner in prison is really not worth mentioning.
American universities—NYU, Duke, and others—have begun to build campuses in China or offer courses and degrees on Chinese campuses, and many others have set up exchange programs and offices. 

American administrators uniformly vow loyalty to academic freedom but on the whole have very poor understandings of the cultural and political contexts they are entering.
I have personally spent many hours on study-in-China programs for Americans and am a strong supporter of more and better exchange. 

On the question of protecting academic freedom, I am not optimistic that American university administrators will dare to take my advice, but will offer it here anyway.
The American side should be explicit and concrete in raising the very most sensitive of topics. 

Hold seminars on the thought of Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo. 

Establish a speaker series on Tibet that honors the Dalai Lama. 

Offer a regular course on the pros and cons of one-party dictatorship. 

The point here is nothing so small-minded as to “stick a finger in an eye.” 

The point is that only by planting flags at the outer boundaries can you insure the integrity of the entire field. 

Without the flags, the wordless anaconda will take over, the boundaries will creep in, and academic freedom will be strangled. 

It is also crucial to bear in mind that, when you raise sensitive topics, you will not be affronting “China.” Communist authorities will not like what you do, but most students and intellectuals will welcome it, and many will be secretly cheering for you.
In the end, administrators at American universities should understand the fact that a dozen or so China scholars who cannot work in China is only a very small part of the cost of Chinese-government blacklists. The much larger problem is the subtle but pervasive self-censorship that blacklists help to induce.

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What's at Stake in Bloomberg's China Coverage

The company's refusal to offend the Chinese Communist Party reveals the limitations of "journalistic access."
By Matt Schiavenza

Bloomberg News editor in chief Matt Winkler

Last June, Bloomberg News published a major investigative report into the wealth of the family of Xi Jinping, now China's president. 

The report, written by two well-respected Bloomberg reporters, Mike Forsythe and Shai Oster, tracked the parallel rise of Xi's political career and that of his extended family's business empire, which had accumulated $376 million in assets. 

Though the article did not allege any wrongdoing, its discoveries illuminated the symbiotic relationship between wealth and power in China, where the elite goes to great lengths to conceal the extent of their prosperity.
The report was groundbreaking. 

Widely praised around the industry, Bloomberg News clearly saw the piece as a feather in its cap; a major accomplishment for a still-fledgling news organization. 

When Amanda Bennett, an executive editor for projects and investigations, announced her resignation last week, she cited the investigation into Xi Jinping's family wealth as the work she was "most proud of."
For the Chinese government, which regards the wealth of top officials a taboo subject, the report triggered an immediate reaction: Bloomberg News was censored on the mainland. 

But the blowback didn't end there. 

In addition to the site's censorship, sales of Bloomberg terminal subscriptions, the financial information portals which provide a huge amount of revenue for the company, temporarily slumped in China. 

And the family of Forsythe, one of the journalists responsible for the article, even received death threats.
This year, Forsythe and Oster completed work on a fresh investigation into the connection of wealth and power in China, this time focusing on Wang Jianlin, a real-estate developer and the country's richest citizen. In September, Bloomberg News Managing Editor Jonathan Kaufman told the reporters that the story was "terrific" and added "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.”
But the next month, progress on the story suddenly came to a halt. 

The reporters learned from an editor that the story would indefinitely be "put on the back burner" for an indefinite amount of time. 

In a report by Edward Wong of The New York Times, Winkler told the reporters that publishing the report would jeopardize Bloomberg's access to China, and compared their situation to Nazi-era Germany, where journalists engaged in self-censorship in order to avoid expulsion from the country.
Winkler, speaking to The New York Times, denied the story and said that the investigation was still ongoing; the delay, he said, reflected a belief that the story was as yet unfit for publication, a claim that seems to belie the editorial enthusiasm for the article. 

But further reporting by the Times' Wong revealed the extent to which Bloomberg ensures that its editorial and business sides do not interfere with each other in China; in every Bloomberg story on China that might offend Beijing, editors insert a code that ensures that the story does not appear on mainland-China Bloomberg terminals.
Meanwhile, though the Times' article did not cite him as a source of information of the spiked story, Bloomberg placed Forsythe on unpaid leave of absence last Tuesday. 

Monday night, on Twitter, he thanked his followers for support.

Thanks everyone for the incredible outpouring of sympathy and support. It has really helped me and my family get through this. 

— Mike Forsythe 傅才德 (@PekingMike)
And yesterday, he announced that his tenure with Bloomberg, which began in 2000, had come to an end.
I can confirm that I have left Bloomberg News. That's all I'm going to say for now. 

— Mike Forsythe 傅才德 (@PekingMike) November 19, 2013
The story, in many ways, is just beginning, and there are many unanswered questions. 

Will Bloomberg ultimately decide to publish a version of the story? 

If so, how will Beijing react? 

But these details obscure the larger point: Given The New York Times' reporting, it appears that the Chinese government has successfully intimidated a major American news organization into killing a story that the government deemed offensive. 

And not just any story, either: a major investigative report on a subject central to any understanding of contemporary China—a subject on which a similar report last year won the Times a Pulitzer Prize.

Meanwhile, George Orwell's famous quote on the purpose of journalism—that it consists of printing what someone else does not want printed—is becoming no less vital in China, where the domestic media lack the wherewithal to do the investigations themselves.

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China to Foreign Media: Get in Line or Get Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lot worse. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What Will It Cost to Cover China?

By Evan Osnos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make no mistake, this is not a simple choice. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a story that nobody can afford to ignore.

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Another Animated Take on Bloomberg News

By EDWARD WONG

Next Media Animation of Taiwan is staying at the vanguard of coverage of the Bloomberg News self-censorship saga. 

It has posted its second take on the scandal — which, of course, Bloomberg says is not a scandal. 

Top Bloomberg editors have denied killing a story on a Chinese tycoon and his ties to Communist Party leaders for political reasons, despite accounts from several Bloomberg employees that that was the case.
What Bloomberg has undeniably done, though, is suspend a prize-winning reporter, Michael Forsythe, who was working on the story. 

The suspension took place after Bloomberg employees spoke anonymously to The New York Times and other media organizations about the troubled story.
The new video gives a colorful rundown of the latest events, complete with a shot of Mr. Forsythe as the iconic Tank Man from 1989 and the bow-tie-wearing editor in chief of Bloomberg News, Matthew Winkler, driving a tank down Chang’an Avenue in Beijing.
China-based journalists who have been reporting on the uproar over self-censorship also appear in the video, putting them on par, perhaps, with Tiger Woods in the pantheon of Taiwanese animation. 

But there seems to be a broad consensus that the avatar of the Times correspondent bears little resemblance to this reporter.

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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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At Bloomberg, Special Code Keeps Some Articles Out of China

By EDWARD WONG

A man walks past a screen showing broadcasts of the Bloomberg television channel in Hong Kong.

It is called Code 204. 

Editors at Bloomberg News append it to an article to ensure that it does not appear on Bloomberg financial data and news terminals in mainland China. 

Little known outside Bloomberg, the system has been in place for more than two years, and it is used regularly to keep articles on Chinese politics and social issues away from the eyes of powerful people in China who might be offended, Bloomberg employees say.
That coding is just one way that Bloomberg tries to navigate delicate issues of Chinese control of foreign news media operations here. 

The fact that Bloomberg L.P., the parent company and one of the world’s largest and wealthiest news organizations, sells terminals in China that publish both financial data and news articles means that Bloomberg is more than just a news-gathering agency. 

It is also a news distributor. 

And that makes Bloomberg’s relationship with the government and Communist Party especially complicated.
The Chinese government closely monitors the use of financial data terminals, a market dominated by Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters that has been the subject of political and commercial tension in China for two decades.
Worldwide, Bloomberg’s terminals are the main revenue generator for the parent company, which also operates a website and a television network. 

In China, Bloomberg takes a more cautious approach to disseminating news on the terminals than on any other outlet, which explains Code 204.
“A lot of people rationalize it and say it’s not self-censorship,” one employee said. 

“I disagree with them.”
Ty Trippet, a Bloomberg spokesman, declined to comment.
That coding was used well before news reports about accusations that Bloomberg suppressed other articles on China emerged last week. 

An article in The New York Times quoted unnamed Bloomberg employees as saying that Matthew Winkler, the longtime editor in chief, indicated that he had decided not to publish two investigative articles by reporters in the Hong Kong bureau that looked at ties among Chinese tycoons, the families of political leaders and foreign banks. 

The Financial Times and Next Media Animation have also independently reported details of the story.
In a conference call with four journalists in Hong Kong on Oct. 29, Mr. Winkler defended his decision to withhold one of the articles by arguing that Bloomberg would be expelled from China if the article were published, employees said.
Mr. Winkler  declined to comment on the conference call.
Bloomberg incurred the wrath of the Communist Party after it published an investigative article in June 2012 on the family wealth of Xi Jinping, the new party chief. 

Sales in China of Bloomberg terminal subscriptions, which cost more than $20,000 per year, slowed afterward. 

Chinese officials had ordered some state enterprises not to subscribe, apparently in retaliation. 

Bloomberg’s website has been blocked on Chinese servers since, and its news bureaus on the mainland have been unable to obtain residency visas for new journalists.
Terminal sales in China are believed to make up only a fraction of Bloomberg’s global revenues, but the company would like to increase that. 

Bloomberg also worries about preserving its ability to gather news and financial information in China for global subscribers who buy its terminals to track commerce in the world’s second-largest economy. 

Since publication of the Xi article, Bloomberg journalists have sometimes been denied access to news conferences in China, so they lag behind their competitors in issuing alerts on their terminals — in a business in which a few seconds can determine the success of a trade.
For years, Bloomberg has been careful about the news it distributes on its terminals in mainland China. Senior Bloomberg managers added Code 204 to the editing system in early 2011, around the time that Chinese officials were growing anxious over calls for Chinese citizens to start a Jasmine Revolution, which never materialized. 

Editors routinely apply Code 204 to coverage of Chinese politics and general news, not just investigative blockbusters. 

“It’s very loosely applied,” one person said. 

Some editors justify Code 204 by arguing that the Chinese government allows Bloomberg to publish only financial news and data on the terminals, not political articles or other information, employees said.
“Their rationale is that we’re operating under the laws of mainland China,” said one employee, who, like others at Bloomberg, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of being fired. 

The employee added that those editors defending Code 204 say Bloomberg has a license that allows the terminals to offer what is “narrowly defined as economic news.”
Like Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg has official permits from China to distribute financial information and report on a range of topics, employees said. 

A license from the State Council Information Office allows Bloomberg to disseminate financial information to terminal subscribers. 

Separately, the Foreign Ministry accredits Bloomberg’s news bureaus and journalists in China.
A central question for Bloomberg editors, then, is whether some stories written by the news bureaus should be kept off the terminals to conform with a rigid definition of the state council license. 

Some inside Bloomberg argue that many stories classified as Code 204 could actually be distributed on the terminals under the license because they contain information important for doing business. 

For example, articles about political figures and their family backgrounds or financial ties provide information that can be useful to the businesses that subscribe to the terminals.
Editors append Code 204 case by case. 

Those with the power to apply codes and route articles are said to be “turned on.”
But this kind of self-regulation has failed to keep Bloomberg out of trouble in China, as the fallout from the Xi family wealth article has shown.
Several current and former employees of Reuters said they were unaware of any similar function on the Reuters financial data software platform. 

Subscribers to a comprehensive Reuters terminal plan in China can see raw financial data as well as all the articles that appear on the Reuters news wire, which also has a Chinese-language service, employees said.
Wang Feng, the former editor of the Chinese-language service and now online editor of The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper, said he recently discussed with former Reuters colleagues whether news articles could be coded to keep them off the Reuters terminals in mainland China. 

“It technically would not even have been possible to do that at Reuters,” he said.
A Reuters spokeswoman, Barb Burg, declined to comment.
Since the 1990s, the Chinese government has had an uneasy relationship with foreign financial data services, for both ideological and commercial reasons. 

In 1996, Xinhua, the state news agency, tried to monopolize the business by controlling or driving out Reuters and Dow Jones, then the two dominant data providers. (Bloomberg had only a small China presence then.) 

Reuters and Dow Jones waged an international lobbying campaign that forced Xinhua to back off in 1997, according to James McGregor, a business executive and former journalist who ran Dow Jones in China at the time. 

Xinhua and the Chinese government tried the same thing in 2006, but backed down after the United States and the European Union filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization.
In an interview, Mr. McGregor said the foreign financial data companies did have leverage over China and could fight intimidation, since Chinese businesses rely on the terminals for day-to-day — even second-to-second — transactions. 

“I think it’s impossible to push Bloomberg off the table here because they have a robust and important offering to Chinese traders, and Chinese traders want to be part of the global market,” he said.
Similarly, news agencies have some leverage, despite the visa denials and threats, he added. 

“Does China really not want news coverage?” he said.

“China’s part of the world, and they have to be part of the news world.”

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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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