All Blog Posts from Public Eye

We asked CBS News Correspondent Barry Petersen what covering China is like under the new rules put in place for foreign journalists in the run-up to the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics. Read his report below. The accompanying photograph is a shot of local officials questioning the CBS News team. Pictured left to right: The provincial press office official, who did the questioning; Asia Producer Marsha Cooke; Petersen; and a uniformed policeman, who was there to add official presence and said nothing.

Article 6: To interview organizations or individuals in China, foreign journalists need only obtain their prior consent.

--From the “Regulations on Reporting Activities in China by Foreign Journalists During the Beijing Olympic Games and Preparatory Period” taking effect on 1 January 2007 and expire on 17 October 2008, a Decree of the State Council

Next time, you are involved in a ''misunderstanding'' with police, cite this article and say it was signed by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.

--From a piece written by Jonathan Watts for the newsletter of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of China.

Welcome to a brave new world of journalism in China for foreign correspondents.

In the old days, before we could go anywhere outside Beijing, we needed permission from the receiving provincial press office, and they would check with the Beijing press office of the Foreign Ministry.

Anything controversial -- and half the time things that were not -- got turned down. Too busy, wrong time, no one available to help you. Go without permission and they could and would turn us around and put us back on a plane to Beijing.

Newspaper reporters could sometimes get away with travel, but TV crews are a lot more obvious. We need pictures to tell our stories, and that means a camera and that means we get spotted fast.

Now, in these new days, the word has spread: leave the foreign journalists alone, they do not need permission to be where they are.

Example: we just traveled to a couple of tiny villages in Sichuan Province without asking or telling any officials. People there are angry because a hydro-electric dam will soon be completed, and when it blocks the river and forms a reservoir, large parts of their towns will be under water.

People in one village claimed that local officials were cheating them out of land and not paying them enough to re-locate.

These are the same local officials who once decided if we would be allowed into the area. So a few months ago we would likely have been denied permission to visit.

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Yesterday, Richard Spencer, writing on his blog in the Telegraph, brought us the story of Fu Xiancai, an activist who in May gave an interview to a German current affairs program. Fu Xiancai had been warned about, and attacked for, his outspokenness in the past, earning a broken leg and a few blows to the head in the process. But that was nothing compared to what happened last week.

Writes Spencer:

…he was summoned to his local police station to be ticked off about his "oppositionism" and told no good would come of it. On his way back home, he was whacked from behind, and left unconscious in a ditch.

Now he is in hospital, paralysed from the waist down, having suffered a fractured vertebra in his neck. Visitors are not being allowed in to see him, so the information comes via his family.

This is a pretty chilling incident for reporters. We are often intruding into sensitive areas, and deciding how to treat our interviewees is a very difficult one. He is not the first to be beaten up for talking to the press. Others have been jailed, sometimes for substantial terms.

I asked CBS News Correspondent Barry Petersen, who covers China, for his thoughts on the Fu Xiancai case. He sent a long email with his reaction, which is printed in full below.

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Violence is no stranger for Chinese dissidents. The sad thing is that the Chinese authorities can define dissidents in the broadest possible way, including even gentle people who feel the need to simply speak out.

In America, we are accustomed to having police watched over by journalists reporting on their activities and courts judging what they did. In China, the police face none of this.

It makes them a force unto their own. And, worse, it is a force that is not always on the side of right or even the government. The police can be on the side (and on the payroll) of the local city boss. Police can then be used to quell dissidents who talk too much or farmers who protest when their land is simply taken.

Occasionally, these incidents surface usually in the foreign press. Less often, there may be some retribution from the central government in Beijing. Let's say...VERY less often.

In the U.S., we see clear lines of authority. Police usually work for the local city, the highway patrol for the state, the army for the federal government.

Overseeing them are local, state and federal courts. And what these courts say becomes the law.

China has some of these institutions, but with little or no real power. The idea of a court telling a high official what to do is not part of China's way of law. Indeed...it usually works the other way around. So recourse to courts is often no recourse at all.

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Brian Stelter has a nice interview up with CBS News correspondent Barry Petersen, who has been based in Tokyo since 1995. Petersen has written a couple of dispatches for us on what it's like to be a foreign correspondent in China – you can read them here and here.

Stelter asked Petersen, "What is the state of foreign corresponding on network news, as you see it?"

"Better and worse," Petersen replied. He explained:

In the 'old' days the networks were much more aggressive about covering foreign news in areas like plane crashes, coups, floods. I consider this the 'worse' time. We chased around a lot doing stories that smelled like news but were not very relevant to either American policy or the lives or normal Americans.

Now the bar is higher. To get a foreign story on the air it needs to be interesting or relevant or compelling. We still cover some huge, breaking news stories such as the Asian tsunami.

But to get enterprise pieces on, especially from Asia, the stories must be that much more interesting.

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Yesterday, CBS News correspondent Barry Petersen took us inside the world of reporting in China -- where the rules are very different than here in the U.S. For instance, just yesterday, the Associated Press reported that a Chinese documentary filmmaker, who was detained by police in late February while making a documentary about underground Christians, has, according to his sister, "been placed under a murky form of arrest in a possible sign police are having trouble building a case against him." Further, "Police have refused to release details about charges or let his family see him, saying his case was being kept secret." In today's second glimpse inside Barry's world, he explains that in China, the government is always watching:


The Great Equalizer … The Internet

In a sense, it’s nice to know we foreign journalists are not alone. Any Chinese Internet user who tries to get foreign news from foreign sites could well be asking for trouble -- especially with the help of American search engines now cooperating with the Chinese government. [You can watch Petersen's "Evening News" story about that .]

I lived for four years in Moscow in the days of the Soviet Union and Gorbachev and the secret police. We knew they listened to us in our apartment because we could sometimes hear them moving their listening devices around in the ceiling. Actually, it was a relief to know it was KGB spies making that strange scraping noise, and not rats.

Definitely not rats.

In China, we know the same thing is going on. But maybe with advances in technology, it is not so obvious. For instance: tapping a phone line can sometimes lead to clicks and noises, but no one can tell if a cell phone call is being monitored.

That is why our team showed up one day to meet a man for an interview about his house being demolished by the government, and instead found police ready and waiting. That meant another detention and another "confession and apology" -- and always, the chilling reminder that they know where we are going.

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We were offered a glimpse into the lack of press freedom in China last week, when we learned that most people in the country likely didn’t see footage of a protester interrupting Chinese President Hu Jintao’s high-profile public visit to the White House with some loud criticisms of President Hu’s treatment of the Falun Gong. While it was the headline of most news stories in the U.S., CBS correspondent Barry Petersen noted in a story about the censorship, “In China, what you see is what you get, and what you get is often not the full story.” Indeed, the full story behind many of the reports that Barry has done in China for CBS News are far more complicated than what ends up on the air. Here’s the first installment of Barry’s perspective on what it’s like to be a foreign correspondent in China:

The first thing you need to know about your rights as a foreign reporter in China is that, in the end, you have no rights.

Yes, they have books of rules and regulations, but the only rules that count are the ones made up by the policeman or foreign ministry officer sitting in front of you.

Does that sound frustrating? Confusing? Welcome to my world.

We were doing an interview one day on a Beijing street. We do this regularly, usually without notice or problem. This was after a series of anti-Japanese protests in China, which would only take place with the express consent of the government.

Our interview subject was the leader of one protest group.

But little did we know that the government had decided that the anti-Japanese protests were over. So as we were talking several policemen walked up and told us to stop.

Then they herded us into an office building, and split up the team: American correspondent, producer and cameraman in one office, and our Chinese soundman and our Chinese researcher in another.

They called in the officials who deal with the foreign press, who got there in about an hour. Thus ensued (after they graciously poured glasses of Coke for us) an argument about the tape.

We’d done the interview and wanted our tape.

They did not want the interview used. We argued, they listened, and in the end they got the tape. Plus, we had to sign a “confession and apology” for what we had done.

Our choices were not good. Had we resisted, we knew the Americans would be left alone to go home, but we were concerned about reprisals against our Chinese staffers.

Being detained? Expect it, so you might as well enjoy it.

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