Reporters under attack as China flexes its muscles

MICHAEL SMITH, a reporter for an Australian newspaper, was jolted from his sleep in his Shanghai apartment last week by six Chinese state intelligence officers who questioned him under a bright spotlight.

Almost 800 miles away in Beijing, as drinks flowed in the middle of a party at his flat, Bill Birtles, correspondent for Australia’s state broadcaster, received an almost identical visit.

The message from the authorities was the same: pack your bags. Details were sketchy but the pair were told they were “persons of interest” in a case and subject to a ban.

The reality is more nuanced. The Australians were the latest journalists swept up in the growing animosity between China and the West – a spiralling row that is rapidly closing our window into a rising global superpower.

The expulsions, which have also affected a number of US journalists, have sowed fear among the shrinking number of foreign reporters left in China.

Mr Smith wrote: “I wondered if … I was about to be ‘disappeared’ to one of China’s notorious black jails.” The security services’ visit to his flat followed the detention of Cheng Lei, an Australian anchor for Chinese state media, in a secretive national security case.

Mr Smith and Mr Birtles feared the same fate, and both were relieved to be allowed to go home to Australia after a tense diplomatic standoff.

But the incident heralds a darker era for foreign media in China that has worrying implications for the free flow of information out of an increasingly assertive and authoritarian power.

As well as expulsions, harassment is on the rise. Alice Su, a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, says she was interrogated, grabbed by the throat and pushed into a police cell before being forced to leave Inner Mongolia.

China experts warn the British press could be next if ties between London and Beijing, under strain over unrest in Hong Kong, deteriorate further.

“It’s a huge loss for our understanding of China. It’s going to go back to the Cold War days basically where you can only look at China from Taiwan … an

‘You have to go back to the era of the Cultural Revolution to imagine a time when reporting was restricted as much as it is now’

Iron Curtain is falling again over the Pacific,” said Gerry Shih, a Washington

Post correspondent who was one of several US reporters expelled in March.

Like his colleagues, Mr Shih was blindsided by the foreign ministry’s sudden decision to rescind visas – an increasingly common tactic.

Mr Shih, now based in Taiwan, said hostility towards foreign media was not just a result of deteriorating foreign relations but was also linked to internal struggles within the Communist Party.

Critical reporting on sensitive issues such as Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong pro-democracy protests and the treatment of the Uighur Muslim minority in Xinjiang had already inflamed tensions, said Steven Lee Myers, the

New York Times bureau chief who in March was forced to leave China within 10 days and relocate to South Korea.

“You have to go back really to the era of the Cultural Revolution to imagine a time when reporting was restricted as much as it is now,” he said.

“Unfortunately, it feels to me like we are returning to that kind of era of hostility.”

China analysts predict that Beijing’s treatment of the foreign media will continue to deteriorate as Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, seeks to exert more control over the narrative his country projects to the world.

Charles Parton, a former diplomat in China, says British journalists will “very likely” face similar treatment to their US and Australian colleagues in the future.

A trigger point for friction, he said, could be an expected ruling by broadcast regulator Ofcom that could ban the China Global Television Network from UK airwaves for showing forced confessions.

The Government should engage in more “imaginative reciprocity” when restrictions were placed on British journalists in China, said Mr Parton.

But he cautioned it was inevitable that reporters would “find themselves a little bit more on the front line than they would wish” if democracies were to stand up for their values.

He added: “If they don’t, they will be kowtowing to China and they will reap the consequences of that.”