It's increasingly clear that the Chinese government is not going to honor the promises it made to the International Olympic Committee to respect press freedom, not even for the foreign reporters who are already descending by the thousands on Beijing. That's left many of them scratching their heads and wondering how they're going to cover the China Olympics story. But they should just as well be asking how they're not going to.
As a college undergraduate, I was an ardent admirer of a leading foreign newspaper correspondent. He opened the paper's bureau in Beijing, and wrote compellingly about the China that was just climbing out of the Cultural Revolution and daring to follow Deng Xiaoping's dicta for a freer economy. He didn't shrink from the dark stories of China's political repression, past and present. Many of those profiles found their way into his best-selling account of those early years when foreign correspondents were setting up operations in China for the first time since the Communist takeover.
The problem was, as I discovered when I arrived in China to work as a stringer for The Washington Post in 1985, some of the people that veteran journalist had profiled suffered retribution for talking with a foreign reporter. One of them had even gone to jail. And that made the name of my reporting hero, among the foreign correspondent community in Beijing, just plain mud.
A wire service reporter I knew after Tiananmen made a similar mistake. He is an impressive journalist, who later went to work for a major international paper. But in the wake of the 1989 crackdown on democracy, he quoted a Chinese friend making highly critical comments about the government. The Chinese man was a smart, Western-educated young academic who had befriended many of us correspondents. Thankfully, he made it out of the country without arrest, but the incident could easily have ended less happily.
Just as important as what you write in China is what you don't write: the sources you don't quote (even if they say it's "no problem"); the pictures you don't take; the homes and workplaces you don't barge into. Especially if you're not staying in China for long or you don't speak the language (excuses that neither of the correspondents above could claim), the government's repressive machinery may be invisible to you. You may not recognize your Public Security Bureau tail for what he is. And you'll have long ago left town when he comes back to visit that fascinating Internet entrepreneur whom you drank tea with for a couple of hours in Wuhan. You may never even know that your source had to pay a massive bribe to keep his business going after that, or to keep his kid in college. His wife won't call you when he gets dragged off to the police station for "questioning." They'll have learned their lesson - not to talk to reporters - but you won't be there to learn yours.
So how do you protect your sources in China? As a cub reporter covering Tiananmen for Newsweek, I did it the wrong way and got dressed down by my foreign editor. The magazine's media columnist was writing about precisely this question, how to protect sources after the crackdown, and interviewed me for his story. I blithely told him the truth, that I'd changed one letter in a source's last name. What did the readers of Newsweek care if Wang Zhen became Wang Zhan?
Whether they cared or not, my editor did, and rightly so. If you're going to change a name to protect a source, you have to say so in your story. But don't let that deter you. Despite the recent furors over blind sourcing, I don't believe your readers will be put off by it. In fact, that's part of the important information that you have a responsibility to convey to them: that talking to Western reporters is still dangerous for Chinese people, and we still have a responsibility to protect them.
Carroll Bogert is the associate director of Human Rights Watch and a former foreign correspondent for Newsweek magazine.
