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V. The Closure of Tibet

When the Tibet unrest happened, [the Chinese government] lost its nerve and went back to its traditional default position with regards to the foreign media, which is: “Don’t let anyone see anything.”⁹⁴

—Beijing-based foreign correspondent, Beijing, March 29, 2008.

Media freedom also continues to be restricted geographically. The situation in Tibet today illustrates the range of controls officials can apply when they perceive a threat.   The picture is one of deliberate, orchestrated closure of Tibetan areas, with journalists scrambling to avoid obstacles at every turn. Their efforts are ultimately frustrated by official persistence in keeping them away from the “sensitive” areas.

Access for foreigners, and particularly foreign journalists, to Tibet has been closely circumscribed since the Chinese People’s Liberation Army entered central Tibet⁹⁵ in 1950.⁹⁶ Tibetans refer to the events of 1950 as an “invasion,” while the Chinese government refers to it as the “peaceful liberation” of Tibet.⁹⁷

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has long required foreign correspondents who want to do reporting trips to Tibet to apply for permission, a process which journalists describe as lengthy and frustrating.⁹⁸ The temporary regulations contain no geographical restrictions,⁹⁹ but were superseded in February 2007 when MOFA stated that correspondents’ access to Tibet still requires specific MOFA permission due to “restraints in natural conditions and reception capabilities” across Tibet.¹⁰⁰ 

Several foreign journalists who tried to visit Tibet in 2007 were denied access at entry points by government officials and security forces and have been intimidated by MOFA officials. McClatchy Newspapers’ China correspondent Tim Johnson, who made an unsanctioned trip to Tibet in May 2007, said that a MOFA official delivered a verbal reprimand, accusing him of false reporting “unacceptable” to the Chinese government.¹⁰¹ Even foreign journalists with official permission to report in Tibet were blocked at times by local officials and correspondents on MOFA-organized trips, faced micro-managed schedules which interfered with independent reporting, and the constant presence of official guides or minders who intimidated potential local sources. 

In March 2008, access to Tibet and Tibetan communities in neighboring provinces for foreign correspondents was shut off altogether, with the exception of five government-organized and controlled tours.

The March 2008 Protests in Tibetan Areas

On March 10, 2008, hundreds of monks from Drepung monastery, five miles west of the Tibetan capital Lhasa, began peaceful protests calling for an end to religious restrictions and the release of imprisoned monks as part of commemorations for “Tibetan Uprising Day,” the anniversary of the Tibetan rebellion against Chinese rule of Tibet in 1959.¹⁰² While marching toward the Drepung, protesters were stopped by large numbers of Chinese police, and media reports estimate that around 50 monks were detained.¹⁰³ The monks held a sit-down protest for some 12 hours before returning to their monastery. On March 11 at around 2:30 a.m., the sound of gunfire was heard emanating from the area of the monastery.¹⁰⁴

Over the course of that week, similar protests erupted at Sera and Ganden monasteries, and Lhasa was rocked by unprecedented protests, including attacks by Tibetans on ethnic Han and their property. Chinese security forces, notably absent as the rioting got underway, eventually responded by beating protesters, firing live ammunition, and cutting phone lines into monasteries.¹⁰⁵ There have been reports that some protesters were shot.¹⁰⁶ The Chinese government claims that 23 people were killed in the riots, while the Tibetan government-in-exile claims 203 Tibetans have been killed in subsequent government crackdown.¹⁰⁷ The Chinese government quickly sealed Tibet and Tibetan communities in neighboring provinces with thousands of troops and police,¹⁰⁸ resulting in the surrender or arrest of more than 3,000 people in the first month following the unrest.¹⁰⁹ Protests by Tibetans swiftly spread in the following days to areas of the neighboring southwestern provinces of Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai, and Yunnan,¹¹⁰ which are home to more than half of all ethnic Tibetans. According to one observer, “Chinese internal reports are said to have estimated that some 30,000 Tibetans took part.”¹¹¹

Expulsion of Journalists from Lhasa

The Chinese government’s response to foreign media in the aftermath of the riots in Lhasa and in neighboring provinces was swift and uncompromising: journalists in Lhasa came under strong official pressure to leave or were forcibly ejected. Chinese government officials and security forces forced the few other foreign journalists who had managed to arrive in the aftermath of the violence out of the region by March 18.  The temporary regulations were of no help to journalists here.

A group of Hong Kong text and television journalists were confined to their Lhasa hotel by police on the evening of March 15. A government official told the journalists that their reporting on the protests was “out of line” and ordered them to leave Lhasa the next day.¹¹² The journalists were dispatched to the airport in a special minibus and accompanied by two Tibetan government officials “to ensure we all got on the flight.”¹¹³

German correspondents George Blum and Kristin Kupfer left by train from Lhasa to Xining in Qinghai province on March 18. Their departure was prompted by threats from immigration officials that the two journalists’ official press accreditation to China would be withdrawn if they didn’t leave the city.¹¹⁴ 

James Miles, a China correspondent for The Economist, happened to be on an officially-sanctioned visit to Lhasa during the protests, and provided eyewitness accounts to western media of the ransacking and burning of Chinese owned shops and brutality by Tibetan rioters against Han Chinese migrants in the city.¹¹⁵ He was permitted to stay in Lhasa until the scheduled conclusion of his official tour on March 19, 2008.¹¹⁶ Miles believes he was allowed to complete his Tibet trip because MOFA personnel liked his reporting on Tibetan violence against Han Chinese and they did not want the negative publicity of forcing out a correspondent with official permission to be in Lhasa.¹¹⁷ 

Foreign journalists who flew into Lhasa on March 15 were put back on flights to Chengdu in Sichuan province, the regional air hub for flights to Tibet.¹¹⁸

Obstacles for Journalists Trying to Reach Tibetan Areas

The temporary regulations were equally useless to correspondents trying to reach Tibetan communities in the neighboring provinces of Gansu, Sichuan, Qinghai and Yunnan provinces, where no additional geographical constraints should apply.  Although there were no official announcements of extraordinary legal circumstances which might warrant an obstruction, such as a declaration of martial law, the Chinese government also moved quickly to block foreign correspondents from accessing Tibetan communities in these provinces. 

The Chinese government offered vague justifications for sealing off Tibetan areas from foreign journalists. On March 20, MOFA defended its prohibition as legally-justified “special measures in line with the law” and asked that journalists understand and cooperate with the new restrictions on their freedom to report.¹¹⁹

The Regulations allow free reporting by foreign journalists in China, however, there is no absolute freedom anywhere in the world. Besides, Article One of the Regulations stipulates that these regulations are formulated to facilitated reporting activities by foreign journalists in China in accordance with the laws of the People’s Republic of China. We hope foreign journalists abide by Chinese laws and relevant regulations.¹²⁰

The foreign ministry has consistently declined, however, to specify the precise legal basis for the prohibition on correspondents’ access to Tibet and neighboring provinces, and the laws which allow the government to supersede the authority of the temporary regulations. The Chinese government has subsequently altered its justification for the ban on foreign media access to those areas by citing unspecified concerns about journalists’ “safety,”¹²¹ noting “security issues and other issues.”¹²² Many foreign journalists remain puzzled by such statements, given that most of the threats they have encountered have come from government officials themselves.

Foreign correspondents who attempted to get from their Beijing or Shanghai bases to cover one of China’s most serious outbreaks of civil strife since the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 were barred from flights, stopped at roadblocks (where their drivers were intimidated by local security authorities), and even detained. Within days, a significant portion of western China was sealed off from the eyes of foreign journalists. 

The FCCC, which in 2007 recorded 180 separate incidents of reporting interference including detention, intimidation, and harassment across China, documented more than 50 such cases in western China in the two-week period following March 14.¹²³ The challenges facing foreign journalists in trying to report the story were aptly summarized by veteran China correspondent Jonathan Watts of the U.K. newspaper The Guardian.

Trouble has been breaking out hundreds of miles apart in an area roughly the size of Western Europe. Chasing the incidents is like racing from London to Zurich to Lisbon, while trying to dodge the police and avoid putting sources in danger at the same time. In the past seven days, we have taken seven flights, been driven for 30 hours and covered a distance roughly equivalent to 10 times the length of Britain. Security restrictions haven’t helped. I have twice woken-up before dawn to avoid checkpoints on six-to-eight hour journeys that ultimately ended in failure, when the police stopped me, found I was a journalist and sent me back.¹²⁴

With direct travel to Lhasa and the rest of Tibet prohibited, foreign correspondents quickly booked flights to transportation hubs in southwestern China, including Chengdu, Gansu province’s Lanzhou and Yunnan province’s Kunming, in the hope of arranging land transportation to areas of Tibetan protests. But some foreign journalists found that the authorities were unwilling even to permit them to board the flights. 

Public Security Bureau officers refused to allow a Beijing-based foreign correspondent to board a flight on March 19 from Kunming to Lhasa for “security reasons.”  He was blocked by security officials again the same day when he tried to get on a flight from Kunming to Zhongdian, which was of interest for its large ethnic Tibetan population and its proximity to parts of Sichuan province where there had been protests. “When I tried to go to Zhongdian, police with submachine guns and flak jackets [at the boarding gate] said I couldn’t go for ‘safety reasons’ and they were also turning back [foreign] tourists from boarding.”¹²⁵

A Shanghai-based foreign correspondent who likewise attempted to fly to Zhongdian from Yunnan on March 18 was blocked by police who demonstrated a surprising level of knowledge of his movements toward Zhongdian. The correspondent said that they had tracked him through analysis of airline data.¹²⁶

At the airport the police were waiting for me at the [airline] check-in counter, 10 uniformed police, some with machine guns. They greeted me with “You must be [the correspondent’s name]” and when they looked at my ticket I overheard one of them say “Oh yes, he’s just recently been to Hong Kong,”…so they obviously got my name from the airline passenger manifest. We had a routine argument…but I had no luck boarding the flight.¹²⁷

Several correspondents also said that their drivers—essential for reaching more remote areas of these provinces—were often the first target for police intimidation or subterfuge.

A three-person foreign television news crew which had successfully traveled from Xining, Qinghai province, in the early hours of March 16 to the Tibetan community of Gonghe were detained that same afternoon by two car-loads of uniformed local Public Security Bureau (PSB) officers. The PSB insisted that the journalists needed to accompany the police to the local station “to check our credentials.”¹²⁸ The police checked the journalists’ press cards and passports, but directed most of their attention toward the journalists’ driver. “[The request to check our credentials] was a ploy. They gave our driver a good talking-to, and he said that [the police] made him aware of the fact that they didn’t want him to go anywhere [potentially sensitive].”¹²⁹ This intimidation, along with being tailed by an unmarked police car all day, sabotaged the journalists’ efforts to report.¹³⁰ 

A Shanghai-based correspondent who flew to Lanzhou on March 15 en route to report on Tibetan unrest in other parts of Gansu province believed that some of the city’s taxi drivers had been replaced by plainclothes police, or had been temporarily paid to double as police informers. The taxi driver who picked up the correspondent from the Lanzhou airport appeared to intentionally surrender the journalist to police who were recording the entry of foreign correspondents into the city.

The cab driver who picked me up [at the airport] said right away “Oh, many journalists are coming to Lanzhou today,” but I hadn’t even told him that I was a journalist. Then the cab driver said “I think we’re being followed, I should call the police!” Actually behind us was another taxi with two other foreign journalists. Within a few minutes, plainclothes police showed up and looked at our passports.¹³¹

The plainclothes police did not detain the journalists, but merely documented their passport details as part of what appeared to be an official surveillance program of correspondents in Lanzhou.¹³²

Police in these provinces also openly pressured some taxi drivers to limit the destinations to which they would take foreign correspondents. A Beijing-based foreign correspondent who successfully traveled overland from Lijang to Zhongdian in Yunnan province discovered that police who had waved him through a checkpoint into Zhongdian had instructed the driver to ignore the correspondent’s destination requests, and instead drop him off at the local headquarters of the Public Security Bureau.¹³³ When the driver revealed the plan to the foreign journalist, after he had complained that the driver wasn’t stopping at a local hotel as requested, the correspondent “threw him the fare and took off” in the middle of an intersection.¹³⁴

Beijing-based correspondent Richard Spencer of The Telegraph was also subjected to police efforts to control his movements in Gansu province on March 17. Spencer had ended up in Gansu’s Hezuo city that day after three days of repeated incidents of harassment, detention, and intimidation, including being turned back at a police roadblock on March 15 en route to Xiahe from Lanzhou. Spencer was also detained and interrogated by “very aggressive” submachine-gun toting police outside the town of Luqu in Gansu on March 16, and forcibly transferred from his rented vehicle to a police minivan that same day and transported to Hezuo, Gansu province, against his will. That interference occurred while Spencer was attempting to cover reported Tibetan unrest in the province and in neighboring Sichuan.¹³⁵ On March 17, an individual who Spencer identified as a plainclothes policeman repeatedly interfered with Spencer’s efforts to hail a taxi outside his hotel to take him to Lanzhou to board a flight back to Beijing. The plainclothes policeman insisted Spencer take a public bus to Lanzhou on the basis that the bus’s fixed route would prevent Spencer from attempting to independently slip back into neighboring Tibetan communities.¹³⁶ Spencer was eventually allowed to get in a taxi, but the policeman ordered the taxi driver to personally contact the policeman by phone when Spencer had been dropped off at the Lanzhou airport.¹³⁷ 

Foreign correspondents reported that, beginning on March 15, government and security officials converted toll points on main roads running north out of Chengdu, Lanzhou, and Xining into roadblocks designed to block access by foreign travelers, particularly journalists. These were controlled by government officials, uniformed, and plainclothes police who scrutinized the passengers of incoming vehicles for foreign passengers. Local travelers were permitted to continue their journeys unimpeded.

A Beijing-based foreign television journalist trying to get to the town of Xiahe in Gansu, where there had reportedly been Tibetan protests, was forced to abandon the main roads leading to the town due to those roadblocks. “70 kilometers outside Lanzhou, all the toll points became roadblocks. We were told [by police at a roadblock] that Xiahe was ‘closed’ and our driver was told to take us back [to Lanzhou].”¹³⁸ The journalist was eventually able to reach Xiahe “after many hours and many [road-related] acrobatics” and on his way back noted that the roadblocks were focused strictly on incoming vehicles and ignored cars leaving the area.¹³⁹

Police at a roadblock from Lanzhou to Xiahe on March 15 told another Beijing-based foreign journalist that although they were familiar with the temporary regulations, they insisted that those rules “didn’t apply here.”¹⁴⁰ The journalist then attempted to get assistance from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing. “We called MOFA and they said there was nothing they could do because under emergency circumstances, local authorities can prohibit foreigners from entry. This event really showed how powerless MOFA can be [in implementing the temporary regulations on media freedom].”¹⁴¹

A two-man foreign television crew was stopped on March 16 at a roadblock about an hour drive outside of Tongren, Qinghai province, where they had interviewed Tibetan monks at the local monastery. The uniformed police who stopped them politely but firmly dismissed the journalist’s insistence that the temporary regulations gave them the right to freely report in the area.¹⁴² The police required the journalists to get out of their own rented car and instead ride in a police car to a nearby police station. At the station, the journalists were denied the right to phone their bureau in Beijing.¹⁴³ They were allowed to phone MOFA for assistance, but the police who had detained them refused to speak to the MOFA official.¹⁴⁴ The journalists were questioned for hours and then released by the police who tried repeatedly, though unsuccessfully, to convince the journalists to show the police their Tongren interview footage.

Police and hotel staff in Litang, Sichuan province, assured a foreign journalist by phone that the town was open for foreigners to visit.¹⁴⁵ Despite those advance assurances, the journalist was detained three times in a single day by uniformed police who said Litang was closed to foreigners due to unspecified “dangerous” conditions.¹⁴⁶ Later that day, approximately ten minutes after the journalist reconfirmed with both a contact in Litang and the town’s government authorities that the town was indeed open to visitors, two uniformed police showed up at his hotel instructing him that no foreigners could travel west toward Litang. “That message was either really good timing, or they’d listened in on my [phone] conversation a few minutes earlier,” the journalist said.¹⁴⁷

A foreign television journalist who had managed to evade roadblocks and discreetly enter the Gansu town of Xiahe on March 16 and 19 said that the security conditions imposed on the city made reporting impossible. “From Sunday to Wednesday they’d basically put a ring of steel around the city. Police and People’s Liberation Army troops with staves blocked roads into Xiahe proper…and they were letting monks and civilians into the city one-by-one only.”¹⁴⁸

On the evening of March 15, Finnish Broadcasting Corporation (YLE) journalist Katri Makkonen went into a restaurant to evade the scrutiny of a group of people who had been following and videotaping her. Shortly after entering the restaurant, its owners closed its metal shutter door. Five minutes later, the shutter was opened from the outside and five plainclothes policemen entered, demanding to see her passport. One of the policemen carried in his hand the photocopied passport pictures of several journalists which he then attempted to use to identify Makkonen, suggesting that the police had used surveillance of mobile phone communications to discover what correspondents were in the area.¹⁴⁹ The police briefly detained her to record her press card and passport details and then released her. The next day, police detained Makkonen en route to the Gansu town of Hezuo and demanded to view her film footage, threatening to “confiscate” anything they deemed “sensitive.”¹⁵⁰ When Makkonen asked about the possible consequences of defying this order, one of the policemen replied, “You don’t want to know.”¹⁵¹

Seven correspondents interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that they faced demands by government officials and security forces to view and delete such footage after the crackdown on foreign journalists began on March 15, 2008. Four of those journalists lost valuable film footage as a result. A Shanghai-based foreign correspondent who took photographs of riot police outside of the Qinghai province town of Tongren on March 16 lost those shots within minutes when police detained the correspondent and deleted all the photos on the journalist’s camera.¹⁵² “They said photography there wasn’t allowed,” the correspondent said.¹⁵³

By about March 20, many of the foreign correspondents attempting to cover the unrest in Tibetan areas had returned either to regional transportation hubs such as Chengdu or Lanzhou or to their bureaus in Beijing or Shanghai in the hope that reporting restrictions would soon be lifted. To date, however, those controls remain in place. 

Government-Orchestrated Tours for Journalists to Tibetan Areas

In response to growing international concern about the crackdown in Tibet and threats of a resulting boycott of the Olympics opening ceremonies,¹⁵⁴ the Chinese government has granted select groups of foreign journalist’s temporary access on four highly-circumscribed trips to Lhasa and a fifth to Gansu province since the March 14-15, 2008 protests. A group of foreign diplomats were permitted to take a similar trip on March 29-30, though in early April, the Chinese government refused a request by United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, to visit Tibet to investigate the violence there.¹⁵⁵

On the two-day Lhasa trip, which began on March 27, 2008, foreign correspondents said that foreign ministry officials who accompanied them kept a close watch on their activities and repeatedly attempted to discourage, but not prevent, their efforts at independent reporting. However, the constant surveillance which those correspondents endured during the visit made it difficult to freely conduct interviews without fear of possible repercussions to local sources.

To be fair to our minders, when we really pushed them, they let us go do our thing, but they didn’t need to [directly obstruct us] because to go into Tibetan areas [of Lhasa] there were police everywhere and we had to continually show our passports. [Foreign ministry officials] didn’t have to follow us because people watched us wherever we went.¹⁵⁶

Another correspondent on that Lhasa visit said that government officials blocked journalists’ access to key sites, including monasteries and the city’s main mosque.¹⁵⁷ On March 28, 2008, foreign ministry officials tried to cut short foreign journalists’ access to a group of monks who courageously approached the correspondents during their guided official tour of Lhasa’s Jokang monastery and, in the brief moments available to them, told the journalists of serious ongoing persecution and repression. “When the monks approached us, the [MOFA] minders kept trying to pull us away, gently but insistently, citing a ‘time schedule problem.’”¹⁵⁸

The Chinese government’s second media tour, from April 9-13, went to several towns in Gansu province. Potential local sources on the streets of the Gansu town of Machu were apparently very hesitant to speak openly to reporters within earshot of the correspondents’ official minders. “Although the Chinese and foreign journalists were invited to interview people on the street in Machu most conversations quickly ceased as government officials accompanying the tour approached.”¹⁵⁹ Tibetan monks at Xiahe’s Labrang monastery who did approach foreign correspondents during that tour on April 9  and openly spoke of government repression were reportedly later “imprisoned, beaten and in some cases subjected to electric shock torture,” as a punishment for speaking out.¹⁶⁰

A Japanese news agency reporter and photographer who were given special Chinese government permission to visit Lhasa in April 2008 were also subjected to “very disruptive” constraints on their reporting freedom while in the city. The two journalists were “followed the entire time” by police while they were in Lhasa and denied access to monasteries to interview monks.¹⁶¹ The government hosted a third “carefully scripted” four-day government-organized trip of foreign journalists to Tibetan areas which began in Lhasa on June 2. Correspondents on the trip noted a heavy police presence on the streets, similar to that seen during the late March visit.¹⁶² The most recent government-organized foreign media trip to Lhasa was on the occasion of the June 21 Olympics torch relay. Correspondents “were confined to fixed points along the route” and not permitted to freely report.¹⁶³

Foreign correspondents who have tried to document how events unfolded in Tibetan areas through interviews with local residents outside of the areas have been stymied by those potential sources’ fear of retribution for talking to foreign media. “People are very, very scared to talk. And when you talk to people coming out of the area, often they’ll say, ‘I just can’t tell you what’s happening. It’s too dangerous. It’s too dangerous for me.’”¹⁶⁴

The Government’s Propaganda Offensive and its Consequences for Foreign Journalists

China’s state media initially limited its coverage of the Tibetan protests to text reports by the official Xinhua News Agency.¹⁶⁵ Chinese government censors blocked CNN and BBC television reports of the events in Lhasa on March 14-15, 2008, and Internet access to Google News, Yahoo, and YouTube.¹⁶⁶

The first Xinhua reports, published on March 15, emphasized that Lhasa was “calm” and that the Tibetan people’s spiritual leader-in-exile, the Dalai Lama, was responsible for the violence.¹⁶⁷ Those reports failed to provide a context for the riots which included anger and frustration among Tibetans at unpopular elements of Chinese rule. Instead, the Xinhua reports blamed the violence on well-armed Tibetan rioters who “came fully-prepared [for violence] and meant harm.”¹⁶⁸ Xinhua reporters said they witnessed rioters “carrying backpacks filled with stones and bottles of inflammable liquids, some holding iron bars, wooden sticks and long knifes.”¹⁶⁹ A “commentary” article that day described the Dalai Lama as “the self-described peace teacher [who] turned the tranquil holy city of Lhasa into a land of terror.”¹⁷⁰

On March 17, Xinhua quoted Tibet’s government chairman, Qiangba Puncog, as insisting that security forces neither carried nor used “any destructive weapons” in restoring calm to Lhasa,¹⁷¹ a claim at odds with the eyewitness reports of James Miles, China correspondent for The Economist, that some police units had carried and fired guns while quelling the rioting.¹⁷² That day Xinhua began to report that the Lhasa rioting was specifically aimed at disrupting the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.¹⁷³ That same day, other state media outlets began to cover the March 14-15 events in Lhasa.¹⁷⁴

After days of ignoring and then playing-down protests…television channels broadcast hours of Friday’s anti-Chinese protests in Lhasa and the aftermath. Employees at the CCTV state television channel’s English service were instructed to keep broadcasting footage of burned-out shops and Chinese wounded in attacks. No peaceful demonstrators were shown.¹⁷⁵

On March 19, official coverage began to insist that western media coverage of the events in Tibetan areas was fundamentally biased. Xinhua cited Tibet-born former National People’s Congress Standing Committee member Ragdi (who has only one name), who described foreign journalists as “hypocrites” seeking to “slander our legitimate efforts” to maintain order in Lhasa.¹⁷⁶ This story failed to mention that the Chinese government had systematically evicted foreign journalists from Lhasa, the rest of Tibet, and Tibetan communities in neighboring provinces including Gansu, Sichuan, Qinghai, and Yunnan. This piece was soon followed by a barrage of criticism over “biased and sometimes dishonest reports,” particularly regarding allegedly deliberate errors in the captions of photo images.¹⁷⁷

The pictures illustrate how news can be manipulated. The BBC News website carries a picture with the caption saying “There is a heavy military presence in Lhasa,” while the photo clearly shows an ambulance bearing the red cross symbol. The American Fox News website published a photo with the caption “Chinese troops parade handcuffed Tibetan prisoners in trucks,” while the photo shows Indian police dragging a man away. CNN.com used a cropped photo of Chinese military trucks, cutting off the half of the picture showing a crowd of rioters throwing rocks at the trucks. More notably, the websites of German’s Bild newspaper, N-TV and RTL TV, and the Washington Post all used pictures of baton-wielding Nepalese police in clashes with Tibetan protesters in Katmandu, claiming that the officers were Chinese police.¹⁷⁸ 

The news agencies responded by either making corrections or clarifying the context. CNN stated that the photo singled out  by the China Daily as proof of the network’s “biased” reporting had been cropped “to fit the standard story size of the [network’s web] site.”¹⁷⁹ German TV station n-tv Nachrichtenfernsehen GmbH issued an apology for having used Tibetan-related news photos “in the wrong context” and the Washington Post corrected a caption on a photo which the newspaper said had been “incorrectly associated with a photo from Nepal.”¹⁸⁰  

Those corrections and explanations did little to stop the vitriolic state media attacks against alleged anti-China foreign media “bias.” Instead the state media campaign only gained momentum in the days and weeks that followed and explicitly implicated all western media in those accusations of bias, regardless of whether there was any evidence for such allegations against individual western media outlets.

In late March, the China Daily launched a separate website titled “Biased Reports Hurt China” which provided an updated listing of the alleged distortions in western media reporting on Tibet.¹⁸¹ It also linked to a separate website, anti-cnn.com, which dedicates itself to “expos[ing] the lies and distortions in the western media.”¹⁸² On March 27, MOFA spokesman Qin Gang described western media reports on the Lhasa protests as a “textbook of bad examples” and described anti-cnn.com as a reflection of “Chinese people condemning and criticizing irresponsible, unprofessional, and immoral reports.”¹⁸³

Qin’s rhetoric apparently reflected a Chinese government decision to launch an “unprecedented, ferocious media war against the biased western press…[in which] some contents of the old rule book could be thrown out of the window at this special time,” a Beijing-based Chinese newspaper editor told the South China Morning Post.¹⁸⁴ The director of the State Council Information Office’s press department denied that allegation of a “media war,” but reiterated that “some foreign journalists were not objective and fair.”¹⁸⁵

On April 17, 2008, a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Jiang Yu described CNN commentator Jack Cafferty’s remarks as “vile,” that he had called China’s leaders “a bunch of goons and thugs” and demanded CNN apologize.¹⁸⁶ Xinhua devoted at least 10 headline stories from April 9 to May 15 about Cafferty’s alleged “hatred” of the Chinese people,¹⁸⁷ the most recent of which was a May 15, 2008, story which indicated that CNN president Jim Walton had formally apologized for Cafferty’s remarks.¹⁸⁸  

In late March, a group of 29 high-profile Chinese writers, activists, and lawyers circulated a letter expressing concerns about the substance and tone of state media coverage in the absence of the counterbalance of foreign media reporting. The letter warned that “At present, the one-sided propaganda of the official Chinese media is having the effect of stirring up inter-ethnic animosity and aggravating an already tense situation.”¹⁸⁹ And by the end of April, following a month of nationalist protests, Chinese state media reports began to call for a cooling of public anger over alleged western media bias “lest anti-western protests…spiral out of the authorities’ control.”¹⁹⁰

Threats Against Foreign Correspondents in China

Those calls for a cooling of public anger came too late to prevent serious threats to foreign journalists. On May 1, the FCCC estimated that “at least 10 foreign correspondents have received anonymous death threats during a campaign, on the web and in state-run media, against alleged bias in western media coverage of the Tibetan unrest and its aftermath.”¹⁹¹ The threats consisted of angry phone calls, emails, and text messages from Chinese individuals who claimed to be incensed by what they perceived as “biased” western reporting. Those threats ranged from the oblique blog message, “Be aware, there will be a settling of accounts”¹⁹² aimed at Jane Macartney, China correspondent for the U.K. newspaper The Times in late March to a blog threat against Melinda Liu, China bureau chief for Newsweek, which stated “I can kill her without even reading what she writes.”¹⁹³

Targets of the harassment campaign included reporters from the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today whose names, contact details, and other personal information were posted on several domestic websites in early April with accusations that they had “fabricated untrue news about Tibet.”¹⁹⁴ Melinda Liu, president of the Beijing-based FCCC, described the death threats as, “hateful and shrill” and particularly disturbing in that they also extended to the family members of some correspondents.¹⁹⁵ “The comments were obscene and threatening, for example, ‘Look out for your two daughters,’” Liu said.¹⁹⁶ China’s foreign ministry rejected correspondents’ suggestions that the government had intentionally leaked that personal data to Chinese bloggers: “We did not and will not publicize the mobile phone numbers and other personal data of foreign journalists on the websites.”¹⁹⁷

Members of the FCCC had numerous “informal” conversations with government officials from state organizations, including the foreign ministry, BOCOG, and the State Council from mid-March until end-April about the death threats and harassment experienced by foreign correspondents.¹⁹⁸ “When asked to follow up, these officials sometimes said ‘it is not our department's responsibility.’”¹⁹⁹ Names and contact details of foreign correspondents alleged to have “fabricated news about Tibet” continue to circulate on domestic websites in China. “The details got posted [on] April 2 [and] to my knowledge the powers-that-be have not removed them [because] they are still on plenty of sites.”²⁰⁰ As one of the threatened correspondents told Human Rights Watch:

[The threats] are being allowed [to linger on websites] by the government and [that inaction] reflects pretty poorly on it. It seems that any objective report leaves [correspondents] open to accusations that you are a “splittist” out to destroy the country. Are foreign journalists in China now to be concerned about their personal safety?²⁰¹

The threats prompted the temporary closure of one foreign television news bureau in Beijing and the temporary relocation of the bureau chiefs of two Beijing-based foreign media outlets.²⁰²

The campaign against alleged western media bias has also affected, at least temporarily, foreign correspondents’ capacity to effectively report in China. “Some sources just won’t talk to us anymore,” Liu said. “They’re afraid of being called ‘traitors.’”²⁰³ On April 29, 2008, the Washington Post reported that a source canceled a previously agreed interview, explaining “I’m pretty patriotic.”²⁰⁴