A new report by the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China says that conditions for international journalists reporting in China have steadily deteriorated in recent years, and that the government has failed to fulfill pledges made before the Beijing Games to foster an open reporting environment for international journalists.
Excerpt from a 12 September 2014 CPJ Blog post by Sumit Galhotra, CPJ Asia Program Research Associate.
When China hosted the summer Olympics in 2008 it promised greater press freedom, but six years later conditions for international journalists are increasingly more restrictive, as evidenced by a report released today [12 September 2014] by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China.
The FCCC, which consists of 243 members from 31 countries, argued in its position paper that conditions for international journalists reporting in China have steadily deteriorated in recent years, and that the government has failed to fulfill pledges made before the Beijing Games to foster an open reporting environment for international journalists.
“China’s poor record on allowing open and unfettered reporting is in conflict with its desire to be seen as a modern society deserving of global respect. And it is in great contrast with the wide access Chinese journalists have enjoyed when reporting in many foreign countries,” according to the report. “Yet as China embraces and leverages press freedoms abroad for its own media, it is going the opposite direction at home.”
Read the full blog post on CPJ’s site.