Foreign reporters continue to face problems in China

Foreign journalists are facing state-sponsored interference while reporting in China, despite Olympic-related rules aimed at allowing greater press freedoms, an international media organization said yesterday.

The Foreign Correspondents Club of China said it welcomed rules that went into effect a year ago yesterday, but had recorded more than 180 incidences of journalists' work being interfered with last year.

"While the year-old regulations have improved overall reporting conditions for foreign journalists, we are particularly troubled by repeated violations in several areas," club president Melinda Liu (劉美遠) said in a statement.

She cited areas in Beijing and China's northern Hebei Province "where plainclothes thugs have intimidated or physically assaulted foreign journalists" and demanded that such incidents be investigated.

In one case, three reporters were assaulted in two separate incidents while investigating a makeshift prison in suburban Beijing where petitioners who had come to the capital to air their grievances were allegedly being illegally detained.

Journalists working in Tibet and China's westernmost Xinjiang region also said they were followed or detained, or their sources were intimidated, the group said.

Other journalists were being routinely detained, roughed up and questioned while investigating social unrest or local disturbances, it said.

The new rules were meant to allow foreign reporters freedom to conduct interviews with consenting Chinese parties, rather than having to first seek government permission.

Under the new rules, journalists are also to be allowed to report outside the city for which they are accredited, rather than having to seek permission from city authorities.

The rules are set to expire at the end of the Olympic period in October, but a top media official last week said that they may be extended indefinitely.

China's media are tightly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, which routinely censors news deemed to be negative in content or news that shines a bad light on the country's one-party political rule.