As China marks the first anniversary of the devastating Sichuan earthquake, foreign reporters said they were being obstructed by authorities keen to keep a firm lid on any embarrassing coverage.
Journalists trying to interview residents — including parents of children who died when schools collapsed like packs of cards — have been accosted and shooed away by officials in a series of incidents in the past few weeks.
As early as last Wednesday, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) told members to exercise “extra caution” as the situation was “becoming more volatile.”
Foreign media wishing to cover the anniversary of the 8-magnitude quake that left nearly 88,000 dead or missing have had two options.
One was to travel to the southwestern province of Sichuan on an official — and strictly regimented — press trip.
The other was to embark independently — and risk being kicked out.
Tensions are running high in the quake zone, where many grieving parents of children who died in schools accuse local authorities of corruption.
At least 5,335 students died or are still listed as missing because their classrooms crumbled even as many adjacent structures stood firm, an official toll that is markedly lower than earlier estimates said.
Critics have accused local officials of allowing schools to be built on the cheap and pocketing remaining construction money.
But foreign journalists have run into trouble seeking to dig deeper and to report on protests and petitions by parents in Sichuan.
The FCCC noted the case of a Finnish TV crew in the town of Fuxin who were quickly surrounded by 10 people in plain clothes. They tried to grab their equipment, leading to jostling and a broken microphone.
“It was very violent,” journalist Katri Makkonen said.
In the same area, a correspondent for the UK’s Financial Times had to halt an interview with parents after being surrounded by a dozen men, one of whom tried to take his camera before hitting him.
The next day, the team had their camera torn off its tripod when they were filming a protester.
In Juyuan, Radio France’s China correspondent, Dominique Andre, had not even begun to hear people’s stories when she was surrounded by four police vans and between 15 and 20 uniformed men.
“It is the first time that I have been physically stopped from working — without violence, but firmly,” she said. “The only thing I did wrong was being there.”
In Mianyang, two police officers burst into the town hall where Andre was interviewing a reconstruction official and forced her to erase photographs of petitioners she had taken at the entrance.
Last Wednesday an AFP team was asked to leave the village of Wufu, near Mianzhu, despite being told they could work there.
Two days later they were forced out of Juyuan and were stopped again when they tried to return on Monday. They said large numbers of police in uniform and plain clothes were present.
Last week, the vice head of the Sichuan propaganda department accused some Western journalists of creating trouble.
“A very few journalists are not going to the disaster area to report, but are inciting the crowds, asking people to organize,” Hou Xiongfei (侯雄飛) said.
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