International rights groups denounced new Chinese curbs on the dissemination of foreign news as a step backward ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when thousands of journalists will descend on the country’s capital.
The official Xinhua news agency announced rules on Sunday requiring foreign media to seek its approval with immediate effect to distribute news, pictures and graphics within China.
Warning against dissemination of news that endangers national security, sabotages national unification or promotes cults, the rules empower Xinhua to censor reports distributed in China by foreign media and to delete forbidden content.
The rules also seek to bar international financial information companies, including Reuters and Bloomberg, from selling news services directly to Chinese customers such as banks and brokerages.
“These new regulations on the distribution of foreign news are a step backward,” said Joel Simon, executive director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
Sharon Hom, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights in China, said the rules breached Beijing’s “commitment to allow journalists to freely cover the Olympic Games in 2008”.
The curbs “sound a wake-up call to the international community that a closed, state-controlled Olympics is on the horizon,” Hom added.
China's defense
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang defended China, saying the rules did not cover foreign media coverage during the Olympics and did not therefore violate Beijing’s commitment.
Qin said the rules were a “reasonable continuation” of a 1996 cabinet decree regulating economic information.
He was bombarded with questions on the curbs and repeatedly referred them to Xinhua, saying the rules were drafted and announced and would be implemented by the state news agency.
The Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders called for a joint reaction from the U.S., European and Japanese governments to China’s attempt to curb the free flow of information.
“Xinhua is establishing itself as a predator of both free enterprise and freedom of information,” the group said.
“Part of Xinhua’s motive seems to be (to) muscle in on a lucrative business that has eluded it until now,” it said, adding that it was a “complete violation of China’s commitments to the World Trade Organization”.
More controls on the way?
On Monday the European Union criticized the curbs as a “very negative development” and vowed to raise the issue in human rights talks with Beijing.
The restrictions came days after a Chinese researcher of the New York Times was jailed for three years for fraud and a Hong Kong-based China correspondent of Singapore’s Straits Times was sentenced to five years in prison for spying for Taiwan.
China’s parliament is now deliberating a bill that would fine domestic and foreign media if they broke news on natural disasters and other emergencies without authorization.
China has a history of covering up emergency incidents, and news blackouts are regularly imposed by propaganda mandarins obsessed with control and nervous about the impact of such incidents on social stability and the ruling Communist Party.
British Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell said in Beijing last week before the new rules were announced that she would raise the issue of press freedom with Chinese Olympics organizers.
About 20,000 accredited media are due to descend on Beijing for the Olympics, and thousands more without access to the venues are expected to report from China during the games.
