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Our concern with the media situation in the run-up to the Beijing Olympic Games is simple: neither China nor the International Olympic Committee have fulfilled the pledges they made in 2001 that China's media would be free and open in time for the Games.
On the day before the Olympics were awarded in July 2001, the Beijing organizing committee promised international and domestic media "complete freedom" before and during the Games. Specifically, China said "There will be no restrictions on journalists in reporting on the Olympic Games," when it made its official bid for the Games.
Not only have China and the IOC failed to live up to that promise, China has actually moved away from fulfilling it. Although some rules have been lifted for foreign journalists, their Chinese colleagues face tighter than usual restrictions on their reporting. We have seen the restrictions slapped on foreign journalists trying to report on the demonstrations and ensuing ethnic violence in Tibet and surrounding provinces and regions in March. The Foreign Correspondents Club of China says it has been informed of more than 180 incidents of harassment of colleagues since it started keeping a tally last year.

For Chinese journalists, the Central Propaganda Department's censorship machine is running at the higher level it uses to control news flow during critical party congresses and national legislative assemblies, when the government wants to stifle all criticism and put on a display of national unity. And even though there has been a flurry of releases earlier this year, China continues to hold 24 journalists behind bars, the largest number of any country in the world.

These restrictions persist despite the growth of commercialized Chinese media - which regularly press the limits of government restrictions - and domestic readers who increasingly demand accurate, timely information.

The press freedom situation has been aggravated by the apparent reluctance of the International Olympic Committee until now to press China to meet its pledges. In the past, the IOC had made tone-deaf statements like "It is a not within our mandate to act as an agent for concerned groups. Journalists are imprisoned all over the world, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad reasons." That was an answer IOC Olympic Games Executive Director Gilbert Felli gave CPJ in Lausanne when we met with the IOC in November 2006.

Lately, however, the tone has begun to change. On April 11, IOC president Jacques Rogge told a Beijing press conference that China should honor its pledges to improve human rights and press freedom specifically by implementing its media law "in full." Those new regulations give foreign journalists the right to travel to all parts of the country, including Tibet.

The Chinese government expressed strong displeasure at Rogge's comments but it cannot claim that it is being forced to accept Western standards of governance, some sort of unwarranted interference in its internal affairs. After competing with four other cities in 2001, it entered into a contractual agreement with the International Olympic Committee to host the Games. One of the promises it made was that it would fix its media problem. When skepticism arose back then, both sides assured the world that by 2008, China would have moved on from its archaic censorship policies.

After seven years of avoidance and delay, it is not easy for us to hope that things will get better in the few months between now and 8/8/08. In the past, China's response to threats to its image has been to clamp down tighter on the media rather than free it up. So what should the 25,000 to 30,000 visiting journalists expect when they cover the Games and particularly when they cover the China that lies beyond the Games' venues?

Resident foreign correspondents already follow practical rules like assuming that their phones could be tapped and their e-mail scanned, particularly if they are the sort of reporter who digs deeper into controversial issues. They also know that they are running the risk of a confrontation if they look too closely at issues like the military or Taiwanese independence, pro-democracy activists, AIDS villages, the Falun Gong, or underground churches that meet without the government's permission. Protests at the village level by farmers angry with party corruption or abusive officials will be harder to stifle, but the pressure has already started and will increase on groups that might try to pull off a demonstration to catch the attention of foreign cameras in Beijing.

But more importantly, newcomers to reporting in China should realize that their Chinese counterparts are not allowed to play by the same rules. And that particularly applies to the thousands of young production assistants, translators, gophers and fixers they will be hiring to help them once they start to spread out across the country.

It is the younger college students and recent graduates, with the language skills and enthusiasm to catch the eye of a foreign correspondent, who will be more at risk. We are concerned that when foreign news teams arriving in Beijing hire local Chinese assistants, the foreigners will place demands on them that might put them in jeopardy. Reporters who ask their Chinese hires to arrange potentially dangerous meetings - with activists, or to visit an AIDS village - or to get advance information on potential demonstrations that the government will want to quash, might be putting their Chinese colleagues at risk. It is not inconceivable that they will be made to pay a price, if not during the Games, then after them, when the world's media attention has moved on.

Clearly, these are not yet shaping up to be the sort of open Games the world has become accustomed to or the Games we were promised in 2001.

Recognizing that the Games presented us with an opportunity to focus the world's eyes on China's media policy, last year CPJ produced a report, "Falling Short: As the 2008 Olympics Approach, China Falters on Press Freedom," which we are in the process of revising for this year. Our intention is to speak to the 25,000 journalists covering the Olympics. We want to give them practical advice on how to work as a journalist in China, as well as tell them of the conditions under which their Chinese colleagues are working.
As an organization working on behalf of journalists and press freedom, CPJ has refrained from calling for a boycott of the Beijing Games. We believe instead that heavy international attendance at, and coverage of, the Games will do more than any boycott to influence China in the right direction.
We still vigorously call for, and despite the evidence so far, hold out the hope for, positive steps by China before the Games open. These should include, at a minimum, making permanent the temporary loosening of restrictions on the media, extending these freedoms to Chinese as well as foreign journalists, and ending, once and for all, China's dubious status as the world's largest jailer of journalists. With those changes, by living up to the pledges it made in 2001, China could set itself firmly on the road toward possessing a media environment worthy of the great economic power it is becoming.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak this morning.