Correspondents club struggles without official recognition
Jocelyn Ford
Chair, Media Freedoms Committee, Foreign Correspondents Club of China

The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China was started in 1981. I must admit that the person sitting in front of you is from an illegal organization. We are not recognized by the Chinese government. However, we do have interactions with government officials, which is a change from the situation a few years back when our letters and protests about  the attention or arrest of a a reporter,  or something of that nature, would come back unopened. Now, our communications are accepted. We don't get answers usually, but at least the letters do not come back unopened.

We have about 320 correspondent members and some associates.  we are a professional organization but we are also promote free exchange of information as well as professionalism.
I am the head of the Media Freedoms Committee. The committee has only existed for three or four years and when we started we gave it the name professional committee to hide our activities. But now I am comfortable to sit here and say that our name, freedom committee, suggests that there is a more liberal feeling in Beijing now, and that it is expected that we as foreign correspondents should be pushing for these issues.

In 2006, I started doing surveys of the sorts of interference that foreign correspondents face. And when I started doing this I realized that a lot of the correspondents who have been in China for quite some time did not expect to be treated very well. In fact, we tried to get information about any interference that would not be acceptable in an influential democratic country and you would find people saying, "oh well, I wasn't detained. My personal freedom wasn't taken away. I wasn't allowed to speak to a news source, but that's nothing so I didn't include it."

And so in the second year of the survey, which was last year, we tried to make a greater effort to define what interference in reporting is.  Last year we had several people who were physically assaulted by thugs that we presume may have some relationship to the

government. Also what has happened more recently is that a lot of our members are stopped and asked for passports or residence permits, especially when we try to interview someone the authorities do not want us to interview. That is a new form of interference.

I will go back to 2006 to shed a little light about how the Chinese government has brought these new regulations into effect. In the past the foreign ministry did not recognize the foreign correspondents club. They still don't. We did not have any communication. We had a meeting in the spring of 2006 which was quite interesting. We had three members from the Foreign Correspondents Club and two people from the Foreign Ministry. That's when they started to float a trial balloon about what we could consider to be free reporting during the Olympics - or, at least, that is my interpretation.

At that time, every time a Beijing correspondent wanted to report in a local area we would have to get permission from the local foreign affairs ministry office.  Of course, if you were going to cover a sensitive topic, you wouldn't apply. It became a cat and mouse game. Some people would go to an HIV-AIDS village in the middle of the night and then leave and hope the authorities would not find them. 

Then the foreign ministry suggested that rather than ask permission,  you could send a fax and inform the local foreign affairs office you are coming. We said, "well, if it is voluntary..."

Then they came out with the new regulations, which are actually more liberal than we had expected.  It basically says that to interview organizations or individuals in China, foreign journalists need only obtain their prior consent.  And that is our key phrase.  We advise anyone going to China to carry a copy of the regulations.  Download it from the Internet. Carry it with you in Chinese and in English in case you run into obstacles. Of course, if they really don't want you, they will just say "well we have a counter-regulation," which will not be produced. But give it a try.

We did a survey last July on how were these regulations were working.  And we found quite a few cases in which they had not been observed. We put out a statement ahead of the Olympics saying that China had not yet met the requirements as we understood them.  The government was furious. They said, essentially, "why don't you commend us for making an effort and making these improvements."

A couple of days later there was a glowing piece in English on the front page of the China Daily   saying how wonderful conditions were for foreign correspondents. Of course, not a single correspondent was quoted in the story. That was their response

We did find improvements. Conditions for foreign correspondents in China are better now than they were before the regulations. However, they are nowhere near what one would expect of an Olympic host nation.

In October we sent a list of cases to the International Olympic Committee, including examples of several journalists who had been assaulted, together with our recommendations of how to improve working conditions. Basically we did not get a

response. One of our board members met in private with an International Olympic Committee official and was told there was nothing the committee could do.

There has been progress due to the Olympics. We have a lot more press conferences now. The government wants to say how many hundreds of events it organized, and we say, "yes but the person up there didn't answer any questions."  However, some officials are getting better at answering questions but it is still a major problem.

There is a government information disclosure act that comes into force on May 1 and I think this is a positive  move, but one that needs to be watched and tested very carefully, hopefully by foreign correspondents as well as Chinese reporters or whoever else would like to get information from the government.

There are areas that are very disturbing still. Journalists are still not free to travel to any Tibetan regions. We have been told that the information about people convicted for violations of state secrecy laws is being hidden. 

Where do we go from here? One effort we are working on at the Foreign Correspondents Club is a media rights campaign. We have members who have been illegally searched, or who have had their materials taken illegally by authorities. Many foreign correspondents are not aware of the legal rights they enjoy or should enjoy in China. Hopefully, we will be providing more information about what these rights are and what correspondents should do if someone in authority stops them.

We are also concerned about how to better protect sources. Are there legal means that we can use when there are sources who want to speak to us and who are prevented from doing so? What can we do to protect them if they get into trouble after we speak to them?

We also intend to bring up in discussions the increase in cyber-attacks against people who speak out in favor of free media and free expression in China.