China's restricted BBC audience: Not liking what they can't see
Jon Williams
World News Editor, BBC News

There are a handful of countries where the BBC is not welcome - but not many where our services on radio, television and on-line are actively blocked. For the BBC, reporting China is a complicated affair at the best of times.  

The BBC has been reporting from Beijing for more than 30 years.  We've had what you might call an "interesting" relationship with the authorities there.  Most of the time, they're

more than happy for us to tell the world about China - they are less keen on our telling China about the world, and actively prevent us telling China about China.

On the one hand, when the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, visited Beijing in January, the Foreign Ministry and the municipal government bent over backwards to accommodate the BBC. They lit up Tiananmen Square at 6 o'clock in the morning to allow us to broadcast our evening news live from Beijing - the first time they'd ever done so.  

And yet, on radio, the BBC World Service is jammed, BBC World can only be viewed in hotels and diplomatic compounds, and until last month, the BBC News web site was blocked.  Today, in Beijing, you can read the BBC News in English, but not in Mandarin.  And any time the BBC carries a television report about the situation in Tibet, the transmission is interrupted.

Exactly a year ago, we moved our Asia/Pacific headquarters from Singapore to Beijing.  It was an important statement of intent - but also an investment in the story.  We wanted to capture a sense of the economic miracle that's under way in urban China, the buzz and the excitement around the Olympics - the BBC is the UK rights holder, and of course, London is the host city for the Olympics in 2012. 

That's why we welcomed the liberalization of the rules governing foreign media introduced by Premier Wen Jiabao in January last year.  For the first time, we could go pretty much anywhere, talk to anyone - all we needed was the permission of the individual we were talking to.  All of a sudden, China was like everywhere else. It transformed our ability to tell the story.  No longer was there a need to apply for bureaucratic permits to travel. The result was more news about China.  In January, across our radio, television and on line services, we proclaimed 2008 to be "The Year of China." How right we were.

Then came the protests in March. All of a sudden, not just was Tibet closed to the BBC, but so were many of the neighboring provinces.  So much for Premier Wen's order liberalizing reporting. BBC correspondents and camera crews were stopped by police - we

spent a week trying to out-run the public security bureau on the Tibetan plateau. Getting accurate, first hand reports out of Tibet has proved  a real problem.  Without our own people on the ground, we've been largely reliant on accounts by witnesses - we have no means of independent verification. At one point Premier Wen promised to take a group of international media to Lhasa. The bad news is they decided not to invite the BBC.

The reason? Many in China are annoyed at the way the Western media have reported the story.  More than a million people have signed a petition complaining at the coverage on channels like CNN and the BBC. The irony of course, is only a handful will actually have been able to read or watch the BBC's coverage themselves. Much of the BBC's content remains blocked.

So what should we expect in China in the summer?  To some extent the jury is still out.  The situation in Tibet may have calmed down - order and a degree of equilibrium may have been restored.  But then we've seen the protests across Europe during the Olympic torch relay.  "Face" is everything to the Chinese - there's no greater crime than to cause China to lose face.  And yet from Athens, to London, to Paris, Beijing has found itself embarrassed, the Olympic torch the focus of dissent rather than celebration.  So much for "one world, one dream."  What was supposed to be the year when China showed its best face to the world, has seen parts of the globe turning its back on China.

There is one irony in all this. Just as the authorities in Beijing were interrupting transmissions of BBC World and hunting down BBC correspondents in places like Gansu province, they unblocked access to the English language section of the BBC News web site for the first time in a decade.  We now have thousands of readers inside China.  Typically fewer than 100 people read stories from Chinese computers - on the first day, that figure jumped to more that more than 20,000. Not all that many in a country that boasts a population of 1.3 billion.  But it does provide a valuable, alternative perspective on the protests and our reporting of them.