CHINA CLAIMS IT WILL HAVE A MORE OPEN MEDIA DURING AND AFTER THE BEIJING OLYMPICS
December 30th 2007 01:11
China will have a more open attitude toward the world and ensure better services for the media in the future, the leading information official said according to a report in China Daily.
And about 30,000 foreign journalists are expected to be in Beijing next summer for the Games alone, and State Council Information Office minister Cai Wu said his office is helping train local news officials to better serve the media.
The training is aimed at changing the mentality of news officials and government leaders at different levels and preparing them to face the outside world more openly.
The country implemented a new set of regulations on reporting in the run-up to and during the Olympics from this year. They stipulate that from this year to the end of the Olympic Games, overseas reporters only need an interviewee's permission to conduct an interview.
But Reporters Without Borders is dubious about Cai Wu’s claims that new rules for the foreign press introduced as part of the preparations for next August's Beijing Olympics could remain in force after the games are over.
Reporters Without Borders said, "So far this is just a promise like so many other promises that have been made. The authorities need to start respecting the new regulations first. We monitored 65 cases of foreign journalists being arrested, beaten, and prevented from doing a report or threatened since the new rules were supposed to take effect on January 1, 2007. And the day before the minister's statement, an Associated Press reporter was detained in southern China."
Jocelyn Ford heads the press freedom committee of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China, which wants the new regulations made permanent.
She told Reporters Without Borders, “The minister's statement is encouraging. I would be surprised if China went back to tighter restrictions on foreign correspondents. But we are still waiting to see whether the regulations giving foreign correspondents reporting freedom will be more fully respected by Chinese authorities.”
She said that in 2007 her organisation received reports of 180 violations of the rules, ranging from surveillance of journalists to detentions."
This is not the first time that a Chinese official has hinted that the former regulations, under which foreign reporters had to request permission every time they wanted to travel within the country or interview Chinese citizens, would not be restored after the Olympics.
Wang Wei, a member of the Beijing games organising committee, promised in 2001 that there would be "total press freedom" before and during the games. But there have been many incidents involving foreign reporters this year and the Chinese media are still under the Propaganda Department's control.
The latest incident was the arrest and expulsion on 26 December of an Associated Press reporter from a village in southern China where there have been protests again the confiscation of land for a power plant.
- From MediaBlab
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