China Announces That It Will Expel American Journalists

The next day, China announced that it would expel three Journal staff members based in Beijing in retaliation for the headline of an earlier opinion column, “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia,” which criticized the Chinese government’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak. Two of the Journal reporters, Josh Chin, an American, and Philip Wen, an Australian, flew out of Beijing the next week. A third reporter, Chao Deng, an American, had been reporting in the virus containment zone of Wuhan and could not leave.

The Journal has been in the cross hairs of the Chinese government since last year. In August, the Foreign Ministry refused to renew the visa of a Singaporean reporter for the newspaper’s Beijing bureau, Chun Han Wong, effectively expelling him. Mr. Wong and Mr. Wen, the Australian reporter, had co-written an investigative story on a cousin of Mr. Xi, the president.

The forced departures of the Journal reporters last month were believed to be the first outright expulsions of foreign journalists by the Chinese government since 1998.

But in recent years, it has become common for the government to harass foreign journalists and their families, in part by requiring them to undergo onerous processes to renew their visas, according to a report published this month by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China. Recently, the report said, some journalists had been working under visas shorter than the standard one-year duration: six months, three months, even one month.

It counted nine journalists who had effectively been thrown out of the country, whether via outright expulsion or through the unexplained refusal to grant a visa, since 2013, after Mr. Xi took power.

Almost all the American reporters for the three news organizations named in the Tuesday announcement have press cards and visas or residence permits that expire this year. The press cards are needed to maintain residency, and turning them in effectively means the journalists would need to leave the country. Reporters who were recently given a press card and residence permit that do not expire until 2021 can presumably continue to work.

All three news organizations also have full-time reporters based in China who are not American citizens.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/business/media/china-expels-american-journalists.html