The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China (FCCC) has released its Annual Working Conditions Report in which it has said that foreign journalists in China face restrictions and various types of harassment.
According to the report, which has also been circulated through a blog written by Bob Dietz, the Asia Program Coordinator of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), even as China's importance in current affairs grows, foreign journalists' attempts and efforts to get access and to chronicle these important events is not getting any easier.
The FCCC in its report reveals that foreign journalists often face official harassment, obstruction and intimidation, and their local staff remain serious problems.
Over the past year, the FCCC report says that foreign leaders and diplomats have continued to raise the issue of foreign media press freedoms at the highest levels of the Chinese government, but with no results.
It further states that foreign governments have refrained from reciprocating by obstructing the work of the increasing number of Chinese state media journalists posted abroad.
The FCCC and Dietz's blog say that the Chinese Foreign Ministry has for years offered assurances that working conditions are improving, but the annual working conditions survey conducted by the FCCC and the group's review of interference incidents suggests otherwise.
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In its report, of the past year, the FCCC clearly states that about 96 percent of its respondents have said that working conditions for foreign journalists in China almost never meet international standards.
Forty-four percent said working conditions are about the same as last year, while 33 percent said the working conditions have deteriorated.
None of the 117 respondents said conditions had improved.
This represents a negligible improvement over last year's survey, which found that 99 percent of the respondents do not think reporting conditions in China meet international standards. Eighty percent felt conditions have worsened or stayed the same in the past year - up 10 percentage points from the May 2013 survey.
Again, not one member said conditions had improved. Several egregious incidents that made headlines in the past year include: - Authorities arrested Zhang Miao, assistant to Angela Kockritz, correspondent for the German weekly Die Zeit last October. Zhang had expressed support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Kockritz fled China after police threatened her with arrest. - Police pointed assault rifles and shotguns at Al Jazeera correspondent Adrian Brown and his TV crew as they were covering the aftermath of violent protests in Sichuan province in May 2015. They struck Brown's cameraman, snatched away their equipment, and returned it after deleting their footage. They also jostled local officials who were accompanying the team.
There were also attempts by the authorities to pre-empt and discourage coverage of sensitive subjects and restrictions on journalists' movements in border and ethnic-minority regions
The 3500-word FCCC report also talks about staged press conferences, pressure on editors and managers at headquarters outside of China and surveillance and censorship.
This year's survey was sent to 210 FCCC correspondent-members in April, of whom 120 replied. Not all respondents answered every question, the FCCC says.
The FCCC identifies itself as a Beijing-based professional association comprising more than 200 correspondents from 35 countries and regions.