harassment

Global Voices Online noticed yesterday when guerrilla blogger Zola (Zhou Shuguang) began tweeting his own detention. His BlackBerry let the world know that local officials had intercepted him in the town of Fengmuqiao in Hunan province, and he posted updates as they forced him into a car to drive him home. If he leaves his hometown of Meitanba again, they told him, there will be trouble.

Zola is a citizen reporter who takes it upon himself to travel to places where news is happening and blog about it, relying on the kindness of strangers as he goes. (He gets around the ethical quandary this presents by refusing to call himself a journalist.)

Police in Kashgar apparently didn't get the message about new tactics for relating to the media. Japan's Kyodo News Agency reported that Masami Kawakita, a photographer from the Chunichi Shimbun newspaper's Tokyo headquarters, and Shinji Katsuta, a reporter for Nippon Television Network's China general bureau, were slightly injured when police in Kashgar dragged them from a site near where 16 police officers were killed on Monday in a terrorist attack. The men were injured, Kyodo said after "police forcibly disrupted the Japanese journalists' reporting activities near the base [the site of Monday morning's attack], took them to a room in a nearby hotel and beat them before releasing them two hours later, according to people with knowledge of the situation."

International advocacy may have had a role in prompting the reported new rules for police in dealing with journalists covering demonstrators during the Games, but the most likely cause was the damage to China's international image from the widespread video of cops roughing up a few Hong Kong camera crews.

 

Many Hong Kong papers ran a story about the ill-advised remarks of Regina Ip, the former secretary of security for Hong Kong, and a candidate in September's elections for a seat in the Hong Kong Legislative Council (Legco). Ip said the "neck-shoving" techniques used by Beijing police to roust Hong Kong reporters covering the July 29 scuffle for some last minute Olympics tickets (the South China Morning Post's coverage, TVB's story, and a version in Cantonese are available on YouTube, along with others) were "most effective in stopping troublemakers" without causing permanent injuries. She made the remarks when reporters asked if she thought police would resort to more heavy-handed tactics if they need to block reporters from covering a situation embarrassing to the mainland government.