2018

For the third year in a row, 251 or more journalists are jailed around the world, suggesting the authoritarian approach to critical news coverage is more than a temporary spike. China, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia imprisoned more journalists than last year, and Turkey remained the world’s worst jailer. A CPJ special report by Elana Beiser

Washington, D.C., November 28, 2018–Police in Xinjiang detained Lu Guang, an award-winning, New York-resident, freelance photographer whose work has focused on environmental and social issues in China, in early November, according to media reports. Lu’s family lost contact with him on November 3 and later confirmed his arrest with authorities in Xinjiang, according to a…

Taipei, October 5, 2018–Hong Kong’s immigration authorities declined to renew the visa of Victor Mallet, Financial Times’ Asia news editor and the vice-president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, according to a statement today from the Financial Times and other media reports. The rejection came after Mallet chaired a talk by pro-independence activist Andy Chan Ho-tin…

Taipei, September 7, 2018–Chinese authorities should immediately release Ilham Weli, Xinjiang Daily’s deputy editor-in-chief, Memtimin Obul and Juret Haji, directors at the newspaper, and Mirkamil Ablimit, the head of the newspaper’s subsidiary Xinjiang Farmer’s Daily, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Taipei, August 22, 2018–The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to renew the visa of BuzzFeed’s China bureau chief, Megha Rajagopalan, according to a tweet from Rajagopalan and news reports.

In 2010, after four years of offering Chinese users a heavily censored version of its search engine, Google decided it would no longer block search results at the request of the Chinese state. “Our objection is to those forces of totalitarianism,” Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, told The New York Times at the time, adding that…

Voice of America Mandarin Service correspondent Yibing Feng and his Chinese assistant, Allen Ai, were detained for about six hours on August 13, 2018, by security personnel after they tried to conduct an interview in Jinan, Shandong Province.

In its annual report, released July 29, the Hong Kong Journalists Association found that press freedom has gone backward as the administrative region seeks to implement legislation to criminalize critical opinions toward China’s “one country” policy and Beijing.

Hanoi, July 26, 2018–A Sichuan province court on July 13 sentenced Chinese freelance political cartoonist Jiang Yefei to prison for six years and six months on charges of “inciting subversion of state power,” and “illegally crossing a national border,” during a secret trial, according to the U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Asia and the independent news…

Taipei, July 11, 2018–The Committee to Protect Journalists today called on Chinese authorities to immediately release Chen Jieren, an independent blogger who frequently published articles critical of the Communist Party officials on his blog, Jieren Guancha (Jieren Watch).