Asia
2018
Censorship, surveillance, and harassment: China cracks down on critics
Hours after the Chinese Communist Party proposed a constitutional change last month to lift presidential term limits, any words or phrases that remotely suggested President Xi Jingping was seeking a life term were blocked from social media. Censors targeted everything from “Emperor Xi,” “The Emperor’s Dream,” and “Dream of Returning to the Great Qing,” to…
Bangladesh’s press say they are losing the courage to report amid threats from all sides
Nazmul Huda pointed his TV camera at garment workers demonstrating for higher wages in Savar, on the outskirts of Dhaka, and at the police firing tear gas and rubber bullets at them. It took a while for police to notice the ETV reporter, and they were furious. After all, they had ordered him to leave…
Threats, arrests, and access denied as Myanmar backtracks on press freedom
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Esther Htusan is no longer safe to report from her home country, Myanmar. The Associated Press reporter fled the country late last year after being threatened for her critical reporting on various topics that authorities deem sensitive, from the ethnic Rohingya refugee exodus, the military’s controversial counterinsurgency operations in Rakhine State, to…
Conditions deteriorate for foreign press in China, FCCC finds
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China annual survey, released this week, showed a steady deterioration of working conditions in China for the foreign press. The report, “Access Denied,” documented increased efforts by Chinese authorities to deny or restrict foreign correspondents’ access to large parts of the country in 2017. Increasingly, foreign ministry officials use China’s…
Lots of talk but little progress in Sri Lanka over journalist murders
It was the police line-up from hell. Forget all those “Law and Order” scenes where a victim stands anonymously behind a one-way mirror. Sri Lankan journalist Namal Perera had to stand eyeball-to-eyeball with 42 army intelligence officers in April, each of whom, Perera explained to me while demonstrating his fiercest tough-guy glare, faced him with…
In response to Trump’s fake news awards, CPJ announces Press Oppressors awards
Amid the public discourse of fake news and President Trump’s announcement via Twitter about his planned “fake news” awards ceremony, CPJ is recognizing world leaders who have gone out of their way to attack the press and undermine the norms that support freedom of the media. From an unparalleled fear of their critics and the…