Hu Jia

Major news coverage in China and elsewhere is naturally devoted to the Games themselves. Two Chinese weightlifters and the Chinese men’s synchronized divers won gold medals today. Yesterday’s news of 17 synchronized attacks with homemade explosives in the western region of Xinjiang received little coverage in or out of China. The exception once again was Caijing, a financial news…

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the government is taking an aggressive stance on covering news–to grab control of a story before others break it–especially when it involves “difficult” events such as the attacks in Xinjiang province. 

CPJ has a lot of friends at the Foreign Correspondents Club of China; they have been a go-to resource for us for years. They released a statement early yesterday, on the morning of the day the Games opened. FCCC president Jonathan Watts (and The Guardian’s Beijng correspondent) outlined the situation going into the Games very…

All the news is excellent in China today. The Web site of Xinhua News Agency today leads by telling its audience: “Olympic dream brightens the world.” At the provincial levels, the news is equally good, but with a local angle. The Web site of the Southern media group reports that cooperation between south China’s Guangdong province…

Reuters is reporting that an unnamed gunman fired on a Philippine radio broadcaster earlier today in Manila. The journalist, Dennis Cuesta, was not killed but is in critical condition in a local hospital. This continues an unfortunate trend in the Philippines, a country that we rank as the sixth most dangerous for journalists. The Sydney…

We issued this statement from Hong Kong after learning of reports today of the detention and beating of two Japanese reporters, Masami Kawakita, a photographer from the Chunichi Shimbun newspaper’s Tokyo headquarters, and Shinji Katsuta, a reporter for the Nippon Television Network, and the harassment of Reuters reporter, Emma Graham-Harrison, in Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang…

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.  

Foreign journalists have started making their way to Kashgar today after the official Xinhua News Agency reported that 16 police officers were killed when two terrorists drove a truck into an electricity pole and threw two home-made explosives sometime around 8 a.m. Monday. So far, the few foreigners who have made the double-hop plane connection…

Information about today’s attack on border police in the western Chinese city of Kashgar is coming almost entirely from the official Xinhua News Agency. What’s interesting is the huge difference in the agency’s own reports, depending on what language you’re reading. In English, the attack was a suspected act of terrorism by Uighur separatists. In…

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…