The journalists who report from China try to do their jobs obscured by red tape. The problem is that journalists are blind to where the red tape is. Foreign correspondents can’t secure visas. Domestic publications have shut down. Inside China, there is censorship, intimidation, legal challenges, surveillance, and imprisonment.

When it comes to the periphery regions of China, they are encompassed with border disputes and unfavorable views of the government due to a brutal regime. The Xinjiang region with the Uyghur genocide, Hong Kong and the merging security law, or Tibet's occupation is most notable. Under the watchful eye of Beijing, the government has placed many restrictions on journalists to deter them from uncovering China’s stories.

International media organizations have advocated for more press freedom in China such as Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a non-profit organization that globally seeks to aid journalists.

The legal framework behind China’s constitution against media is stated on RSF’s website: “China guarantees ‘freedom of speech [and] of the press’ but the regime routinely violates the right to information, in total impunity. To further silence journalists, it accuses them of ‘espionage,’ ‘subversion’, or ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’, three ‘pocket crimes'’, a term used by Chinese law experts to describe offenses that are so broadly defined that they can be applied to almost any activity.”

The RSF also has a Press Freedom Index that they update every year. It tracks every country in the world based on a quantitative tally of abuses against journalists in connection with their work against media outlets as well as a qualitative analysis of the situation in each country or territory based on press freedoms. In 2023, China is now ranked second to last. China is also the second worst offender of jailing journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Ronson Chan is a Hong Kong journalist, former chair of the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA), and former editor at Stand News, another pro-democracy publication. Chan was arrested in September 2022 after asking for a police officer to identify themselves before handing his identification over. Chan was set to undergo a fellowship at the Reuter Institute's Journalist Fellowship Program at Oxford University soon. However, a judge granted his bail, and he was allowed to leave for the UK.

But Chan was one of the lucky ones.

The most prominent case of a journalist’s arrest and media suppression is Jimmy Lai, who was the founder of the Apple Daily, a popular Hong Kong pro-democracy newspaper. With the National Security Law (NSL), the government closed the paper and arrested Lai who is alleged to have colluded with foreign forces against the interest of the state. His trial is highly publicized in the journalism community in China and overseas, with a recent update citing UN experts gravely concerned for Lai. The reality is that the NSL can be used for subduing any kind of dissent.

Practicing journalism within China is different with the government controlling a sizable portion of free speech. There are taboo topics – such as Xinjiang’s Uyghurs, comments on Xi Jinping, communist party criticism, Tibet, and Taiwan – that cannot accurately be reported by journalists.

Now anything critical is a taboo topic.

Xi Jinping, the current Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader, has shown no stopping his control over civil society in China since assuming office in 2007. A BBC article highlighted a new law Jinping is implementing that “threatens to punish entities that act in ways ‘detrimental’ to China's interests but does not specify which lines should not be crossed.” The law is to combat the Western hegemony as reported by The Global Times in China.

Dr. Alexander Dukalskis is an associate professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin. Dukalskis explained that the relationship between China and Western media has been at odds for quite a while. “I mean, it's very clear that China sees the Western media as having what it calls disproportionate discourse power, which is basically the ability to set the international agenda and to, what you call an agenda-setting function, and they want to challenge that.”

Jailed journalists in China typically constitute domestic reporters. Foreign correspondents from Western democratic media outlets have a different experience as they can stand facing repercussions on these sensitive story topics or talk to sources. But that is no longer the case in this changed reporting landscape.

Anthony Kuhn, a reporter for National Public Radio (NPR) had gotten permission to go to Tibet a few times before. Now there are no foreign correspondents in Tibet. Journalists must apply for special permission to enter the region. The Foreign Correspondents Club of China’s (FCCC) 2022 report states that the Tibet region is “officially restricted for foreign journalists.”

Reid Standish is a reporter for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who writes on China’s foreign policy in a China in Eurasia briefing. He says “It’s always a little bit weird, I think. You know, having covered places like Russia and other authoritarian countries before. I mean China, I think, is more difficult than any of them. Even in Russia people would still talk with you on background sometimes, and you know, maybe you can at least get an official reply and get comments and stuff like that, and this is just kind of a bit of a generally zero engagement so that makes it a little bit tough.”

Christopher Buckley, a New York Times (NYT) correspondent has reported in Xinjiang and mentioned the difficulties of talking to sources in Xinjiang. People could get taken away after simply talking to them. Buckley is one of the reporters, along with Austin Ramzy, who wrote about the leaked files on the genocide of Muslim citizens in China, titled The Xinjiang Papers. The report became a point of recognition from international audiences. However, Buckley only stayed in China until early 2020 when he was reporting in Wuhan for the COVID-19 outbreak. His visa was not renewed after, and he “left China with a great deal of sadness.”

Not renewing visas has become a point of contention. The Chinese Foreign Ministry revoked the press credentials of 3 Wall Street Journal correspondents in February 2020 as punishment for an opinion piece.

Then there are more serious situations when reporters must flee such as Michael Smith, a correspondent for the Australian Financial Review (AFR). Smith mentions Cheung Lei, an Australian citizen who worked as an anchor for CGTN, who was detained in August 2020. Smith is now based in Tokyo, Japan since his departure from China.

Overseas correspondents, especially ones from China, are susceptible to danger with friends and families threatened or detained, notably the Radio Free Asia’s reporters who write for the Uyghur section.

Gulchehra Hoja is a Uyghur RFA reporter. Hoja is from Xinjiang and still has family members there such as her brother and mom who were put into the internment camps. However, Hoja spoke with United States lawmakers who put pressure on China against the detainments. It helped with their release, but they are not completely free.

“They don't have freedom of movement, freedom of, you know anything. They are just under arrest at home and, but I cannot go back, and they cannot come here. So, because I can talk to them once, twice a month, I consider myself lucky, as one of the lucky Uyghurs in exile, because many of them still couldn't reach out to their family and they don't know about what happened to their family and their loved ones. That's very hard. It’s very hard,” Hoja said.

Foreign correspondents are still reporting on China from abroad, such as Stephen Vines, a reporter who was based in Hong Kong doing various work from different media outlets. However, his time in Hong Kong ended in 2021.

Vines mentions how Hong Kong was a suitable location to report on the Chinese mainland and other parts of Southeast Asia yet cites the NSL as the reason for journalism becoming extremely difficult in Hong Kong. He now is part of an independent media outlet called Photon Media, based in the United Kingdom. Their mission is to report on the dissidents and diaspora of Hong Kong, to “let them speak again and flourish in the now tendentious media environment” as they state on their website.

Journalists are sticking to Southeast Asia with Taiwan becoming a new base for Chinese correspondents.

An anonymous journalist described the lost opportunities of remote reporting.

“You lose quite a lot while outside China, like the feel of what is happening. It’s harder to maintain sources and build trust. You miss things from being around the country and discussing the latest trends. There are ways to make up for that deficit, such as stuff based on documents, satellite imagery, phone interviews, and reaching out to people online. The focus has shifted in that there’s more writing about China in the world and fewer domestic stories.”

There is only so much that reporters can rely on through an online presence.

“The blank paper protests, those were covered extensively but the aftermath or follow-up isn't covered as closely since we’re not in the country,” the anonymous journalist stated, “Same with Xinjiang. The buildup to the camps was an international concern but in the last few years since COVID it has not been covered enough and lots of things like that, such as Tibet where you can't go there.”

Journalists must utilize sources that have fled the country. For instance, Buzzfeed News’ series project on the Uyghur internment camps mostly had sources of Muslims, Uyghurs, and Kazakhs that have fled.

In the FCCC’s 2022 report, “38% of survey respondents said at least one of their sources had been harassed, detained, called in for questioning by the authorities, or otherwise suffered negative consequences for interacting with foreign journalists, up from only a quarter in 2021.”

Daria Impiombato is an analyst who works for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) which has produced reports on Chinese coercive diplomacy, foreign policy, and operations against the diaspora from Xinjiang. Like Buzzfeed’s project, Impiombato’s work has been extensive with the Xinjiang Data Project, to research and map the internment camps where Uyghurs and other Muslims are being detained.

Impiombato spoke about the difficulty of doing such work. Journalists are crucial in getting data and information, and with no journalists there, it is nearly impossible, especially for an area such as Xinjiang. “Not being able to go to China,” Impiombato mentions, “and not having links there is increasingly difficult. Especially for research that requires groundwork.”

Other tactics are used against journalists to deter them from reporting. In-person harassment and online trolling are commonplace.

“With harassment campaigns through trolls, they reached certain levels that were unimaginable before. With women, it is particularly bad. Although some colleagues have been harassed in person attending events for instance. Then there are frequent attempts to hack their accounts. It feels like you're never safe,” Impiombato says.

With all of this, it is also important to remember the clash of Western democratic values with China’s view of foreign media. Dr. Dukalskis mentioned that a publication like The Washington Post might be seen as an outpost of the US government even though it is independent.

“I think that's part of why sometimes China's public diplomacy abroad falls flat because they're not very used to dealing with a free press and the kind of random questions that you would get or the scrutiny that you would get, and sometimes the assumption is always that everything is state-run somehow, and that censorship will deal with it. Whereas that is not really the way things work out outside of China.”

Still, the foreign policy of China is worrying the Western countries. The correspondents report on what is happening with China’s increasing power and on the wrongdoings of the government. For China, it is trying to be the researcher, writer, and publisher of their own story.