Club Lunch Panel: How China Is Muzzling the Media at Home and Abroad

The work environment for foreign journalists in China deteriorated significantly last year, including extensive surveillance, visa difficulties, harassment of news assistants and researchers, and restrictions on access to Xinjiang, Tibet and elsewhere. Board members from the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, the professional association of foreign journalists in Beijing, will discuss their recent report, which they say “painted the darkest picture of reporting conditions in China in recent memory.” But this repression doesn’t stop at China’s borders. In the last decade, the Chinese government has gone to great lengths to export its media practices to other countries, posing a threat to press freedom around the world. Get an exclusive preview of the Reporters Without Borders report on this topic to be released worldwide on March 27.

Yuan Yang is Vice-President of the FCCC and a Beijing correspondent at The Financial Times covering technology. Her recent investigative work has delved into young Marxists in China, as well as data leaks, forced labour and internet censorship.

Josh Chin is Treasurer of the FCCC and a member of its media freedoms committee, which compiles the club’s annual report on working conditions. He covers Chinese politics and technology for The Wall Street Journal out of Beijing and Hong Kong, with a recent focus on the government’s embrace of digital surveillance and its use of internment camps to re-engineer ethnic identity in Xinjiang.

Cedric Alviani is East Asia Bureau Director for the press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders. He has lived in Asia since 1999 directing projects at the intersection of diplomacy, culture and media. The RSF East Asia Bureau was opened in April 2017 in Taipei and focuses on China, Hong Kong-Macau, Taiwan, Japan, North Korea, South Korea and Mongolia.