Chinese Stranglehold

The Chinese Embassy in Malawi has removed Wisdom Chimgwede, Zodiak Broadcasting Station (ZBS) editor, from the list of journalists travelling to China on a media tour it sponsored after receiving instructions from Malawi's Ministry of Information and Civic Education. The visit is slated to begin on June 21. The ministry had earlier on accused the journalist of writing negatively about the...

Fears of attacks on journalists are on the rise in China after a recent string of attacks on media that have ranged from unexplained detentions to violent physical assaults on reporters. Huang Qi, founder of website www.64tianwang.com, was Tuesday charged with illegally obtaining state secrets by the security bureau of Chengdu, Sichuan, after he and two colleagues were reportedly abducted by plain...

The Chinese police arrested Internet writer Zeng Hongling in Chengdu, the capital of the earthquake-hit province of Sichuan, on Monday for publishing personal accounts of the earthquake on overseas Chinese-language websites, according to news reports and a Chinese press freedom advocate. Three days later, a well-known Internet publisher and human rights advocate, Huang Qi, went missing in Chengdu...

China has begun to restrict local and foreign coverage of the aftermath of the May 12 earthquake. Several international media outlets have reported the harassment and temporary detention of reporters at the hands of local officials, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The moves come after a brief period in which the government appeared to relax its normally...

Chinese media is still forbidden to refer openly to the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989. Censorship is also extremely severe on the Internet. "The Chinese authorities are trying to use the Olympic Games to make people forget what happened on June 4, 1989 in Tiananmen Square," Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said. "But the sports events and the festivities that will take place in this...

A Chinese journalist who went to prison for reporting on a health threat before Chinese authorities announced it has been awarded the 2008 Golden Pen of Freedom, the annual press freedom prize of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN). The award to Li Chongqing, who was released from prison in February after serving three years for reporting on an outbreak of dengue fever, marked the second...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has expressed concern over the decision ot Chinese authorities to suspend publication of a magazine and forced the dismissal of its editorial staff over coverage of last week's earthquake in Sichuan province. New Travel Weekly, published in Chongqing, was reportedly suspended from publishing on May 20 after failing to carry mourning messages in the...

Chinese authorities have freed a Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) reporter and a cameraman, the public broadcaster said Friday. The pair, together with a Chinese builder they were supposed to interview, the worker's brother-in-law and an interpreter, had been arrested Friday morning in Henan province. All five were subsequently released. YLE said Pirkko Pöntinen, the reporter, and Mika Mattila...

Qi Chonghuai, a journalist in China’s Shandong province who had written critically about local officials, was sentenced Tuesday to four years in prison for fraud and extortion in a trial that lasted 12 hours, according to his wife and lawyers. Access to the trial was limited, and reporters were not allowed to attend. It began at 9 am and continued until 9:30 pm, when the sentence was announced...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemns a decision by Chinese authorities to place a journalist known by the name of Naranbilig under house arrest for a year after holding him for 20 days in Inner Mongolia. It also condemned the May 3 arrest of writer Zhou Yuanzhi, who may now be charged with “inciting subversion of state authority” as many other Chinese intellectuals and dissidents have...