China's rise to the status of a world power is often reported in the news. We are constantly told that the West cannot afford to ignore the Chinese market. At the same time, we are titillated with threats of the Chinese military invading Taiwan and of Chinese spies stealing America's nuclear secrets. Articles and reports on human rights abuses also abound. Recently, the hottest topic to invade our newspapers and television screens is China's permanent trade status and WTO access. This mish mash of messages gives rise to a confusion that permits an air of inevitability to pervade the discourse of policy makers who might otherwise be able to exert significant pressure on the Chinese Communist Party to change its ways.

My experience as a producer-camera person in Beijing for Associated Press Television News (APTN), America's only TV news agency, shows just how far China's power is extending. Not content to control their own press, the Chinese are bolder than ever in their attempts to muzzle foreign journalists. The trend has always existed, and journalists who worked in China just after the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 insist that conditions have greatly improved. But recent events demonstrate that the Chinese government is taking large steps backwards and has no intention of exchanging greater transparency for the allowances accorded it by the West.

Worse still, increased pressure from security forces in the Middle Kingdom has influenced the coverage and integrity of certain news organizations. Stories are sometimes stifled and coverage limited for "sensitive" topics in an effort to safeguard the increasing business interests of Western media. This bottom line mentality has even affected the way some press agencies treat journalists.

My own problems with the powers that be in China began to escalate in July 1999. Clinging to a technical fault concerning my papers, the Public Security officials in charge of foreign journalists threatened to refuse me a needed change of visa. Unhappy with my coverage of certain sensitive subjects, notably the Falun Gong, the Foreign Ministry also proceeded to act very slowly.

Not content with harassing me with paper problems, the police also called my Chinese landlord and began to threaten him for housing a foreign journalist. (All foreign journalists in China are supposed to live in officially approved housing for foreigners, which permits the police to keep a close watch on them. Traditionally, the police have been relaxed on this rule. Recently, however, authorities have been implementing the rule more strictly.) In the end, the police refused to accept my visa application until I could prove that I now lived in official foreign housing. They announced this a few hours before my current visa was to expire and despite the fact that the Foreign Ministry had assured my boss that I would have a week or so to find new housing. I had to make a mad dash to register at a hotel in order for the police to accept my application. I continued to live in my Chinese apartment for a few days as I have two cats I could not bring to the hotel, but faced constant fear that the police would evict me or use this as an excuse to create more problems for me in obtaining my visa.

The almost daily trips to the public security bureau or the foreign ministry, the doubt as to whether or not I would, in the end, be able to stay in China, the stress of having to find a new apartment in so short a time — all were compounded by the attitude of my superiors.

It is important to mention two things here. First, the housing issue had long been a bone of contention between APTN and myself. All producers in Beijing are provided with a housing allowance permitting them to afford the high rent of an official foreign residence. I did not deem it fair that I should be an exception to the rule. More important, every time I was detained, the police brought up the subject of my "illegal" housing situation. It was yet another means for them to pressure me. In a country where the opportunities for police pressure are so numerous, I felt it was wrong for APTN to refuse to give me housing.

Second, the goal of Public Security when they begin to harass journalists this way is to wear them down, so that they will think twice before going out to do another sensitive story. Therefore, it is vital for employers to completely support the journalist being harassed. This was far from being the case. Although I worked fulltime for APTN, I had no contract. I had been promised a staff position and contract in late March 1999, but these had never materialized. Therefore, I had no legal insurance that, were the Chinese authorities to expel me, APTN would employ me elsewhere or continue to pay me until a new location could be found.

The attitude in the field was not much better. On the morning of the expiration of my visa, I was yelled at for needing to take time to look at apartments. That very afternoon, after the police refused to take my visa application until I could prove I had changed housing, I was screamed at and warned that I would have to be quick in finding a new apartment.

These details may seem superfluous but I cannot stress enough the psychological goals of Public Security and the obvious effect that such an atmosphere might have on a journalist's work.

This episode was only a taste of things to come.

I finally got a much needed vacation and came back to Beijing determined to continue my work as a journalist and convinced of the need to deal with what my mother calls "corporate reality." (I feel this is a euphemism for sleazy business practices, but never mind...) Things went well, and the atmosphere at work improved markedly.

In October, things began heating up again with the Falun Gong. There were attempts at protests in Tiananmen Square, and Falun Gong members were being arrested every day. On October 26, 1999, I went to the Square to film these arrests taking place and was detained by the police. I managed to hide the tape in my underwear (as I always did on such occasions). The security officer threatened me with expulsion if I continued to cover the Falun Gong and reminded me of the problems I had faced that summer.

Two days later, on October 28, 1999, the Falun Gong held a secret press conference in the suburbs of Beijing. The story made headline news throughout the world and was a great slap in the face to Public Security, which had strict orders from high up in Chinese officialdom (perhaps from Jiang Zemin himself) to put an end to the Falun Gong "ordeal."

The police reaction to the press conference was organized and, unfortunately, efficient. Journalists known to have covered the event were followed everywhere, making further contact with Falun Gong members or work on other sensitive topics almost impossible. A few days later, five of the journalists present at the press conference were called in for interrogation. Our papers were confiscated and I, for one, was again threatened with expulsion if I continued to refuse to cooperate. I was also told that I could no longer work on anything, including the official biweekly Foreign Ministry press conferences.

The reaction from the international press was strong. A meeting was organized at the Foreign Correspondents' Club, which sent an official letter of complaint to the Chinese Foreign Ministry. The U.S. Embassy also got involved, and I have heard (but not been able to confirm) that the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State brought the matter up with the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. The story of the interrogation was on the front page of The New York Times the next day. Faced with this pressure, Public Security gave us back our papers. The relentless following of our moves, however, did not stop.

At this point, I was frustrated with not being able to develop the Falun Gong story. Apart from being followed and therefore risking getting people into trouble, there was a lack of will in my office to move the story further. I was told to keep in touch with Falun Gong members through my beeper and public phones in case any further "spectacular" events were planned but was strongly discouraged from trying to get interviews or trying to go deeper with the story.

On November 18, 1999, I filmed a press conference, during which I left my handbag and a kit bag under a chair in the front row. Once the event was over, I found that my handbag — which contained my beeper, mobile phone, journalist accreditation card, residence permit and passport — was missing. The possibility of the police having stolen my bag flashed through my mind, but I dismissed it as paranoia. When recounting the theft to other journalists, however, many had the same reaction. This kind of method has been used before by Public Security.

Whether or not it was indeed the police who stole my bag is a matter which can never be cleared and is, in any case, irrelevant at this point. What is relevant are the events that followed.

On the day of the theft, I went to the Public Security Bureau as instructed. They refused to give me the declaration of theft I needed in order to obtain a new passport, claiming that they needed a picture for this (which in the end was not needed at all) and stating with an ironic smile that they wanted to wait to see if my bag showed up. This is NOT normal procedure and put me in an illegal situation. Furthermore, it prevented me from being able to do my job correctly.

The next step was to call my embassy (I have dual citizenship and was in China on my French passport). Aware of the problems I had been having with the police, the official I spoke to said she would give me a new passport anyway as the embassy knew and trusted me. The police then refused to recognize my new passport as I had obtained it without their declaration of theft. They demanded a letter from my embassy saying that my former passport had indeed been stolen, which the embassy could not do as I did not have the declaration of theft from the police. The French consul confirmed that it was not normal practice to deny me this document and warned me that I should leave China if the police persisted in their refusal.

In the meantime, my boss denied that there was any problem and said, "You'll just have to deal with this yourself." I asked if he had alerted the news management in London, and he retorted that there was no need to do so. Since I had been told to deal with this situation myself, and since I felt it was important for London to know what was happening in view of the possibility of my being expelled, and because I was not able to work properly, I told my boss that I would send an e-mail to London myself. I copied my boss in this e-mail, which simply related what had occurred. This prompted a furious reaction on the part of my boss, who felt I had tried to bypass him. He in turn sent an e-mail, copied to myself, to the news manager claiming that if I was having problems with the police, it was because of my "bad attitude," that the police were just doing their job, and that APTN should not get involved as the police would perceive it as interference in their internal affairs. ("Interference in internal affairs" is a phrase frequently used by the Chinese when lambasting any attempts at criticizing them for their human rights record or other sensitive subjects.) My boss's e-mail was a personal attack, the aim of which was to discredit me and portray me as psychologically unstable. It also showed that my boss was indeed on the side of the police and would do nothing to help me. I tried to discuss this with the news manager in London, but the telephone conversation degraded into a yelling match and I gave up. Once again, I found myself in a situation of harassment from Public Security, with no support from APTN.

A few days later, I was told by the news manager in London that I would not receive a raise — or a contract and staff position — as I had been again told I would a few weeks earlier. Furthermore, he warned me that due to restructuring at APTN, my position was threatened.

My boss was eventually called in by the Foreign Ministry to discuss the problem of my papers. When I asked him what had transpired during this meeting he refused to give me any details, simply saying that the Chinese authorities "really don't like the Falun Gong" and that I would get my accreditation back. In the end, I did recover my papers. But while accreditation for all other foreign correspondents was renewed until December 31, 2000, mine was not. The Foreign Ministry employee who handed me my accreditation card did say that they would renew it in March, but I had no insurance that this would be the case. It was clearly a form of pressure to keep me from covering the Falun Gong or other sensitive topics. I mentioned this to both my boss in Beijing and to the news manager in London but got no reaction.

In light of what transpired shortly thereafter, this attitude is not surprising.

On December 31, 1999, I was sent with another colleague to Tiananmen Square to cover the crowds gathering there. My colleague had a beta camera, and I had a small digital camera. Although the government had done its utmost to keep people away from the Square by organizing activities all over the city except at Tiananmen, crowds of people were naturally attracted to the literal and symbolic center of Beijing. Police presence was enormous and arrests of Falun Gong members were taking place. My colleague and I desisted from filming this, as it was not our purpose in coming to the Square. Nonetheless, we were harassed and told to leave. At midnight, my colleague stepped onto a ladder he had brought along and started filming the crowd. At this, the police rushed at my colleague to stop him from filming and to get rid of the people who had gathered around him. He left his camera on, and I filmed the whole scene on my digital camera. Between the two of us, we had excellent shots for a story on the atmosphere at Tiananmen Square as China entered the new millennium. I stress that this atmosphere symbolized the mounting fear on the part of the Chinese Communist government in the face of rising unrest throughout the country and was therefore a valid story.

Upon returning to our office, my boss refused to include any images of the police reaction and harassment in our output. This confirmed my suspicions that APTN was determined to soften its coverage of China. Added to the stress I had suffered recently, I lost my temper.

The next evening, Saturday, January 1, 2000, I received a call from the news manager in London who told me that my position had been made redundant as of December 31, 1999, at midnight, while I had been out working. I was given one month's salary minus my part of my housing cost in lieu of notice and negotiated that APTN pay my rent for the month of February. Ironically, the news manager told me that had I had a contract, a certain procedure would have been followed, but that as "we" had "never been successful" in obtaining such a contract, APTN was free to do as it pleased. In other words, I had no rights whatsoever. A few days later, I learned that my position had not been made redundant at all, and that APTN was, in fact, planning to replace me.

At that point I took a scheduled one-month vacation to Laos. Upon my return to Beijing, I found that nasty rumors had been spread to ruin my reputation. The word was that I was fired for being a troublemaker and an extremely difficult person, and for failing to get along with my boss. I feel it is unfair to label a person as a troublemaker for trying to stand up for his or her rights and, more importantly, for journalistic integrity. Also, if I was not getting along with my boss, this was due to his attitude in the face of my problems with the police.

Since my Chinese visa was expiring on March 2, 2000, I had to prepare an international move (funded by myself, of course). There was no hope of getting another job in Beijing because I could not expect to be accredited again by the Chinese authorities and because my reputation had been ruined.

I am now working as a freelance journalist in Bangkok and have learned that the APTN producer here has been sent to replace me in Beijing, although she does not speak Chinese. She, in turn, is being replaced here.

The question of why APTN acted in such a horrendous fashion toward me raises some troublesome points. First, APTN has major business interests in China. Apart from selling contracts to various Chinese television stations (all government-controlled) to use APTN material from other parts of the world, the APTN Beijing office had earlier managed to convince the government and Chinese Central Television (CCTV) to organize satellite feeds directly from the APTN bureau. In the past, all broadcasters and agencies were obliged to take a long trip to the western part of Beijing in order to do satellite feeds. Reuters has since been granted this privilege also, but APTN was first, giving it an obvious commercial advantage.

Another worrying element is a conversation I overheard in the APTN Beijing office while I was still employed there. A marketing executive had stated that the new APTN policy was to concentrate on broadcast services and business more than on news. Why was APTN so reluctant to stand up for me in the face of police harassment? Why did they deny that a problem even existed? The only possible answer, as I see it, is that they feared that this would negatively affect their business interests in China.

Note that directly following the Falun Gong secret press conference in October 1999, when five journalists were involved, there was an uproar and the problem of confiscated papers was resolved quickly. In other words, when companies speak out, when stories of police harassment make the front page of the New York Times or CNN headlines, the Chinese government feels the pressure and modifies its behavior, if only partly. The message that APTN gave China, on the contrary, was that it is okay to pressure foreign journalists — they will capitulate in the face of this pressure.

Since the tragic events of 1989, China has learned a great lesson about the power of Western media and especially television. Policymakers all over the world depended on the coverage of what was taking place at Tiananmen Square. Embargoes and other sanctions followed. The will to keep certain issues out of the Western (and especially American) press is very strong among Chinese politicians. That they are increasingly successful in doing so is proof of just how powerful China is becoming. This power comes not from military might, however, nor from a government that acts in a responsible manner toward its citizens, but from the greed of big business in the West to make more and more and yet more money.

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

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