U.S. Limits Chinese Staff at News Agencies Controlled by Beijing

Senior State Department officials said the five organizations would have broad authority to decide who on staff — whether journalists, managers or other employees — would remain. The officials said the move was not a result of any specific information or content that the five organizations have published or broadcast.

Instead, two senior State Department officials said, the new limits seek to punish Beijing for what they described as systematic stifling of press freedoms against foreign reporters in China. The two officials briefed reporters on condition of anonymity as required under State Department protocol. Separately, a senior official said the Trump administration might soon limit how long the media visas allow Chinese journalists to stay in the United States.

The State Department officials would not discuss what steps China might take in retaliation.

Beyond the expulsions of the Journal reporters, the Chinese government has repeatedly allowed the visas of foreign correspondents whose work is perceived as unfriendly to lapse, forcing them to leave the country.

A report released Monday by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China pointed to another Wall Street Journal journalist who in the past year was in effect forced to leave. He had written about potential ties between organized crime and a cousin of President Xi Jinping of China.

The report said that in at least five other cases, the Chinese government had similarly declined to renew resident journalists’ long-term visas. Reporters formerly from Al Jazeera English and The Guardian confirmed to The New York Times that the government had declined to grant them new visas, without explanation, ending for all intents and purposes their careers as journalists in China.

The journalists report, titled “Control, Halt, Delete: Reporting in China Under Threat of Expulsion,” also focused on what it characterized as a ramped-up practice of issuing truncated long-term visas — ones that must be renewed after a short period in an onerous process that also implicates visa-holders’ family members in the country. The report called this a means of harassing journalists and sending the not-so-subtle message that the Chinese government was displeased with their reporting, whether it concerned Mr. Xi, protests in Hong Kong or the treatment of ethnic minorities.

In all, the report concluded, at least a dozen correspondents received visas for six months or less in 2019, compared with five the year before. The standard length for a long-term journalist visa in China, known as a J-1, is one year.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/world/asia/china-journalists-diplomats-expulsion.html