Beijing blues

China may relax its media censorship ahead of the 2008 Olympics. But for how long?
Jonathan Watts

A series of miracles will take place exactly two years from today in Beijing. The putrid yellow smog that usually cloaks the city will suddenly lift to reveal a glorious blue heaven. The thick traffic that almost permanently clogs the roads will dissolve for an entire fortnight. Quaint, dusty, brick-walled hutong alleyways will disappear behind awe-inspiring monuments to modern architecture. And, wonder of wonders, a proudly down-to-earth population of spitters and smokers will - at least temporarily - give up the habits of a lifetime.

It may sound outlandish, but this is not the prophesy of a deranged fortune-teller. It is the vision of Beijing's Olympic planners and I, for one, have no difficulty at all in believing it will come true. China is determined to make the 2008 Games a stunning coming-of-age party for a fast-growing country that is ready - after hundreds of years of colonial humiliation, civil war and revolutionary excess - to reclaim its place as one of the world's leading civilisations.

The market-communist government also has enough old dictatorial power and new economic clout to make it happen. When the Games start on August 8, more than a million cars will have simply been ordered off the streets. Entire neighbourhoods have already been flattened to make way for the Bird's Nest Olympic stadium, the Water Cube swimming pool, as well as new roads, new subways and the biggest airport terminal in the world. To clear the polluted air, factories have been moved out of the city centre, construction workers will down tools, and nitrogen rockets will be fired into approaching clouds to artificially induce rain.

In short, when Chinese mandarins make up their mind to do something, they are ready to move heaven and earth to achieve their goal. But despite their desire to impress the world, there is one act of hospitality that, so far, the organisers have been reluctant to consider: the abolition of some of the tightest media restrictions in the world.

In 2008, between 20,000 and 40,000 foreign journalists are expected to descend on Beijing for the Olympics. This press corp will be at least double the size of the athletic body. In bidding for the Games, Beijing promised that the media would be given complete freedom to report in China. But so far, progress in this respect has been a lot less evident than the development on the building sites.

A survey released yesterday by the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China (FCCC) found 72 cases of harassment since 2004 - the year Beijing was handed the Olympic torch. They included more than 30 police detentions of journalists, 21 incidents of reporting materials being destroyed, and 10 case of physical harassment, including several beatings and a strip search, of reporters or their sources. The club's president, Melinda Liu, said such actions were an affront to the Olympic spirit.

I should state my involvement in compiling this report. Part of the motivation is that I have been affected in a minor way. I have been detained by police three times in three years for, variously, talking to Tibetan activists in Beijing, the widows of a mining accident in Shaanxi, and peasants who lost their land in Guangdong. My interogators have generally been polite, but in every case, the detentions have proved a frustrating and unpleasant experience that seemed completely out of step with the progress made in so many other areas of Chinese society.

Far worse treatment is meted out to ethnic Chinese journalists and their sources. Ng Han Guan, an Associated Press photographer was clubbed and his camera smashed by plain-clothes security personnel when he took a picture of a colleague being manhandled by police after the Asian Cup final in 2004. BBC producer Bessie Du and cameraman Al Go were strip-searched by police after they visited a riot scene at Dingzhou village in Hebei province last summer. Fu Xiancai, a land rights activist, was left paralysed in June this year after a beating he received on the way home from a police station, where he had been warned for giving an interview to ARD, a German TV channel. Police say Fu broke his own neck.

While the stories being covered ranged from land disputes to pollution protests to industrial accidents, the common thread through almost all of the incidents was that the journalists were told they deserved punishment because they did not get permission from the authorities to visit the area. This is one of the greatest problems facing reporters. Under a rule that belongs more to the China of the Cultural Revolution than today's increasingly open society, foreign reporters are required to request authorisation for every reporting trip they make outside of Beijing. If they are caught without it, they face detention and expulsion from the province.

Most journalists ignore this rule - article 15 of the regulations covering foreign journalists - or they would never be able to cover sensitive stories. The central government cannot condone such violations, but neither does it expel correspondents as it once used to do. There is a tacit recognition - expressed privately by many policymakers - that overseas reporters may even be useful in providing information about scandals that provincial leaders try to cover up. But as long as article 15 remains in place, the authorities can interpret it to turn journalism into an offense at almost any time.

But as it is usually unenforced, is it worth challenging? Yes, and only partly because of the Olympics. The Chinese government has said it will live up to its Olympic promise on media freedom. How to do that will be debated later this week when broadcast executives meet with the 2008 organising committee in Shangri-la, Yunnan provinc, and in a bigger conference in September.

One scenario has it that no change will be made. After all, as one cynic put it, most of the journalists who arrive in 2008 will be sports reporters who do not give two hoots about what happens outside the stadiums in Beijing. Another possibility is that the current restrictions will be lifted for just a month either side of the Games to allow feature writers to visit the provinces without any embarrassing impediments.

Given China's reputation as the world's biggest censor, few people expect outright abolition of reporting restrictions. After all, no country in the world imprisons more journalists. Among them are two who worked for foreign media organisations. The New York Times assistant Zhao Yan has been in prison for almost two years and was recently put on trial for passing on state secrets. Ching Cheong, the Straits Times correspondent, faces an even more serious charge of spying for Taiwan.

But the eyes of the world will be on China like never before in 2008 and Beijing is desperate to prove the perfect host. The International Olympic Committee - whose president Jacques Rogge is on record as saying he hopes the Olympics will help to improve human rights in China - will have a powerful sway on media arrangements. And foreign broadcasters such as NBC of the United States, will want to ensure that the billions they have spent on rights does not backfire.

The Chinese foreign ministry is also increasingly sophisticated in the way it tries to shape global public opinion. Ten years ago, China expelled correspondents who wrote articles its leaders' disliked - an act that always generated even more bad international publicity. In recent years, however, the foreign ministry has been more willing to engage in dialogue with foreign reporters, which have led an easing of regulations covering housing and hiring.

Being able to choose where you live and who you hire is an undoubted and welcome improvement, though surely one that would be taken for granted by correspondents in most other nations. The FCCC is now lobbying for the freedom to travel around the country - something a Chinese reporter in London, Paris or Berlin would do in Britain, France or Germany without second thoughts.

There is little reason to be optimistic, but it is surely worth trying to engage in dialogue with the authorities. Changes inside China today are so rapid that what seems outlandish today can sometimes be achieved tomorrow. Given the fact that the rules are already widely ignored, a permanent lifting of travel restrictions would cost the government very little, but the gains would be enormous. It would help to show that China is not just living up to global standards, it has ambitions to set them.

This may be asking for a miracle too far. More likely is a temporary easing for the duration of the Games. If that happens, China will argue that it has met its Olympic commitments and for a few glorious months, the media - probably excluding domestic reporters - will bask in an artificially sunny and open climate. But after that the detentions - like the pollution - will resume as normal in the autumn of 2008. And then the big question will be - beyond the concrete and the steel of the stadiums and roads - what will be the legacy of the Beijing Olympics?