China Announces That It Will Expel American Journalists – The New York Times, Nytimes.com
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The announcement comes weeks after President Trump limited the number of Chinese citizens who can work in the United States for five state-run Chinese news organizations.
Zhao Lijian, the new Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, speaking at a daily briefing at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs office in Beijing last month. Credit … Andy Wong / Associated Press
(March) , () (Updated) 5: pm ET
In a sharp escalation of tensions between the two superpowers, Chinaannounced on Tuesday that it would expel American journalists working for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. It also demanded that those outlets, as well as the Voice of America and Time magazine, provide the Chinese government with detailed information about their operations. (The announcement, made by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, came weeks after the Trump administration (limited) to the number of Chinese citizens who can work in the United States for five state-run Chinese news organizations that are widely considered propaganda outlets.
China instructed American journalists for the three news organizations whose press credentials are due to expire this year to “notify the Department of Information of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs within four calendar days starting from today and hand back their press cards within ten calendar days. ” Almost all the China-based journalists for the three organizations have press cards that expire this year.
The announcement went on to say that the American journalists now working in mainland China “will not be allowed to continue working as journalists in the People’s Republic of China, including its Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions.” The two territories are semiautonomous and in theory have greater press freedoms than the mainland.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the decisions “are entirely necessary and reciprocal countermeasures that China is compelled to take in response to the unreasonable oppression the Chinese media organizations experience in the US”
The statement also accused the United States of “exclusively targeting Chinese media organizations,” adding that it was “driven by a Cold War mentality.” The new limits imposed by the Trump administration effectively forced Chinese employees of the state-run organizations to leave the country. Reporters at foreign news outlets in China were among those who aggressively reported on the coronavirus epidemic in January and February, including in its earliest days, when it was a regionalized outbreak in central China and the Chinese government sought to play down its severity.
The news organizations have also reported in the past year on other issues deemed extremely sensitive by Chinese officials, including the mass internment of Muslims in the Xinjiang region the shadowy business dealings of (family members of leaders , incl uding President Xi Jinping. Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times , condemned the expulsion of US Reporters in a statement, calling it “especially irresponsible at a time when the world needs the free and open flow of credible information about the coronavirus pandemic.”
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