Beijing has announced the expulsion of three journalists from the American economic newspaper The Wall Street Journal , in retaliation for the publication in that medium of a rostrum with a headline he had considered racist. The statement of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in the daily press conference of its spokesman, comes a day after the United States imposed restrictive measures on the Chinese state media correspondents on their soil, considering them an official propaganda arm of his country.
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The column was titled "China is the Real Sick Man of Asia" ("China is the real sick of Asia", a denomination that evokes foreign abuses of the nineteenth century). Professor Walter Russell Mead of Bard College in the United States is signed, and had already raised a resounding complaint from the Chinese authorities, who considered that the rostrum “dirties the efforts of the Government and the Chinese people in the fight against the epidemic” of Covid-19 in the country. Beijing demanded an official apology and reprisals against those responsible for the article being published, which, he says, has not happened.
“The Chinese people do not welcome the media that use discriminatory racial language and that maliciously defame and attack China. Therefore, it has been decided that, as of today, the press credentials to three journalists of the Wall Street Journal will be revoked, ”said Foreign spokesman Geng Shuang in an online press conference. The Chinese system implies that, having no press credential, a journalist's residence permit is immediately annulled, which amounts to an expulsion.
The three journalists, who have not participated in the process of writing or publishing the criticized article - the news and opinion departments work separately - are the “number two” of the correspondent, Joshua Chin, of US nationality; Australian reporter Philip Wen and American reporter Chao Deng, as published by the newspaper itself.
It is the first time in more than thirty years that China has suddenly expelled several journalists from the media. The three reporters will now have five days to leave the country. China has expelled several foreign journalists in the last eight years in retaliation for their coverage, although until now it had never recognized that they were deportations.
Since the correspondents must renew their press card and residence permit every year, they simply did not issue the new cards, forcing the correspondent to leave the country. Among those punished in this way in recent years is the former correspondent of the French magazine L'Obs, Ursula Gauthier, for a very critical column on the treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang, or the WSJ correspondent , Chun Han Wong, for a report on the financial activities of a relative of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping.
In a statement, the Foreign Correspondents Club in China (FCCC) has expressed its "deep concern and firm condemnation" about the cancellation of the visas of the three journalists. "The measure taken against the WSJ correspondents is an obvious and extreme attempt by the Chinese authorities to intimidate foreign media by retaliating against their correspondents in China," he added.
“The correspondent members of the FCCC and their colleagues in China suffer with increasing frequency harassment, surveillance and intimidation by the authorities. The expulsion of the three journalists from the WSJ is only the last, and most alarming, as the authorities have adopted, ”the statement concludes.
The announcement of the Chinese ministry comes hours after the administration of US President Donald Trump indicated that he will begin treating five Chinese state-owned journalistic companies that maintain correspondents in the US as foreign embassies, which will force them to register their properties and their employees before the State Department.
In a briefing with journalists, two senior US State Department officials who spoke on condition of anonymity indicated that the decision was taken by the Chinese government's increasing control over its means. Since coming to power seven years ago, Xi has been increasingly inclined to use them to spread favorable propaganda to Beijing, as they have claimed: "These (journalists) are, in reality, arms of the propaganda apparatus of the Communist Party of China" .
In his press conference, Geng responded to those accusations that “the United States boasts its freedom of the press. However, it restricts without reason the normal operations of the Chinese media in its territory. This is unjustified and unacceptable. ” The spokesman also warned that "we reserve the right to take retaliatory measures."
