Freedom of Press is suppressed in China. Image Courtesy – IndiaTV News
This is a piece of alarming news for media persons of the international arena. Freedom of the Press is suppressed in China. The Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) in China says that journalists have been subjected to physical harassment, hacking, online trolling, etc. in China. They have also faced problems like the denial of visas. Local journalists in China and Hong Kong are also facing all kinds of troubles. China declared the FCC as a banned organization.
China has opened a front against the international media as soon as the attention of the media around the world began due to Beijing Winter Olympics. China has already become notorious around the world for human rights violations in Xinjiang province and repressive policies in Hong Kong. According to a report, some foreign journalists have been so heavily oppressed that they have left the original land of China.
According to a BBC report, other journalists had to flee China making excuses of emergency reasons. Journalist Cheng Li of Australia and Hage Fan, a Chinese national, have been implicated in the country’s security matters, and they were kept in jail for more than a year. The Chinese administration has been harassing the families of other foreign journalists.
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At the same time, according to the report of the news agency ANI that freedom of the press was restricted so badly in 2021 that its record of the last two years was also broken.
The scenario of Media Freedom in Pakistan is also horrible. A report of the Pakistan Newspaper Editors’ Council (CPNE) states that there is no freedom of expression and freedom of information in Pakistan. Five journalists were murdered while working. The thing is even horrible enough – one of these journalists named Nazim Jokhio was kidnapped and brutally murdered in Pakistan.
According to the BBC report, Chinese authorities have also used the pandemic as a tool to delay reporting trips and approvals for new journalist visas. The news bureaus have been suffering from staffing issues for this reason. It has also made an impact on how they have been able to report to their country.
Those reporters had been followed who attempted to cover Xinjiang. Xinjiang has been a controversial region in China because the Chinese government has been accused of committing genocide against the Uyghurs in this region.
