China to relax media rules ahead of olympics

BEIJING—China is relaxing decades-old restrictions on foreign reporters, announcing new regulations Friday that will give foreign media greater freedom to travel and report in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Even as the rules were made public, however, a Chinese court affirmed a prison sentence for a Chinese reporter.
The different signals underscore China’s mixed treatment of the media. The communist government hopes the Olympics will burnish the country’s international image, and knows positive foreign reports will help. At the same time, it has clamped down on domestic media and Internet essayists in the fear that unfettered reporting would weaken the Communist Party’s authority.
The new regulations temporarily abolish rules that require foreign reporters to obtain government approval for all travel and interviews. Under the new rules, which take effect Jan. 1 and run until mid-October 2008, only the consent of the person to be interviewed is needed.
“When Beijing hosts the Olympic Games, we want to create an enabling environment for foreign journalists,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said in an hourlong briefing on the regulations. Just a few blocks away, a Beijing court took five minutes to reject an appeal by Zhao Yan, a New York Times researcher, of his three-year prison sentence. Zhao was convicted of fraud, but press advocacy groups saw his case as a political vendetta for Zhao’s pre-Times career as a crusading investigative reporter and as a warning to Chinese reporters.
“What kind of judge are you?” Zhao asked the judge, according to the Times, which cited a courtroom witness it did not name. “Is this how you use the power the country gave you?”
Reporters Without Borders, the press freedom group, took note of China’s diverging treatment — tolerance for foreign media, intolerance for Chinese reporters. “The campaigns against the archaic restrictions on the work of the foreign press have not been in vain,” said the organization, which has called China the world’s leading jailer of journalists, with 32 in prison as of January.—Agencies