So Much for Free Speech

“From now on,” said China’s Communist Party chief Jiang Zemin, “newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations will never be allowed to disseminate bourgeois liberalization.” Jiang’s comments, made in a speech last November but only now published, describe a crackdown on the press that had in fact begun months earlier and that remains in force today. China’s brief spring of relative freedom in news reporting--part of the “bourgeois liberalization” condemned by the regime--ended with last June’s party-ordered massacre in Beijing. Now the press is again under onerous controls, while intimidation of foreign correspondents is being stepped up.

This week the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Beijing formally protested to the Foreign Ministry over what it charged are flagrant efforts to harass foreign reporters and insulate them from contacts with the Chinese. Correspondents say that they are kept under close surveillance by security forces and that many Chinese friends have been warned by their employers that they are being watched. British and American journalists say that police carrying recorders and cameras pursue them in public.

China’s journalists, insisted Jiang in his speech, must serve as “mouthpieces” to “give publicity . . . to the party’s basic line.” That’s not a demand that can be placed on the world’s press. What can be done, what is being done, is to make the conditions under which foreign reporters work deliberately difficult and unpleasant. The aim is to make it as hard as possible to get at the truth about what’s going on. The irony is that the tactics being used themselves demonstrate a fundamental and harsh truth about what life is like in China today.