Return to Repression

China muzzles journalists who asked too many questions after the recent earthquake.

IN THE FIRST weeks after the Sichuan earthquake, China's Communist authorities were widely credited with allowing relatively open media coverage. Some observers even proclaimed a new era of press freedom. The change was real enough, compared with the total blackout that Beijing imposed after some past disasters, which were treated as state secrets. But much of the early reporting benefited the regime, by portraying senior officials such as Premier Wen Jiabao supervising dramatic rescue efforts. International aid poured in, domestic support for the government swelled and what had been a rising chorus of international criticism of China's human rights record quieted.

Then came a predictable shift: Chinese and foreign journalists turned from describing rescues to probing whether some of the more than 70,000 deaths from the earthquake could have been avoided. In particular they began to focus on school collapses, which killed some 10,000 children. In a number of places schools crumbled while surrounding buildings remained intact; allegations of shoddy construction and poor or corrupt supervision by local authorities began to surface. Angry parents began organizing demonstrations and demanding accountability in towns such as Dujiangyan, where hundreds of students died in a middle school.

That is where the new era abruptly ended. This month, the propaganda ministry issued directives to state-run media banning reports on school construction and protests by parents. School sites have been sealed off, and attempts by parents to gather near them have been broken up. A number of foreign journalists were briefly detained and then ordered to leave Dujiangyan after they tried to report on one attempted demonstration -- even though authorities in Beijing had said the previous day that coverage in the earthquake area would not be restricted. Authorities also arrested a well-known dissident Web journalist, Huang Qi, who had been posting critical articles about the earthquake response on his Web site. One of the articles was about Zeng Hongling, an academic who was arrested after writing her own critical reports.

The suppression of critical coverage and the harassment of foreign journalists are the norms in China. What makes it remarkable now is not only the brief relaxation of control that preceded it but the fact that it comes just weeks before the Olympic Games in Beijing. Authorities have pledged to allow open coverage of the Games. But there will surely be events during those weeks that don't please the regime and coverage that is critical. If the government's censors don't quickly learn to restrain themselves, they will embarrass their country in front of the world.