Journalists Say China Is Not Living Up To Openness Pledge

Seven years later, Chinese authorities and the Western news media apparently have different understandings of "complete freedom." Sun Weida, a spokesman for Beijing's Olympic organizing committee, and Liu Jianchao, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, suggested recently that reporters did not actually need to visit blocked Web sites to do their jobs. Sun was surrounded by a mob of reporters after a news conference, and when he insisted that the Internet was free and open in China, some of them shouted, "That's not true!"

"I've had some difficulties accessing Web sites about Falun Gong and Tibet," said Adalberto Leister, a reporter with Folha de Sao Paulo, the biggest newspaper in Brazil. "My assistant has to talk to someone in Brazil and get them to e-mail me on my personal e-mail account. I was in Athens, and it wasn't like this."

NBC, which is promising to air 3,600 hours of Olympic coverage and has paid a reported $900 million to broadcast the Games, has asked for more live footage from Tiananmen Square. The Chinese government, though, has committed to only six hours a day and no interviews.

And yet at the grand opening of the Olympic Main Press Center last month, Sun Weijia, director of media operations for the Beijing Olympic organizing committee, said: "You can broadcast and you can do live broadcasts on Beijing streets and from Tiananmen Square. If you want to have an interview with anybody, you need only the permission of the speaker. This applies to all areas: the venues, the city, the suburbs."

But television crews from South America and Germany have complained publicly about being harassed and followed by plainclothes police or about public security police who have cut off live shots even though the reporters had permission to film.

Journalists were particularly upset when they found access to certain Web sites blocked. Under pressure, officials on Friday allowed access to the previously blocked sites of the BBC and Amnesty International. Other sites that have required the use of proxy software to view, such as those of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, were also unblocked.

But reporters in the Olympic Main Press Center still could not access other sites, including that of the Tibetan government in exile and various sites and blogs referring to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Kevan Gosper, a spokesman for the IOC, said he was embarrassed by having promised that Internet access would be unfettered, only to find out that wasn't the case. He initially suggested to reporters that a deal on access had been made between senior IOC leaders and the Chinese government, but then reversed himself Friday.

"I raised the question as to whether there had been a separate deal," Gosper said in an interview. "Since then, in the last hours I've had an absolute assurance from the IOC that there was absolutely no alternative agreement to enable a blockage of sites."

"We are not working in a democratic society; we're working in a communist society," Gosper added.

Zhan Jiang, journalism dean at the China Youth University for Political Science, argued that the Olympics would help bring gradual press freedom to China.

"Although the Chinese government wants to guide what the foreign media reports, the foreign media know very clearly what they want to cover and what they don't," Zhan said. "I think the government is prepared for that. The fact that they have unblocked some Web sites shows they are cooperating quietly."