The situation is ’reflective of an increasingly hostile atmosphere for journalists speaking out about the state of press freedom in China,’ the report says.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) found new ways to harass foreign journalists working in China last year while continuing to use old tactics to stifle press freedom, according to a new report.
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC) published its annual member survey on April 8. The report, titled “Masks Off, Barriers Remain,” said that while China’s “zero-COVID” policy had now become a thing of the past, the country’s media landscape remained challenging for foreign journalists, as they had to deal with Chinese authorities’ “heavy-handed responses” to independent reporting.
According to the report, China deployed unmanned aerial vehicles to monitor foreign journalists in the field for the first time in 2023.