“I wasn’t surprised when I heard that these American journalists were being kicked out of China; they weren’t the first ones to be kicked out.” Yono, who spent eight years in Beijing and one year in Hong Kong, covered China for Swedish media from 2007 to 2016, but after writing about the detention of two Swedish citizens in China, he was blacklisted by China in 2016 and could no longer obtain a visa to enter the country, moving to Taiwan. Now, he reports on China from Taiwan.
“If you register as a journalist in China, it brings you just more trouble than it helps.” Yono admits that’s why he chose not to apply for a journalist visa at the Time, but to hold a business visa instead. He said journalists on press visas in China would not only be monitored and tracked by the Chinese government, but would also put the interviewees in danger; in Taiwan, however, the Taiwanese government is willing to assist and will not mock a journalist for reporting “in the wrong direction.
In March of last year, the Chinese government announced the deportation of several American journalists and limited the issuance of press visas to international media. At this stage, Taiwan has become a base for these international media reporters to observe and report on China.
According to Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the end of December last year, 34 new foreign media reporters were registered in 2020, including 21 from the U.S. media alone, including a number of reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and others who were originally based in China. While some international media are only planning a short-term presence in Taiwan in response to the Epidemic and the friction between the U.S. and China, there are also media outlets planning a long-term presence in Taiwan.
William Yang, vice president of the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents’ Club (TFCC), told Voice of America that after the Chinese government deported a number of American journalists last year, many of them are now in Taiwan and have brought some different faces to the foreign media scene in Taiwan. “People are probably also slowly discovering that reporting on China from Taiwan is not an impossible phenomenon, so I think that would be the biggest change in the last year. But at the same time, we also see that some foreign media in Taiwan are really starting to think about whether they will have some longer-term plans over here.”
An American journalist who relocated from Beijing to Taipei last year said in an interview with Voice of America, “[The deportation of American journalists] is obviously a bilateral issue between the U.S. and China, and no longer something that news organizations can resolve on their own, so it’s up to the Biden administration to negotiate with the Chinese government. We’ll just have to see what happens next, but we’re not seeing any signs right now that the Chinese government wants to loosen the rules and allow American journalists to return to China.”
It wasn’t just Beijing’s expulsion of U.S. journalists last March that triggered the migration of these international media reporters. With China’s passage of Hong Kong’s National Security Law last June and its increased intervention in Hong Kong affairs, even The New York Times had to respond, announcing in July that it was relocating several of its Hong Kong news operations to Seoul, South Korea.
“Hong Kong is no longer viable as an outpost for observing China, so I think Taiwan has the potential to play that role.” The unnamed U.S. correspondent in Taiwan mentioned above revealed that they had set up a bureau in Taiwan last year and would not only cover China from there, but also Taiwan. He stressed that Taiwan’s growing importance is reflected in its performance in fighting the new crown epidemic, as well as the criticality of Taiwan’s technology industry in the context of the bilateral “decoupling” of the U.S.-China technology war.
Earlier in 2017, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) abandoned Hong Kong to set up its first office in Asia in Taipei, Taiwan; in 2018, Deutsche Welle also set up an office in Taipei as its main base for reporting on East Asia. Now, Taiwan can expect even more new opportunities.
In an interview with Voice of America, Swedish journalist Jojje Olsson, who has been based in Taiwan since 2016, said, “I think the community of foreign journalists will continue to grow in Taiwan, or at least maintain the same level.” He said that many international media outlets would prefer that their correspondents in Asia not all be concentrated in China, and that the risks are too great if anything were to happen.
While the freedom to do journalism in Taiwan is high, the unnamed American journalist mentioned that reporting from Taiwan has other challenges that must be overcome, such as the difficulty of gaining the trust of interviewees through telephone interviews, and the difficulty of portraying the true face of the Chinese people, in addition to the issue of call security.
“If the Chinese government is willing to open up and reverse their policy of driving away foreign media reporters, we will certainly send some of our reporters in Taiwan back to China.” The aforementioned American journalist, who asked not to be named, added: “But we would also keep some journalists in Taiwan, which has really become more important in its own way.”
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