BBC journalist Sha Lei revealed his experience in China for the first time on Friday after arriving in Taiwan under the title “The grim reality of reporting news in China forced me to leave”. In the article, he stressed that his experience is the latest case of foreign media pulling out of China in recent years, and is part of a global war of ideas and information waged by China.
The BBC announced this week that Beijing-based journalist Sha Lei, who has been in China for nine years, has left China for Taiwan, “to bring to light the truth that the Chinese authorities do not want the world to know. Sha Lei previously disclosed that he and his team faced surveillance, threats, obstruction and intimidation wherever they filmed or covered stories in China. According to Taiwan’s Central News Agency, Sha Lei has recently arrived in Taiwan with his wife Murray, who works as a journalist for the Irish Broadcasting Corporation, due to pressure and threats from Beijing against the BBC and him personally.
In the article, Sha Lei said that he came to work in China in 2012, when Xi Jinping came to power, and that Xi has used China’s rigid political system to tighten his grip on almost all levels of society. And now that Xi has been in power for nearly 10 years with an unlimited term, the news media has become its representative battleground. Foreign media reports related to exposing the truth about Xinjiang, questioning China’s handling of the epidemic and the origins of the virus, or speaking out for the people of Hong Kong who oppose the authoritarian rule of the Chinese side have undoubtedly become targets of the authorities’ attacks.
The article points out that while foreign journalism’s space in China is tightening, the Chinese Communist authorities are investing heavily in foreign media strategies to take advantage of free and open media platforms overseas. In this regard, Chinese “war wolf” diplomats have tweeted against foreign media, but have banned their own citizens from using the same foreign information platforms. Sha Lei said his experience in China could be seen as a small part of an emerging, highly asymmetrical war of thought control waged by China.
But in his article, Sha Lei emphasizes that some brave and determined foreign journalists in China remain committed to reporting real news, and that some prominent Chinese citizens are also taking great risks in trying to bypass authorities’ censorship to tell their country’s story. For example, much of what the world learned about Wuhan before the city’s closure came from Chinese citizen journalists, and now they are paying the price. Sha Lei stressed, “We should not forget that the people who continue to face the greatest risks in this new battle of global ideas because they tell the truth are Chinese citizens.”
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