In 2020, Sha Lei and his reporting team were followed in Xinjiang and what they filmed was censored.
BBC China correspondent John Sudworth has left the country for Taiwan after being pressured and threatened by the Chinese authorities.
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Sha Lei has won several awards for his reporting on human rights issues for Uighurs in the Xinjiang region. He left Beijing with his Family.
The BBC says it is proud of Sha Lei’s reporting and that he remains the BBC’s China correspondent.
China has condemned the BBC over reports it has done on Xinjiang.
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Sha Lei has been reporting from China for nine years. He says he decided to leave for Taiwan after realizing it was becoming increasingly difficult to stay in China.
He and his family were followed by plainclothes police all the way to the airport and the check-in hall. His wife, Yvonne Murray, is the China correspondent for Irish public broadcaster RTE.
Sha Lei said he and his reporting team faced surveillance, threats of legal action, obstruction and intimidation wherever they were filming in China.
Sha Lei’s BBC colleagues are still in Beijing; he said he intends to continue reporting from Taiwan.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said authorities had not received prior notice of Sha Lei’s departure.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a news conference in Beijing: “In recent days, when we were about to renew Sha Lei’s press card, we learned that he had left without saying goodbye. After he left, he did not notify the relevant authorities in any way, nor did he give any reason.”
In a statement, the BBC said, “Sha Lei’s report revealed the truth that the Chinese authorities do not want the world to know.”
The number of international media outlets sending reports from China is declining. Last year, China expelled journalists from the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, among others.
And in September 2020, the last two journalists working for Australian media in China flew back to Australia after a five-day diplomatic standoff.
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club in China (FCC) said foreign journalists were “caught up in diplomatic strife that has gotten out of hand.”
“The verbal abuse of Sha Lei, and his BBC colleagues, forms part of a larger pattern of harassment and intimidation that has hampered foreign journalists’ work in China and put their Chinese news assistants under increasing pressure,” the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in China said in a statement posted on social media Twitter.
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