By CARA ANNA
DANBA, China: It was just after nightfall when three journalists were stopped at a police checkpoint on a winding, rutted road in China’s western Sichuan province — territory that had become out of bounds for the foreigners.
Police officers took them to a nearby town and locked them in a hotel overnight. They then escorted the journalists more than 250 miles back to the provincial capital, Chengdu, and left them with a warning.
“If you come back, we will send you back again,” one official said.
The routine became drearily familiar over days of fruitless attempts to journey into Tibetan regions where the largest anti-government protests in almost 20 years erupted last month.
Dozens of such checkpoints have sealed off a chunk of western China twice the size of France, keeping out foreign journalists and other unwanted visitors as part of a campaign to squelch bad publicity ahead of the Beijing Olympics in August.
To avoid accusations of muzzling the media, officials deny the existence of a travel ban, saying only that reporters are recommended to keep away for their own safety.
The de-facto ban on news coverage in China’s Tibetan regions violates China’s revised rules that are supposed to allow foreign journalists freedom to report through the Olympics.
But in the sealed-off regions, officials wave those rules away, saying the current situation is a “special” one.
Officials often try to sugarcoat the treatment with offers of tea and food, cigarettes, handshakes and a seeming concern for the journalists’ well-being.
“Sorry for the inconvenience,” some say.
“We warmly welcome you to come back another time,” say others.
“When all of this calms down, you can come back and have much better reporting conditions,” said officials in Danba, where the three journalists were kept overnight.
But it hasn’t all been so polite. Policemen have waved guns in journalists’ faces, confiscated passports and forced photographers to delete photos of checkpoints and riot police.
Authorities say 22 people died in the March 14 riots in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, while other reports put the death toll in the protests and ensuing crackdown at up to 140.
New violence in Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan province along the border with Tibet has led to eight more deaths, the London-based Free Tibet Campaign said Friday.
Officials in the Tibetan areas of Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai provinces all repeatedly warned of potential dangers to journalists from insurrectionist Tibetans, who live in the so-called “Tibetan autonomous regions” but have little say in a power structure dominated by China’s majority ethnic Han Chinese.
When pressed for details of the dangers, officials in the areas where riots and protests were known to have happened all claimed no knowledge of any unrest.
The deputy head of the local government in the Aba prefecture in Sichuan province appeared to contradict himself Thursday when he told reporters that life was “completely normal” in the area, but that it was still too dangerous for foreign media.
Some officials said they doubted the area would be open again until the Olympics are safely over.
“Wait until September,” one foreign affairs official in Aba said cheerfully as his car carried two journalists away from a checkpoint late Monday night.
Travel to Tibet has always been tightly restricted, but such rules have now been extended to neighboring provinces. Bus stations have even been told not to sell foreigners tickets, and drivers face stiff punishments for picking up outsiders.
But worried about further damage to Tibet’s tourism industry, the regional tourism authority announced this week that Tibet will reopen to foreign tourist groups on May 1.
Even if a foreign journalist gets past a checkpoint, he or she is usually caught after checking in at a hotel, where registration with a passport is required.
In other cases, plainclothes policemen tail journalists, crimping their activities. On Thursday, a plainclothes tagged after a reporter as she walked Danba’s main street, quietly trying to interview local Tibetans. The policeman then stopped the Tibetans and asked them what the journalist had asked.
There is even interference far from the sealed-off areas.
At a university campus in Sichuan’s capital Chengdu, a journalist was barred from meeting with Tibetan professors by a woman who claimed herself to be a Tibetan professor. She then took photos of the journalist with her cell phone camera, claiming the blonde-haired woman looked like one of her sisters, and had her escorted off campus.
While officials seemed to feel little need to justify their actions, at least one fell back on what has become a major thrust of Chinese propaganda.
“The foreign media twist the Tibetan story very much, so we need to completely forbid them from wandering around,” said one foreign affairs official.
