BEIJING, April 5 – Some Chinese nationalists have undertaken a campaign of harassment, including violent threats, against foreign reporters who took part in a recent trip to Lhasa, for alleged bias in their coverage of unrest in Tibet.
The intimidation efforts have included hundreds of calls and text messages to the cellphones of reporters who took part in the government-arranged Lhasa trip late last month, including correspondents from The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Associated Press. The flood of threats began this past week after the cellphone numbers, Chinese names, and brief descriptions of several of the correspondents were published on a military-themed Internet bulletin board. Contributors to that site have boasted of making harassing phone calls, and posted their own violent threats. “Beat to death these unjust, conscienceless criminals,” wrote one.
The campaign is the latest escalation in a nationalist backlash against Western news coverage of the March 14 antigovernment riots in Tibet and their aftermath. The precise basis for the complaints isn’t clear, although critics have circulated a few photographs published on news Web sites that they argue were misleadingly cropped or captioned. More broadly, the anger reflects deep-seated resentment among many Chinese — fostered by decades of government propaganda — at perceived interference in China’s internal affairs by foreign governments and groups. The phone calls and text messages in recent days have ranged from relatively mundane denouncements to profane attacks on the reporters and their families to numerous threats of violence and death. (“You damned American devil, God will punish you. Tomorrow you will be hit by a car and killed.”)
Some Tibetans and their supporters also have responded in recent weeks with angry emails to Western reporters, complaining about what they claim is skewed coverage of the Tibet unrest in favor of the Chinese.
It isn’t clear how the contact information for the reporters who took part in the Lhasa trip made its way onto the Internet. China’s government, which routinely censors material on the Internet that it doesn’t like, has allowed the contact information to remain on the Web. The Wall Street Journal asked the company that hosts the bulletin-board site where the contact information was first posted, to remove it. The company said it couldn’t do anything until Monday, citing a holiday in China.
A Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs official, asked about the harassment at a routine news conference Thursday, said he was unaware of it. Ministry officials couldn’t be reached Friday, which was a national holiday in China.
