A few years ago, a Tibetan journalist living abroad received a cryptic invitation to coffee from a man who claimed to be a childhood friend. The name didn’t ring a bell to the reporter, who covered Tibet from outside the region, but he agreed to meet up with the long-lost acquaintance at a local hotel’s cafe.
China's repression of journalists: no more borders, no more constraints
Governments targeting journalists for repression and violence is nothing new. Journalists had been killed for chronicling Hitler’s crimes against humanity and exposing Stalin’s Holodomor, the intentional mass starvation in Ukraine. In 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist critical of Saudi Arabia’s government was dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
But China’s campaign to intimidate and silence journalism and speech around the world has altered the global repression calculous. Gone are the guard rails that imposed some limits beyond discrete episodes of harassment, efforts to undermine an individual’s credibility, or even targeted assassinations. Instead, a new regime has emerged that ignores national borders and a sense, however wobbly, that there are constraints.
There’s a new term that captures the new war on freedom of expression: transnational repression, and it encompasses high-tech surveillance, shocking acts of transgression against international laws and norms, and old school mafia tactics of threats against family back home.
When the journalist arrived, he was greeted by a person who didn’t look familiar. He wasn’t a childhood friend. Instead, the man told the reporter, he worked with one of China’s state security agencies. He explained that before their meeting, he had paid a visit to some of the reporter’s family members back in Tibet — who were fine, he assured him — and then waved over two men sitting at a nearby table. The trio then besieged the journalist with questions — “Who are your sources in Tibet? How do you get your information?” — but the reporter refused to answer and hurried out of the hotel.
A few weeks later, he was ambushed on his walk home from work. According to one of the reporter’s former colleagues, two men sprung out of a vehicle, thrust a black hood over his head, and pushed him into the car. The van drove around for hours as the men interrogated the reporter about his contacts in Tibet and searched through his phone. Again, he refused to answer. After several hours, the kidnappers dropped the reporter off near his house, warned him not to turn around for five minutes, and sped away.
According to a U.S.-based Tibetan journalist who had worked with the kidnapped man, this was the end of his colleague’s career in media. He was terrified that his journalism work could put him and his relatives back in Tibet in harm’s way. “He was so worried about his family he quit reporting right away,” he explained. “He said, ‘I’m not going to risk my life and my family’s lives.’”
