BEIJING, Aug 30, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – The Chinese government has not renewed the press credentials of a foreign journalist who wrote an article about one of President Xi Jinping’s cousins, the news organisation said Friday.
It amounts to the effective expulsion of Chun Han Wong, a Singaporean
national who has worked for the Wall Street Journal’s Beijing bureau since
2014.
“We can confirm that Chinese authorities have declined to renew Chun Han’s
press credentials. We continue to look into the matter,” a Dow Jones
spokesperson told AFP.
Wong — together with fellow journalist Philip Wen — published a story in
July detailing how Australian law-enforcement and intelligence agencies were
probing the activities of Ming Chai, one of Xi’s cousins.
The article was part of a wider investigation into organized crime, money-
laundering and alleged Chinese influence-peddling.
Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying rejected the allegations
at the time the report was published, saying, “I don’t know where these
journalists go to dig up this dirt.”
The foreign ministry did not reply when contacted by AFP on Friday.
Visa delays, detentions and suspected phone-bugging are among the
challenges faced by foreign journalists in China, who say working conditions
are getting worse with many reporting being watched and harassed.
Beijing bureau chief for BuzzFeed News Megha Rajagopalan was effectively
expelled from China last year after she was unable to renew her visa.
She had reported extensively from the restive northwestern region of
Xinjiang prior to her expulsion.
A survey of 109 foreign journalists published in January “painted the
darkest picture of reporting conditions inside China in recent memory”, the
Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China said at its release.
The report said many journalists working in China have been threatened with
visa delays, or issued with short-stay visas, which they believed were
related to their coverage.