China will revoke the press credentials of some US reporters in an escalation of a stand-off with Washington over journalists operating in each other’s countries.
China’s ministry of foreign affairs said in a statement that US journalists working for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post whose press credentials are due to expire this year must hand back their press cards and stop working in the next 10 days. The decision also affects journalists based in Hong Kong and Macau. It was not immediately clear how many journalists would be affected.
Beijing and Washington have been locked in a tit-for-tat battle over each other’s journalists. In February, the US designated five Chinese media outlets — including Xinhua, China’s official news agency — as foreign diplomatic missions, saying their journalists operated as propaganda agents and required greater monitoring.
A day later, China expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters, two of whom were US nationals, the first time in decades that Beijing cancelled the press cards of multiple foreign reporters at the same time.
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, in its annual report, described the expulsions as “the most brazen attempt in the post-Mao Zedong era to influence foreign news organisations and punish those whose work the Chinese government deems unacceptable.” It accused Chinese authorities of using visas “as weapons”.
Beijing said the decision was punishment for a headline on an opinion piece blaming China for its handling of coronavirus.
In March, the US said it was capping the number of Chinese journalists at five Chinese state media outlets in the US at 100, effectively expelling 60 journalists.
In its statement on Tuesday, China said the US cap had in effect expelled Chinese journalists from the US. “Such outrageous treatment prompted strong representations from China,” the ministry of foreign affairs said.
China’s foreign ministry has also accused the US of having “a Cold War mentality and ideological bias” that it said had seriously affected the normal operation of Chinese media organisations in the US.
Under China’s new directive, China-based branches of Voice of America, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Time will also have to submit information about their staff, finances, operations and real estate in China.
Mike Pompeo, US secretary of state, said on Tuesday he “regrets” Beijing’s decision and hoped China would reconsider, adding the moves would “deny the world the capacity to know what’s really going on inside”.
But he denied that the measures were like-for-like, characterising the Chinese press targeted by the US as “propaganda outlets”.
The Trump administration has a febrile relationship with US media. President Donald Trump has frequently derided US media outlets that publish critical stories about him as “fake news”. The state department recently refused a National Public Radio journalist a seat among travelling press accompanying Mr Pompeo, after the secretary of state was angered by another NPR reporter’s work.
