Sichuan quake zone reporters assaulted

Foreign journalists trying to conduct interviews in the Sichuan earthquake zone in western China are being attacked and detained as Beijing ratchets up security in preparation for the first anniversary of the devastating quake on May 12.

The effort to block reporting highlights how sensitive Chinese officials are to any criticism of their handling of the disaster a year on amid continuing complaints from parents over the collapse of shoddily built schools in the area during the quake.

In separate incidents on Tuesday a Finnish television crew and a Financial Times reporter were attacked near Fuxin number two primary school while trying to interview parents of the 126 children killed when the poorly constructed school collapsed.

In another incident on Wednesday a correspondent for the Irish Times was detained by police for almost an hour for trying to meet parents of hundreds of children who died in another school collapse in the town of Juyuan. He was released but told foreign reporters were forbidden from interviewing grieving parents during the “sensitive” period around the anniversary of the earthquake, which killed nearly 90,000 people.

Several other media organisations said their staff had been harassed and detained in the earthquake zone by police and government officials, in spite of recently introduced laws that supposedly allow foreign journalists to go anywhere in China and speak to any willing interview subject. Those rules do not apply to Chinese media organisations, which are controlled and censored by the state.

In a year of politically sensitive events, including the 20th anniversary on June 4 of the crackdown on student democracy activists at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Beijing has stepped up controls on independent reporting and taken extra measures to stifle dissent.

The government has issued a blanket edict saying the school collapses that killed thousands of children had nothing to do with corruption or poor construction quality, as many parents allege.

Following Tuesday’s confrontation an FT correspondent was attacked by local officials again on Wednesday while trying to interview earthquake survivors waiting to make complaints outside a government building in Mianyang city.

Zhang Jie, deputy head of the Mianyang Communist party propaganda office, later said security officers were allowed to stop any interview at any time. He said foreign journalists should trust the Chinese government to resolve any issue on which they were forbidden to report.