Police turned back a reporter from Britain’s The Guardian after he drove over a mountain pass to enter an Linxia, Gansu province, an area near the border between with Sichuan where protests had taken place.
Reporter Jonathan Watts said an English-speaking officer told him “There is a police action taking place. Foreigners are not allowed inside. These are the orders of high authority.”
He said a Foreign Ministry official told a colleague: “When there is some emergency, the local authority has the power to set up prohibited areas for outsiders. This is for the stability and unity of that province and this country.”
Police detained a Finnish Broadcasting Co. correspondent and cameraman outside the monastery town of Xiahe in Gansu province and threatened to confiscate their footage.
The team arrived in Xiahe on March 15, and was trying to leave when law enforcement officers brought them to the police station. The police insisted they had a right to view the correspondents’ footage because the reporters had been in a forbidden area during a police operation. The police said they would confiscate any sensitive material.
“We declined to show the footage and said that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has said that foreign journalists have the right to report freely. They said ‘You don’t want to know what will happen if you don’t show us the footage,” said correspondent Katri Makkonen.
The journalists showed the police one tape. After 90 minutes, the reporters left with the tape they showed to the police as well as the ones they managed to hide.
Five policemen entered a hotel room in Tongren, Qinghai province where a Kyodo News reporter was staying at around 1:30 a.m. and demanded to see his identification papers. Local foreign affairs officials later told the reporter to leave the area because it was “dangerous.”
Later that same day near Xiahe, Gansu Province, police stopped the same reporter when he tried to reach an area where demonstrations were taking place. He was told to leave; police vehicles escorted his car until he left the province.
