The Foreign Ministry is organizing a series of trips to Western China including Tibet. The registration deadline for the first trip is this Friday, June 11.

For more information and to register for this and other trips, please see the website of the International Press Center, at http://ipc.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/.

The FCCC Board

President: Stephen McDonell (ABC News)
Vice President: Lucy Hornby (Reuters)
Secretary: Kathleen McLaughlin (BNA)
Treasurer: Tze-Wei Ng (SCMP)

General Board Members:
Jocelyn Ford (US Public Radio)
Peter Ford (The Christian Science Monitor)
Andreas Lorenz (Der Spiegel)
Peter Simpson (Daily Mail)
Richard Stone (Science Magazine)

Associate Board Member:
Giorgio Magistrelli (Consultant to Embassy of Malta)

The outgoing board would like to say thanks to all FCCC members for your support over the past year.

Yahoo has not answered the FCCC’s questions about the attacks, nor has it told individual email users how the accounts were accessed. Password security and malware are ongoing concerns, but it’s unclear whether they are related to this case.

We recommend that you take particular care with any information sent by email, especially with any sensitive information sent via Yahoo accounts. Check your privacy and forwarding settings in all web-based mail (found in Yahoo under “mail options”). Change your secure passwords frequently, but please remain aware that this mode of communication ultimately can’t be considered private.

The FCCC reminds you that email does not appear to be secure in China, and that alternate means of arranging interviews and conducting other sensitive business are often preferable.

For tips on creating a strong password, please see: http://news.cnet.com/8301-19518_3-10310092-238.html

The FCCC has previously notified members to be cautious about malicious email attachments and provided some guidance on making Gmail secure. There have also been incidents in which the email of foreign correspondents’ local assistants have been targeted.

Malicious email attachments sent to foreign correspondents in China tend to increase around big news events and sensitive political dates. In addition to the Expo messages, the overall volume of malware messages sent to foreign correspondents appears to have grown this week.

Please note: .pdf attachments, often assumed to be harmless, have become a common mode of spreading this type of malware. We suggest caution in handling every attachment you receive, especially as these attacks grow more sophisticated. Regular anti-virus software does not typically pick up these types of malware. If you’re unsure whether an email attachment is safe, you can check here.

More information on email attacks against foreign correspondents in China is available here. Gmail users can find information here.

Here is how you can check if your Gmail has been compromised:

• Log into your Gmail account
• Click “Settings” in the upper right hand corner. Then click on the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab.
• Look at the forwarding section. If there’s a mysterious email address you can’t recognize, then
  that’s cause for concern.
• You can check “disable forwarding” to stop future emails from being sent to this address, though other steps may also be necessary to make your account secure.

We remind all members that journalists in China have been particular targets of hacker attacks in the last two years. Please be very careful about what links you click on, what email attachments you open, and do run virus checks regularly.

If you have been hacked, please let the FCCC know at fcccadmin@gmail.com. We can help put you in touch with experts to run diagnostics.

Some things you can do generally to improve security:

• Access Gmail through a secure HTTP connection: https://mail.google.com. (The extra ‘s’ means secure). Make sure always use https is checked in Gmail’s settings, under General>Browser connection.
• Change your passwords.
• Keep up to date with software patches and updates.

Here is one recent example:

From: Pam [mailto:pam.bourdon@yahoo.com]
Subject: Trip to Beijing

Please can you both confirm that you received this e-mail I sent a few days ago. Given recent e-mail problems I am worried that it has gone astray yet again.

Dear,

I am the economics editor of The Straits Times. I plan to be in Beijing October 2nd, (arriving late evening) to research the annual world economy survey.
I was suggested that you would be able to help me fix up some interviews.
I attach a list of people I would like to meet with. I would be happy with just 6-7 interviews during my stay, so don’t worry if some of them are away. If a lot of my chosen economists are unavailable, I will have a few more names.
I think that they are all Chinese speakers, but please check for me as I find that discussing technical economics through a translator does not work very well.

I will be staying at the China World Hotel, No. 1 Jian Guo Men Wai Avenue .
From past experience, it would be good if meetings could be grouped to minimise getting stuck in bad traffic!

The subject I am researching is the implications for the world economy, and in particular the developed economies, of the increasing
global importance of China, India and the other emerging economies. How is the increased weight in the world of emerging economies affecting growth rates, jobs, wages, profits, commodity prices, inflation, interest rates, asset prices, capital flows and exchange rates? Who will be the winners and losers in this new economy?

Please let me know if you need any more information.
And thank you in advance for helping me arange my trip.

Best regards

Pam

Please keep your assistants’ safety in mind when reporting and gathering news in China.

For more guidance on working with Chinese assistants, please see this section of the Reporters’ Guide.

FCCC Professional Committee

President: Scott McDonald (AP) – Canada
Vice President: Lucy Hornby (Thomson Reuters)  – USA
Treasurer: Andrew Batson (Wall Street Journal)  – USA
Secretary: Kathleen McLaughlin (BNA)   – USA

General Board Positions:
Sim Chi Yin (Straits Times)   – Singapore
Andreas Lorenz (Der Spiegel)  – Germany
Francois Bougon (AFP)   – France
Beniamino Natale (Ansa)  – Italy
Ole Torp (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) – Norway

Associate Position:
Giorgio Magistrelli  (Consultant to Embassy of Malta) – Italy

Many thanks to you for your support over the past year, and a big thank you to all of you who attended the AGM.

Old and new board members meet (L-R): Giorgio Magistrelli, Andrew Batson, Marga Zambrana, Jonathan Watts, Scott McDonald, Ole Top, Francois Bougon, Lucy Hornby, Andreas Lorenz, Chi Yin Sim, Kathleen McLaughlin, Beniamino Natale

You’ve probably noticed that the FCCC website now has a very different look and feel. This is the result of a project I’ve been working on for the last several months, to bring the FCCC website into the modern Internet era.

The old website had been pulled together basically by hand, and the accumulation of ad-hoc changes meant that it was requiring increasing amounts of time and effort to maintain and update. The new site is based on the widely-used WordPress blogging platform, so the way it works should seem pretty familiar to you all. It also has the benefit of being very easy for the board and the manager to update: statements and incident reports are going online much faster than before.

Essentially, the main benefit of the new site is that it can more easily link up with the rest of the online world. None of these features are that exceptional, but they were hard for the old site to handle.

For instance, you can easily use RSS readers to monitor new posts through the site’s feed: http://www.fccchina.org/feed/

And for those of you on Twitter, those updates also automatically feed into an FCCC account there: http://twitter.com/fccchina

One of our hopes for the site is that it will raise the FCCC’s profile by making it easier for people to find us online. So please link to FCCC statements and events on your own sites when you can!

There’s also been some updates to the content. We’ve got better links to other FCCs in Asia, and also to important reference information on Chinese government websites. The Reporters’ Guide we put out last year is now new and improved. Among other changes we now have an online English translation of the new reporting regulations available for reference.

There’s also an online form for confidentially reporting harassment.

And note the handy display of upcoming events at the top right of this and every page, to help you keep track of social events and speakers.

This For Members section will also give us a bigger platform to share job ads and other practical information. But from now on, please take note that any messages you want distributed to the membership may also be be posted online for anyone to read, unless you request otherwise.

Feel free to contact me directly if you have any suggestions, or would like to help us continue to maintain and improve the site.

Andrew Batson,
Webmaster

The FCCC has already received several reports of interference in areas affected by the earthquake. Summaries of the reports are below. For detailed descriptions see the Incident Reports section.

If you run into difficulties registering or reporting, please let us know by sending an email to admin@fccchina.org. If you experience interference we will send you a link to our new online incident reporting form.

Registration contacts for earthquake affected areas:

Sichuan:
四川省人民政府新闻办公室： 028-86600343，86600501
四川省人民政府外事办公室新闻处： 028-84388114
Chengdu:
成都：陈程 成都市人民政府新闻办公室新闻联络处处长 028-86639404，13908078567
Mianyang:
绵阳：张杰 绵阳市人民政府新闻办公室副主任 13508116966
洪常青 绵阳市人民政府新闻办公室干事 15908223675
Deyang:
德阳：涂升珂 德阳市人民政府新闻办公室新闻处处长 0838-2313126，13550648261
Guangyuan:
广元：王万仁 广元市人民政府新闻办公室主任 138808121440
张学兵 广元市人民政府新闻办公室外宣科科长 13508068126
Aba Prefecture:
阿坝州： 蒋祖权 阿坝州人民政府新闻办公室外宣科长 13990411007

Recent Incidents

On April 6, a German television crew working in Shifang and nearby areas was physically prevented from filming and detained for over five hours. When the crew was waiting to meet the father of a child who died in a school collapse, unidentified men grabbed the man in front of the journalists’ hotel and took them away in an unmarked car. He was later released.

On April 2, a German reporter was barred from Yingxiu while attempting to report conditions leading up to the first anniversary of the quake. The reporter was in a public cemetery amid a group of Chinese journalists interviewing relatives of the dead when authorities approached him, told him he had failed to register, then led him away from the cemetery.

On April 1, a French journalist working in Dujiangyuan on a story about a family whose daughter was killed in a school collapse was stopped and detained by both uniformed and plainclothes police. The parents were released. The reporter was forced to go the police station and informed he needed to register to conduct reporting in the area