QUOTE: “Li suddenly exploded in rage and hit my right arm as I took his photo. The blow knocked the camera to the ground. Li yelled at me as he did this. I later discovered that the incident had broken by camera’s focusing mechanism, and the camera no longer works properly.”

DESCRIPTION: Edward Wong and Jonathan Ansfield, two reporters for The New York Times, were detained by members of the People’s Armed Police and the Public Security Bureau in Gansu Province for a total of 20 hours, starting on Feb. 27.

We were also watched by the PSB for an additional 16 hours while being forced to stay in a hotel in Lanzhou, the provincial capital of Gansu. A Japanese traveling companion and a local driver were also detained with the two reporters during the same period. The driver was subjected to interrogation and threats. The incident began at 11 p.m. on Feb. 27, Friday, as we were driving through southern Gansu Province. We were on a snowy mountain road heading south to the Gansu-Qinghai border. We were on our way between two points in Qinghai and were passing through Gansu for several hours because the most direct route between the two points ran through Gansu. We had no intention of stopping and doing any reporting in Gansu. We had just finished reporting a story in a Tibetan area of Qinghai, and our purpose now was to report on the situation in other Tibetan areas, but not in Gansu. We were stopped at a checkpoint at a bridge along the road at 11 p.m. There were a half-dozen members of the People’s Armed Police guarding the checkpoint, which was in the mountains about two hours south of Maqu. The officers took our passports, then told us to wait in the car until a senior officer from the PSB in Maqu arrived. When asked, the PAP officers did not give a reason why we were detained, and they did not allow us to turn around and drive away from the checkpoint. At one point, our driver, a Tibetan man whom we had hired in Qinghai Province, was pulled into a police car and questioned for the better part of an hour. It was snowing on the road the entire time, and we had to keep the car’s heater running. The PAP officers gave us additional gasoline and cups of hot milk. We were unable to sleep while in the car. At 4 a.m., two local police cars pulled up. A senior PSB officer who had arrived in one of the cars took our passports from the PAP officers. We had not choice but to follow the police cars back to Maqu. We arrived at about 6:30 a.m. at the police compound there. The three foreigners in our party were put into one room while the driver was taken into a separate room to be questioned by the police. The driver later told us he was asked to describe our activities in Maqu. The police, who had discovered Jonathan and I were journalists by looking at the visas in our passports, asked the driver whether we had interviewed anyone in Maqu. The driver said we had done no reporting. None of the police officers spoke to us or questioned us. At no point during the process were we given any explanation for why we were being detained or why we had been stopped, even though we repeatedly asked the police to explain our detention. Foreigners do not require special permits to travel in China except in the Tibet Autonomous Region, or TAR. Furthermore, journalism rules made permanent by the Foreign Ministry in Oct. 2008 do not require reporters to obtain permission to travel anywhere in China other than in the TAR. Qinghai and Gansu are both outside the TAR. In other words, we had not violated any rules and were acting according to the law. At 6:45 a.m., I called Tang Rui, an official at the Foreign Ministry, to ask him to help get us released. He said he would have his counterpart in Gansu start working on it. The interrogation of our driver continued for a couple hours. He later told us that the police in Maqu did not have a harsh attitude during the interrogation. Around 10 a.m., we were told to drive north to the town of Hezuo, the seat of Gannan Prefecture. An officer in Maqu said we would have to meet with the foreign affairs officer for the Gannan PSB and with an official from the prefecture’s foreign affairs bureau. We drove up to Hezuo under police escort. The trip took about two hours. During the drive, I called Tang Rui again to tell him the detention was dragging on. I reiterated to him that the police had yet to tell us why we were being detained. “Really? Really?” he said, as if he couldn’t believe that the police had not given us a reason. He then told me that my attitude was making him “uncomfortable,” that I was being “unreasonable” and that I was making too many demands of him. He accused me of making threats. “Maybe you should listen to the advice of the police,” he said. As soon we pulled into the front yard of the PSB compound in Hezuo, the PSB foreign affairs officer, Li Sheng (李胜), and a plainclothes policeman began filming us. Li had a videocamera, and the other man had a digital still camera. Jonathan and I pulled out our own digital cameras to document the detention process, in case there would be a dispute about it later. Li suddenly exploded in rage and hit my right arm as I took his photo. The blow knocked the camera to the ground. Li yelled at me as he did this. I later discovered that the incident had broken by camera’s focusing mechanism, and the camera no longer works properly. At no point before hitting me did he ask me not to take photos. Minutes later, we were led into Li’s office. He denied that he had hit me and quoted a Chinese saying: “You have to fight to know each other.” He then pulled out a book and quickly flipped to a phrase that was underlined in red ink. The phrase was in Chinese, and it said that foreigners or foreign journalists (I forget the exact wording) can travel in Tibet or Tibetan areas once they’ve met “certain conditions.” Li then quickly took the book away. We asked to see it again so we could record this, but Li never brought the book back again. I suspect the rule he had shown us was an old one that had been made moot by the Foreign Ministry’s new rules allowing foreign journalists more unfettered access to most of China. We then had some long arguments with Li, during which he refused to give us a reason why we were being detained. He said that we would be set free if we could show him that we had taken no photos in Gannan Prefecture. Jonathan and I agreed, since we hadn’t taken any photos in the area. Although my camera’s focusing function was broken, I could still show Li that I had no photos of Gannan on my camera. Li appeared satisfied with the fact that we had no such photos, but he still refused to let us go. At this point, a Tibetan official from the foreign affairs bureau, Cairang Dao’erqu, arrived. He also declined to give us a reason for our detention. The two said we would have to go have lunch with them at a nearby hotel. We asked to be allowed to check into a hotel room somewhere in town to take a shower and recover from our sleepless night rather than eat lunch, but they refused. We spent about an hour at lunch. Li said we would have to all go together to Lanzhou, about four hours north of Hezuo. We told him we would go to Lanzhou with him, but asked him to allow our driver to drive directly back to Qinghai, where the driver lives, but Li refused. He said the driver would have to take us up to Lanzhou under police escort. We were concerned for our driver’s safety on the roads because he had already spent one night without sleep, and we wanted him to return home as soon as possible. We drove the four hours to Lanzhou. We were tired and wanted to catch the last flight back to Beijing, but missed it because we did not arrive in Lanzhou until the evening. Li and his colleagues followed us to a hotel that we chose. We checked into the hotel and bought plane tickets for a flight scheduled to leave the next morning. We showed these to Li and told him to let our driver return to Qinghai. Li had been holding the driver’s driving license. At this point, Li pulled our driver into his police car and drove around the parking lot while talking to our driver. He continued to interrogate the driver on our activities and threatened to make life hard for the driver. He told the driver he could take away the driver’s car. At about 7 p.m., he gave the driver back his license and told the driver to leave immediately. Our driver began driving back to Qinghai alone. Earlier, when we had first arrived in Lanzhou and realized we would miss the last plane to Beijing, we had asked Li whether we could accompany our driver to Xining, the capital of Qinghai, which is three hours west of Lanzhou. We were concerned that our driver might get into an accident if he drove alone because he had gone a night without any sleep. Li refused, saying we had to stay in Lanzhou. After making sure our driver left Lanzhou, Li and his colleagues checked into our hotel, no doubt to make sure we stayed in Lanzhou and got on our morning flight to Beijing. We boarded a flight to Beijing at 11 a.m. on March 1, Sunday, a full 36 hours after we were first stopped at the checkpoint south of Maqu. At no point did anyone give us a reason why had been detained. On March 2, the Foreign Ministry summoned me to a meeting the next afternoon. At the meeting, held on March 3 at the International Press Center, two ministry employees criticized an article I had written the previous week from a Tibetan town in Qinghai. They said the article was not “objective.” They urged me to be more “objective” when reporting on sensitive political matters. They also asked me to describe details of the detention. Like everyone else we had encountered during the process, they could cite no legal reason for our detention.

On the second day, police followed Moleman to his hotel in Hezuo, came to his room and informed him that the entire area was off-limits to foreign journalists. On the third day, police followed the team from Hezuo 250 kilometers to Lanzhou, where local police then took up the tailing detail.

The men following the journalists also checked into the same hotel, and proceeded to follow them throughout the next day, including to the airport when the journalists left town. “I was able to get the story, though,” Moleman reported. “(I) had expected this sort of attention and had taken some precautions.”

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.”

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.

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.

The correspondent was first stopped at a checkpoint about 50 kilometers outside of Lanzhou. The reporter took a back
road, and was turned back again at a checkpoint 20 kilometers outside of Xiahe. Louisa Lim’s car was followed by a police car for about 100 kilometers. Then a black sedan tailed her for about 300 kilometers, until she had almost reached the airport.

A plainclothes policeman filmed the reporters. Authorities also recorded the driver’s license and license plate of the Lanzhou taxi driver, who “was terrified,” said ITV correspondent John Ray. “The only explanation we were given was there was ‘trouble ahead’. When we pressed them, we were told the road was damaged.”

On their way back to Lanzhou the journalists were pulled over at another toll booth and once again asked for their passports. “No explanation was offered; nor could they reconcile the road block with the Olympic regulations concerning foreign journalists,” said Ray. “We tried to film them, but were shooed away.”

After returning to Beijing, the ITV journalists were manhandled off a university campus where Tibetan students were holding a candlelit vigil, and people they believe to be plainclothes police photographed them.

Police told the reporting team to show their IDs and press cards and questioned them. The journalists were told they couldn’t travel further because there was a police operation going on, and they were being stopped for their own security.

When the correspondent showed the police and local foreign affairs officer the new foreign media reporting rules, he was told that the regulations weren’t valid due to the police operation. The police threatened the driver with arrest if he continued with
the crew. Correspondent Tom van de Weghe asked the police what would happen if he were to continue by foot.

“We will arrest you and put you on an airplane,” replied the police. The crew left the road block after about two hours, drove five hours and spent the night in Xining, Qinghai Province.

During the night the police called the Chinese driver many times to ask to which locations he had driven the team. The crew experienced problems sending the reports to Belgium because of restricted internet access.

Authorities also ordered the eight-member crew not to talk about the police in riot gear and soldiers it saw headed toward Labrang monastery, one day before news broke of riots in Lhasa on March 14. The crew had been at the monastery for two days filming a documentary on Tibetan culture for a six-part series titled “Change in China.”

On the afternoon of March 13, sound man Spence Palermo says he passed a half dozen local police in riot gear headed towards the monastery. “On their heels were two separate columns of about two dozen Chinese soldiers each, also decked out in shielded helmets and night sticks.”

At dinner authorities informed crew members they would not be allowed to film the monastery the following day as planned. Instead, they filmed a monastery of the “Ben sect” about 40 miles outside of Xiahe. On the night of March 14, they were individually escorted to their rooms and told they wouldn’t be allowed to leave their rooms until the next morning. The next morning, Palermo heard a commotion outside the hotel and saw a convoy of Chinese military trucks.

“I figured over 400 soldiers were headed to the monastery. Suddenly there was a pounding on the door and a very irate and panicky official started grabbing my gear and hustling me down to the lobby, saying that we had to leave ‘immediately.’ We were led out of town.”

After the crew filmed at an ancient fort, its members were told they would not be allowed to return to Xiahe. Instead, their Chinese assistant went to the hotel to pick up their equipment and luggage.

“Apparently the protests had spread through the whole town and our hotel – state-run of course — had been targeted [and] all of the windows smashed out,” Palermo recalls, “[There were] fires burning on the street. The word was that under no circumstances would Western media be allowed anywhere near the town.”