China detains British reporter covering protest at Olympics
John Ray of London's ITV News is dragged away and held for 20 minutes. The International Olympic Committee says, 'We don't want to see this happening again.'
BEIJING — China came under criticism from the International Olympic Committee on Thursday after a British reporter was dragged away by police and detained for 20 minutes while covering a protest.
China pledged to provide open access for foreign news media as a condition for winning the right to host the 2008 Olympics. In addition to the Wednesday incident, security officials in recent weeks roughed up Hong Kong reporters covering a ticket stampede in Beijing and Japanese journalists reporting on a bombing in the far western province of Xinjiang.
"The IOC does disapprove of any attempts to hinder a journalist who is going about doing his job seemingly within the rules and regulations," Giselle Davies, a spokeswoman for the committee, said at a news conference Thursday. "This, we hope, has been addressed. We don't want to see this happening again."
The incident occurred when John Ray, 44, of London-based ITV News was rushing to cover a Tibet protest at the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park, south of the main Olympic stadium. Ray later said that a small struggle ensued as police officers forced him to the ground and dragged him before eventually letting him show his media credentials.
China also pledged unfettered access to the Internet as a condition for the Games. Though it eventually under pressure stopped blocking some websites, including that of the human rights group Amnesty International, several others remain impeded. In defending its policy, the government has said it considers the access "sufficient."
China, with its controlled commercial press and state-run media, has struggled to deal with the shock of having 20,000 foreign journalists on its soil who work under a very different system. In some ways, it has been surprising that more incidents haven't occurred given that gap.
Though the central government has almost certainly instructed lower-level officials not to manhandle foreign journalists, local police and party secretaries are used to having wide latitude to "maintain order."
Zhan Jiang, head of the media department at the China Youth College for Political Science in Beijing, said he hadn't heard of the Ray case. If it's true, he said, China should handle it deftly and apologize, as it did after the Japanese journalists in Xinjiang were roughed up.
