Breitbart
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) named China the world’s worst jailer of journalists on Thursday, the third year in a row that the host of the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics has taken the title.
The organization called 2021 “an especially bleak year for defenders of press freedom,” noting that it managed to confirm the arrests of 293 journalists, a record high for the group and unseating a record made only in 2020. It also noted the appearance of several new countries at the top of the list. Most dramatic in its change in handling media is Myanmar, which the CPJ noted had zero journalists imprisoned in 2020 but came in second place to China this year.
In China, the CPJ listed growing persecution of journalists in formerly free Hong Kong, the disappearance of Chinese journalists attempting to document the government’s poor handling of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic at home, and the ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people in East Turkistan among aggravating factors in the Chinese Communist Party’s attacks on freedom of the press.
The group identified two cases in particular worth alarm: the imprisonment of Jimmy Lai, founder of Hong Kong’s Apple Daily and staunch anti-communist; and Zhang Zhan, a citizen journalist who disappeared into Communist Party custody in 2020 after filming the disastrous handling of the Chinese coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, where the virus originated, in early 2020.
“Eight Hong Kong media figures, including Jimmy Lai, founder of Apple Daily and Next Digital and CPJ’s 2021 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Awardee, were jailed in a stark blow to the city’s already embattled independent press. Some could face life in prison,” The CPJ noted. “On mainland China [China’s true borders not including territories it wrongly claims, like Taiwan and Hong Kong], others face a litany of vague Orwellian charges.”
“Freelance video journalist Zhang Zhan is serving four years for ‘picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,’” the organization observed.
Persecution in Hong Kong escalated precipitously in 2020 with the passage of the “national security law” in Beijing. Under “One Country, Two Systems,” the policy that governs Hong Kong, laws passed in Beijing do not apply to the residents of the formerly autonomous city, but the Hong Kong police began enforcing the law, anyway.
The “national security law” demands a minimum sentence of ten years in prison for anyone found guilty of “terrorism,” “inciting secession,” “inciting foreign interference,” or “subversion of state power.”
Police have been liberal in interpreting the last two, on one occasion arresting a Liverpool soccer fan for “inciting foreign interference” and shutting down Apple Daily for a variety of charges under both the last two “crimes.”
Lai, 73, is personally facing at least a decade in prison under the “foreign interference” allegation. He turned 74 years old on Wednesday.
CPJ reported identifying 50 journalists in prison in China for their work. The organization only counts individuals whose whereabouts it can confirm and who have been arrested explicitly for engaging in journalism.
