China expels WSJ reporter who wrote about Xi’s cousin

BEIJING, China – Beijing said journalists who attack China were “not welcome” in the country, after it failed to renew the press credentials of a foreign journalist who wrote an article about one of President Xi Jinping’s cousins.

It amounts to the effective expulsion of Chun Han Wong, a Singaporean national who has worked for the Wall Street Journal‘s Beijing bureau since 2014.

In a statement to Agence France-Presse (AFP), the foreign ministry said it “strongly opposed some foreign reporters’ malicious smears and attacks on China, and these kinds of journalists are not welcome.”

“In the meantime, we will facilitate foreign reporters who do news coverage in accordance with laws and regulations,” it said.

Wong – together with fellow journalist Philip Wen – published a story  in July detailing how Australian law-enforcement and intelligence agencies were probing the activities of Ming Chai, one of Xi’s cousins.

It formed part of a wider investigation into organized crime, money-laundering and alleged Chinese influence-peddling.

“We can confirm that Chinese authorities have declined to renew Chun Han’s press credentials. We continue to look into the matter,” a Dow Jones spokesperson told AFP.

Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying rejected the allegations at the time the report was published, saying, “I don’t know where these journalists go to dig up this dirt.”

A Wall Street Journal reporter, who did not want to be named, confirmed that Wong’s visa had expired on Friday, August 30.

Visa delays, detentions and suspected phone-bugging are among the challenges faced by foreign journalists in China, who say working conditions are getting worse with many reporting being watched and harassed.

Beijing bureau chief for BuzzFeed News Megha Rajagopalan was effectively expelled from China last year after she was unable to renew her visa.

She had reported extensively from the restive northwestern region of Xinjiang prior to her expulsion.

A survey of 109 foreign journalists published in January “painted the darkest picture of reporting conditions inside China in recent memory,” the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China said at its release.

The report said many journalists working in China have been threatened with visa delays, or issued with short-stay visas, which they believed were related to their coverage. – Rappler.com