Chinese move to prevent reporting on protests

BEIJING — In the days since plainclothes security agents harassed and assaulted several foreign journalists on Sunday, the Chinese police have moved to prevent reporters and photographers from covering any potential public protests by establishing "no reporting" zones in Shanghai and Beijing.

Officials have informed a number of reporters and photographers that one of the capital's main shopping districts, Wangfujing, and People's Square in the heart of Shanghai are either off-limits or require a special permit for taking photographs and conducting interviews.

A videographer working for The Associated Press received such a permit Tuesday but was nonetheless prevented from recording by the police, the news agency said.

The highly unusual move — such restrictions usually are applied only to sensitive regions such as Tibet — underscores the concern with which the Chinese government views the protest calls, which have been named the "Jasmine Revolution" after the demonstrations that started in Tunisia and have swept the Arab world.

Public response to the announced gatherings has been tiny, but Chinese security officials have reacted with huge deployments of uniformed and plainclothes officers, both in the capital and in other cities across the country. Since anonymous calls for protests went out two weeks ago on a U.S. website, state security forces have also placed scores of dissidents and rights advocates under surveillance and tightened censorship to prevent word of the "jasmine" rallies from spreading on the Internet or by means of microblogs.

The restrictions, which appeared to be a rollback of the news-media laws that were liberalized before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, follow an outbreak of violence and intimidation against journalists who tried to cover rallies called by organizers last Sunday for more than 20 cities across the country.

Three journalists were injured, including a Bloomberg News videographer who was seriously beaten by plainclothes security agents, according to the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, and more than a dozen reporters were barred from approaching Wangfujing by officers who cited vague new restrictions.

The correspondents' group also said employees from five news organizations reported some material or images had been confiscated and that nine other journalists had been detained for as long as four hours.

In a statement e-mailed to its membership on Monday, the group described the tactics as vicious and well orchestrated, recounting instances in which men in plain clothes grabbed journalists, dragged them into alleys or shops and then forcibly erased images from their cameras.

"It's absolutely outrageous that in the middle of Beijing, the capital of China, a foreign reporter can be kicked and beaten in the face and the authorities just blame the journalist, saying he was in breach of some regulations," said the association's president, Stephen McDonell, a correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "It's a terrible development."

In addition to the new restrictions on foreign reporters, the authorities have employed physical obstacles to would-be protests, erecting metal construction barriers adjacent to possible protest sites and hosing down nearby sidewalks to keep people moving.

At a regularly scheduled news conference Tuesday afternoon, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu endorsed the police actions: "As far as I know, over the weekend the Beijing police properly handled the incident at Wangfujing."

News about the calls for protests has been blocked from Chinese media and Internet portals.

U.S. and European diplomats have condemned the intimidation of journalists and criticized the rollback of news-media rules.