Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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A NEW YORK TIMES correspondent, Vivian Wang, has been expelled from China after the newspaper published an interview with Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te.
Though the expulsion has been framed as a response to the interview, which took place in December via videoconference at the DealBook summit, the expulsion was also probably related to Wang’s other reporting. While the New York Times has defended its coverage as fair and balanced, the Chinese government may not have taken kindly to reporting on its handling of COVID-19 or the actions of Chinese state security. Wang was not actually directly involved in the interview with Lai, though the move makes it clear that Chinese media outlets will broadly take action against media outlets that engage with Taiwanese politicians.
It may not be surprising that the Lai administration condemned China’s actions. In response, the Lai administration suggested that the move highlighted how Taiwan was a safe press environment in a way that China was not, as well as that the deterioration of press freedoms in China heightens Taiwan’s resolve to defend itself.
The US government later responded by expelling a Xinhua reporter, as an apparent reciprocal move to Wang’s expulsion. There have been waves of expulsions in the past, in which China and the US both expelled journalists from either country. At the same time, it is to be noted that Chinese journalists who were expelled from the US were usually at Chinese state-run media, which may at times dovetail with efforts at surveillance, espionage, or intimidation by Chinese state security. By contrast, journalists from Western outlets are at privately owned newspapers and outlets. The deteriorating media outlook in China has led many Western outlets to be unable to post correspondents in China for many years, particularly in the wake of the 2019 Hong Kong protests and COVID-19, even as it is thought that improvements in US-China ties may lead to some journalists being allowed to enter again.
In the meantime, one notes that in response to past journalist expulsions from China, Taiwan has suggested that it could be a media hub in the region. Certainly, it is true that many journalists who were unable to continue working in China in past years did relocate to Taiwan, even if many have since moved elsewhere. Part of the challenges with staying in Taiwan are labyrinthine banking and government bureaucracy that made setting up a bureau difficult, even as the government could have perhaps taken a more proactive role in creating conditions for media outlets to set up in Taiwan.
This is similar to how the Taiwanese government suggested that Taiwan could be a hub for NGOs in the region in the past, in light of shrinking civic space in traditional regional hubs such as Bangkok. Even so, the same issues largely apply, in that only large Western INGOs have been able to set up in Taiwan, and they, too, encountered a labyrinthine banking and government bureaucracy that made setting up offices difficult.
Indeed, had the Taiwanese government been serious about making Taiwan a media hub, it would have already taken action during past waves of journalist expulsions from China–and while Taiwan did benefit from journalists that did relocate to Taiwan, or spent some time in Taiwan, it perhaps failed to make broader changes that could have made it an attractive working environment for journalists in Asia.