China Tracks Foreign Journalists

 

Philippe Lopez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Foreign journalists were detained by Chinese policemen on a street leading to a designated demonstration site in Shanghai on Sunday.

By SHARON LaFRANIERE and EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — Western journalists have lately been tolerated in China, if grudgingly, but the spread of revolution in the Middle East has prompted the authorities here to adopt a more familiar tack: suddenly, foreign reporters are being tracked and detained in the same manner — though hardly as roughly — as political dissidents.

On Sunday, about a dozen European and Japanese journalists in Shanghai were herded into an underground bunker-like room and kept for two hours after they sought to monitor the response to calls on an anonymous Internet site for Chinese citizens to conduct a “strolling” protest against the government outside the Peace Cinema, near Peace Square in Shanghai.

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China Tracks Foreign Journalists