China bars journalists from workshop

Friday January 27th 2006, 12:57 pm
Filed under: Newspapers

Chinese journalists have been ordered to stay away from a media seminar, organised by the British Embassy in Beijing, marking a new extension of the campaign against freedom of expression. The embassy had invited more than 40 guests, including journalists, broadcasters and ministry officials, to a workshop on media regulation in Britain. Diplomats saw it as a low-key and uncontroversial way of encouraging debate on media reform, which until recently the authorities had seemed to want to encourage. But the embassy has now been told by some of those invited that they have been refused permission to attend, with the Communist Party Propaganda Department apparently behind the ban. Reports in Hong Kong also say newspapers have been ordered not to cover the event. Sources said the embassy and the Thomson Foundation, the media training organisation, intended to press ahead with the workshop. (The Telegraph,January 27, 2006)

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