Offline, journalists have found a way to travel around the country, aided by easing rules around covering foreign news. “In 2008, the authorities realized that they needed us more than we needed them and acted accordingly,” said a longtime reporter for a US media outlet who covered the match. 2008 said.
Journalists need to take care to protect their sources and avoid local officials being unkind to strangers, but fairly simple tricks are often enough to get through the cracks: leave your cell phone on. stay home and call resources on public phones; meet in a hotel or restaurant in another city; squatting on the back seat of the taxi.
Nowadays, visiting athletes from several countries have been advised use a recording phoneand that carrying clean equipment is common — though not always adhered to — advice for anyone visiting China for a business or study trip. Digital services have been accepted with such gusto, it’s nearly impossible to function without a mobile phone with WeChat installed — which also means it’s almost impossible to get around without leave traces of the digital path anywhere. The last time I traveled extensively in China, in 2016, the store clerks were confused, disgusted, and sometimes had to call someone in if I wanted to pay in cash. My friends who booked taxis for me rejected the bills I tried to give them.
And pandemic control measures have been “Big Brother’s best friend,” in the words of one reporter. To get around China today, you need a health app, which can be used to scan a QR code to enter shopping malls and large apartment complexes or take public transport. There are reports that the results may have been manipulated to prevent dissidents from traveling. And in an FCCC membership survey, 52 percent of respondents said they were “required to leave a place or denied access for health and safety reasons when they were not at risk.”
“In fact, the games of 2008 were the end of the similar era in China. It is an era where the police — and more broadly the government — are lagging behind in terms of dealing with technology,” said Evan Osnos, who lived in Beijing from 2005 to 2013 as a reporter for The Chicago Tribune and New Yorkers. “As a journalist, that means we have this vast terrain geographically for places you can go, and also intellectually, an area of people you can talk to and reasonably confident that they won’t get into trouble talking to you. ”
It’s easy to forget how China rose to the top of the Olympics — and how the foreign press was approached when challenges arose. Protests broke out in Lhasa shortly after my arrival in March, and the foreign media printed witness. Then, on May 12, less than three months before the Opening Ceremony, I was sitting at my copywriting desk when the room started moving. We felt the tremor as a result of an earthquake 1,000 miles away in Sichuan. The scale of the devastation was terrible, and the people were angry about the poor quality of school construction that resulted in many children’s deaths.
