Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he’s been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today’s resurrected item:
Crowd Attacks Journalist
By Graham Earnshaw in Peking
November 16, 1981
A foreign correspondent in Peking was roughly man-handled by a crowd yesterday and then detained by the police for questioning after he took photographs of people beating up a young man in garish clothes.
Stan Oziewicz of the Toronto Globe and Mail said the police told him he had “offended the masses by photographing them without their permission.”
Author’s note: We’re back seeing the masses being collectively offended again at the moment.
Editor’s note: The image above with the CNN logo adorned with bullet holes is from this anti CNN Sina.com page. It’s good to note that there has been some progress: sticks and stone may break foreign journalists’ bones, but Sina petitions signed by anonymous youngsters on the Internet…
There is more on the Sina campaign and general anti CNN stuff on Imagethief and on Sinobyte.