Chinese authorities arrested two journalists who work for Voice of America, the U.S.-backed media outlet announced Monday.
“It is outrageous that two journalists have been detained for nothing more than doing their jobs,” said VOA Director Amanda Bennett.
The journalists, one a VOA correspondent and the other a contractor, were taken as they tried to interview a Chinese professor who was placed under house arrest over a prior VOA interview. The professor had been seized during a phone interview almost two weeks ago, then moved through various hotels, but VOA learned he had been returned home.
“Where are you taking me?” correspondent Yibing Feng asked the security guard whom he encountered at professor Sun Wenguang’s apartment.
“You will know,” the officer responded. The conversation was overheard by VOA editors, according to the report.
Chinese authorities have deployed four security officers to live with Sun’s family, the professor shouted through the door to VOA. He is a critic of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s autocratic domestic policies and so-called “throw-money diplomacy.”
“Now I have been locked in at my dwelling,” he said. “Why can Chinese reporters act as journalists in the U.S. freely while U.S. reporters cannot do normal journalistic work in China?”
VOA is backed by the U.S. government, with affiliates around the world. “This is [U.S.] government property, you cannot take it,” Feng reminded the officers, without apparent success.
Sun’s arrest, and the ensuing detention of the VOA journalists, touches on two much-criticized aspect of Xi’s policies. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is leading an international effort to offset China’s use of infrastructure investments to gain influence in the Indo-Pacific region, while American lawmakers have put additional focus on the Communist Party’s crackdown on internal dissidents.
“Every time you hear overblown rhetoric about how we are on the verge of ‘tyranny’ or ‘authoritarianism’ in America remember what real tyranny & authoritarianism looks like,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., tweeted. “In China the police arrested a Xi critic while he was in the middle of a live interview.”
