China expels French journalist after accusing her of ‘supporting terrorism’

Expecting the move, Ursula Gauthier, a longtime journalist for the French news magazine L’Obs, said late Friday night that she was prepared to leave China.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang accused Gauthier in a statement of “defending terrorist acts” and of provoking “rage” among the Chinese people with an article published by the French magazine last November 18.

Explaining its decision not to renew Gauthier’s credentials, the Foreign Ministry said the article had “incited the outrage of the Chinese people” and that China “does not tolerate the freedom to embolden terrorism”.

The announcement on the terrorism law came a day after China said that it would not renew the press credentials of a French journalist who wrote an article about ethnic violence in the nation’s northwestern Xinjiang region.

Gauthier is the first high-profile foreign journalist to be expelled from China since Al Jazeera’s Melissa Chan in 2012.

But Ms Gauthier called the accusations “absurd” and said she had been requested to apologise “for matters who I never have composed”.

The paper was one of the first to object to Gauthier’s story, publishing a scathing criticism of her suggestion that violence by Uighurs against civilians might, in part, be driven by resentment against government policies.

“I’m really angry. Really”, Gauthier said in a phone interview Saturday.

While the domestic media in China is subject to strict control and many topics are taboo, the foreign media is free to publish on any topic.

By then, state media had carried abusive editorials against Gauthier, accusing her of deep prejudice against China. “They are accusing me of writing things that I have not written”.

It added that Beijing would not be allowing Gauthier to continue reporting from the country.

Gauthier said she wasn’t sure why the editor of the Global Times and the Foreign Ministry had singled her out so forcefully. However, foreign journalists frequently complain of harassment by the authorities while conducting routine reporting. Jaime FlorCruz, the Beijing bureau chief for CNN recalls that, not only did foreign journalists need government permission to leave the capital, but official minders made it hard to interact with ordinary Chinese.

“Imagine how the French public would react if someone calls the Paris attack an inevitable result of its policy on Muslim immigrants”, Li Wei, an anti-terrorism expert at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times.

The new law also restricts the right of media to report on details of terror attacks, including a provision that media and social media can not report on details of terror activities that might lead to imitation, nor show scenes that are “cruel and inhuman”. “I should be legally persecuted if that’s the case”, she said.