Melissa Chan, otherwise known as the China Bureau of Al Jazeera English has been expelled for reasons that the Foreign Ministry declined to specify in an utterly surreal press conference. She’s the first correspondent to be expelled from China since 1998, though a lot of the local press corps report increasing difficulty in getting visas renewed.
There’s some speculation she was booted out because of a documentary on laogai labour the channel ran last year, even though it had nothing to do with her. It may also have something to do with the peculiar vulnerability of overseas Chinese in China. I think her employers may have been a factor. Picking on AJE to send a message about reporting you dislike is something of an international tradition. I mean, it’s not as if they slung a hellfire missile through her hotel window or anything.
Being a one man band, Ms Chan took the opportunity to get out of Beijing more than other correspondents: a typical Melissa Chan tweet would usually read something like ‘am at the outskirts of X village: oh fuck, here come the audis’.
Beijing’s attitude towards the countryside is painfully ambiguous. On the one hand there are things that party-state central needs to know and it goes to the extent of using spy satellites to find them out. On the other, there’s a lot of resistance to news of how the rural and small town comrades go about their business on a day to day basis. Ms Chan was constantly poking a huge sensitive area simply by getting out of town and digging up stories. That also meant she probably accumulated more complaints about her reporting than other hacks. These wouldn’t be from people who matter, but maybe it all mounted up: there’d be a lot of invisible guanxi strings being tugged there.
Anyway, in honour of Melissa Chan, late of AJE China, let’s reprise the unforgettable story of Farmer Yang and his homemade nebelwerfer.
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