An India-China media war with no winners

Hello readers, and welcome back to the newsletter.

It hasn’t been a great past few weeks for reporters on the India-China beat. In today’s The Hindu newspaper, I have a column on the recent expulsions of journalists by India and China. You can read the column here (partial paywall).

In this post, I thought I’d add a little context to the expulsions (there's been a lot of media coverage on this recently, although not all of it accurate).

As I write in today’s column, in my view, both sides bear their share of the blame for letting things come to this — and as I also unfortunately write, the mess began with New Delhi curtailing Chinese reporters visas for reasons as yet unexplained — and both sides also stand to lose from this race to the bottom. What is needed now is a political agreement that insulates the work of the press from diplomatic rows. That, however, remains an unlikely prospect. You can read the column here.

So, what’s the state of play? This Bloomberg report this week brought a lot of attention to the visa row:

The last Indian journalist in China has been asked to leave, as Beijing and New Delhi eject each other’s reporters in a tit-for-tat row deepening a rift between the Asian economic powerhouses.

Chinese authorities have instructed the Press Trust of India reporter to leave the country this month, according to a person familiar with the matter. His departure will wipe India’s media presence from the world’s second largest economy at a moment of deteriorating ties.

Well, as of today (June 16), this is actually inaccurate. The last Indian reporter in China has not been asked to leave and still has valid credentials (which the Chinese Foreign Ministry also publicly confirmed this week).

The last Indian reporter has been told he will have to leave *if*India doesn’t renew the visa for the last Xinhua reporter in New Delhi. As I understand, the last reporter’s visa is currently under processing. In all likelihood, an extension will be denied so the last Indian correspondent in China will probably leave in coming weeks. But that has not yet happened.

The Bloomberg report also had a puzzling detail on the origins of this mess:

Indian officials familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the situation, said the visa spat began a few months ago over Indian journalists hiring assistants in China to help with reporting. Beijing imposed measures limiting employment to three individuals at a time who must come from a pool provided by the Chinese authorities, they said. India doesn’t have a cap on hiring.

I don’t know where this is coming from — and I’m surprised to see Indian officials quoted as saying this — but this is not true. Let me be clear: the expulsions of Indian journalists in China had nothing whatsoever to do with what they were or weren’t doing in the country. Spinning it as such needs rebutting.

What led to the recent expulsions?

On April 4, both Anshuman Mishra, who’s the Prasar Bharati correspondent (India’s public broadcaster) and I were told by Beijing that our visas were frozen and this was in response to a Chinese journalist being made to leave end-March, leaving only two Chinese reporters in India. By barring us from returning to China, Beijing was leaving only two Indian reporters in India. In other words, tit-for-tat.

Then in May, India asked another Chinese reporter to leave, saying he had stayed in India for too many years (I’m not entirely sure why this would be a concern for New Delhi , surely that’s a matter for the reporter’s employers?).

This then prompted Beijing in mid-May to again retaliate by asking a third Indian reporter, from the Hindustan Times, to leave. Now, we are left with one reporter in each country, and quite possibly, it may be down to zero soon, depending on what India decides to do with the last Chinese reporter.

It does concern me that Delhi appears to have come to the conclusion that it is fine with having no Indian reporters in China as long as it is able to have no Chinese media presence in India. At least, that’s in my opinion the inescapable conclusion as Delhi was well aware that the recent expulsions - particularly in May - would mean the third Indian reporter almost certainly being kicked out. Yet it went ahead with it nonetheless.

As for Beijing, it made the problem worse in 2020 by freezing new Indian visas. As I understand it, Beijing’s response to the three month visas has been somewhat peculiar, because as far as I am aware, it was not raised by MFA officials at a high level for quite some time. Beijing responded simply by stopping visas in 2020.

The lack of dialogue through this entire period has been telling. On a sobering note, one wonders if India and China cannot come to an agreement on something as simple as guaranteeing and protecting the work of half a dozen reporters on each side, pray what chances do we have of making headway on the far more weightier and complex issues that plague the relationship?

Finally, does all this matter?

I’ve seen the argument made that it doesn’t matter having reporters on the ground especially when access is restricted in the Xi era. But as I mention in my column, being on the ground gives you a texture of a country that is otherwise impossible to glean, even from simple daily conversations. I can attest to that, writing as I was on China from outside the country from 2018-2022. Being back on the ground last year gave me a sense of immediacy and perspective — to cite but one example, the impact of the pandemic policies and the unprecedented protests I covered in Beijing in November.

Looking at it from purely India’s self-interest, having no on-the-ground reporters, whether from private Indian media or from the public broadcaster, is surely self-defeating. Given India’s challenging relations with China - geography means this isn't going to go away — it’s become all the more important to understand what’s happening — and not from viral social media videos or posts that more often than not give you, at best, one-tenth of a broader picture, or at worst, something entirely misleading.

Blocking off all channels of communication and exchange merely because of the current problems is extraordinarily short-sighted and self-defeating — by both sides.

Recommended reading

From India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar’s recent interview with The Economist on the on-going LAC negotiations:

TE Turning to the northern border region, you’ve spoken of the need to return to “peace and tranquillity” along the line of actual control. Would agreeing a buffer zone [with China] on the last remaining positions achieve that peace and tranquillity? And how likely is it, do you think?

SJ I want to rewind this a bit. Our problems with China are not new. They actually go back into the 1950s. If my memory serves me right, our first negotiation with China was as early as 1958. And I think I’m the only one in the room who was even born then. Now, very often, when you have these situations, you have the two claimed lands, the Indian-claimed land, and the Chinese-claimed land, they do not coincide. And both sides send out patrols to assert their claim line. And the problem can often be that these patrols collide with each other and then contest their jurisdictions. This has been the running problem.

Now, when you have a very tense situation or occasionally a violent situation, the two countries have agreed on some understanding where there is self-restraint on patrolling in a certain defined area. This is not happening for the first time. If you go to 1958, it happened then as well. We had a major difference with the Chinese in the 1980s, when negotiations went on for seven or eight years. Even then we had an understanding what you will do, but more importantly, what will you not do? And this understanding works both ways. If there are places my troops cannot patrol, there are also places that his troops cannot patrol.

That’s one element in how we have addressed some of the current problems. We have some other problems still to be resolved. When we are talking, how do you produce a solution which works for both sides? I wouldn’t predict simply because at this time, I’m still talking to them. The point I would make is every time if you look at the last three years, there’ve been people who’ve been very ready to say, well, you know, this is impossible to solve, this is never going to happen. And if I can put it very politely they’ve been proved wrong again and again.

TE Let’s imagine that there is a buffer zone agreement on the last remaining flashpoints. How would that potentially change India’s relationship with China?

SJ I wouldn’t get into that hypothetical. I just won’t get drawn in on that.

TE There have been 18 rounds of commander-level talks. You have been making progress working through the different flash points, and the pattern has been to create some buffer zones on both sides. So if you can do the same in Demchok and the Depsang plains, which are the points they’re talking about now, could that provide a sustainable solution?

SJ I don’t want to get drawn into this but every sector and every situation is not the same. Even what worked in a, b, and c, if you go down to the intricacies, which sadly I cannot share with you, they’re not identical. This is a really complex problem, which is why we need so many rounds and such great effort. It’s not a question of looking at the map and deciding what you’re going to do. There’s a topography out there. The topography has its own value and its own disadvantages. So each one has been a very detailed, very complex negotiation. But your comment presupposes that extrapolating previous solutions is a way out of this one. I’m not prepared to be drawn into that, simply because that need not be the way the problem can be resolved. So I would caution that it’s not just a question of saying three places got done this way and therefore four and five will, too. That’s not the way it works.

Interesting comments and the most we have had so far on what’s been going on in the negotiations.

Does this mean a resolution at Demchok and Depsang - the last two spots - and completing disengagement is nowhere on the horizon? At the very least, it means the current state of relations is most likely here to stay for a while yet.

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Thank you for reading. I ended up writing more than I intended to on the visa saga - though I made an effort to spare readers even more detail of the ins-and-outs - but here’s hoping there’s a resolution soon, and that this wouldn’t be something that coming issues of the newsletter would need to dwell on.

Post-script: I started this Substack in January 2021, thinking it would be a nice space to share on-the-ground notes from living in and reporting from Beijing. I finally ended up in Beijing only in June 2022. The visa that took me 30 months to get ended up being invalidated in less than nine months. So much for “on the ground”....