It’s tough being a Chinese journalist these days. They’re being intimidated, beat up, and threatened with arrest. I wrote about one particular case last week:

One of the more interesting stories I’ve been following this week concerns a reporter who was placed on a police “wanted” list after writing an insider trading article. The incident obviously has eyebrows raised not only in the journalism community over here, but also for everyone interested in rule of law and abuse of power.

That incident, which ended “happily” when the warrant for the arrest of reporter Qiu Ziming was withdrawn. However, I think we should be quite concerned that cases like that serve to intimidate investigative journalists from pursuing stories against the powerful.

One of the common elements here is poor decision making by a local official, which is subsequently overturned by a higher-level prosecutor/police. In the case of Qiu Ziming, the warrant was issued by municipal authorities and then canceled by the Public Security Bureau (PSB) office at another, larger city with supervisory authority.

This problem has understandably received a great deal of attention, and perhaps in response, we have new rules issued by State-level authorities:

Prosecutors will have to obtain approval from a higher-level procuratorate before they order arrest warrants for suspects accused of defamation, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate (SPP), the highest prosecution authority of the country, said on Saturday.

[ . . . ]

Xu Yongjun, a press officer with the people’s procuratorate of Haidian district of Beijing, explained that for the defamation cases handled by police and prosecutors, the prosecuting department should review and make a decision whether to approve the arrest in seven days after police make the application.

“With the SPP’s new guideline, it’s conducive to the prosecuting departments to unify the charging standards on similar cases, and effectively resist in the interfering right by the local police and prosecuting department,” he said.

On its face, this sounds exactly right. Insofar as these other cases have been “fixed” by higher-level authorities, a mandatory review procedure would solve the problem. I therefore think that the new rules issued by the SPP are an important step in the right direction.

However, there is something missing in this discussion. The new rule and the context surrounding it deals with defamation. This could potentially encompass acts not only by journalists but also by individuals who, for example, make accusations against employers. An expansive scope is a good thing when the idea is to protect this kind of speech. This was echoed in the words of the SPP:

“We should accurately define the limit between defamation and non-defamation cases and should not consider criticism, accusation or even radical speeches and behaviors to individual officials as defamation,” the SPP said.

But the new rule does not even mention the special context of journalism. The reason why these folks have been intimidated and threatened with arrest is not that they were standing on a street corner somewhere complaining about insider trading or another alleged crime, but they were publishing such accusations in the media.

If I had a magic wand, I would have this new policy somehow acknowledge that “criticisms” made by reporters should be dealt with even more carefully than other forms of alleged defamation. The high-level review process sounds fine, but one would hope that when the new rules are implemented, prosecutors treat incidents involving journalists with a higher standard of care and are extremely skeptical of defamation claims made against a member of the press.