Thread by @MatthiaSander

On today's World Press Freedom Day, I would like to share my story of what can happen to a foreign journalist in #China while on holiday. A long thread with photos and spies. #WPFD2022 @RSF_inter @fccchina

I went on a cycling trip in Guizhou province in mid-April. It all started on day two, in Qianxi city. When I returned to my hotel after dinner around 11 p.m., four people were waiting for me in the lobby. Their leader said they were from...

... the local community administration. He asked me to come with them for a covid test at a hospital. I said I had a negative 24-hour test and green health and travel codes on my phone (mandatory in China). He said all travellers from Guiyang (where I had come from) were...

... required to do a covid test upon arrival in Qianxi. I said I was surprised the hotel hadn't told me earlier, and that it was already late, and that I was planning to leave Qianxi early the next day. We agreed that I would give them...

... my phone number, and they would leave me alone. The agreement didn't last long: 15 minutes later, I received two calls from a local number while brushing my teeth, so I didn't answer. Around midnight, someone knocked on my door...

... - a hotel employee who only said into her walkie-talkie: "He's here." Around 2 a.m., someone knocked again and said "room service". I ignored it. The knocking went on for ~ 10 min. Another voice said, "I'm only here for a covid test". I continued ignoring them, they gave up.

The next morning, six people were waiting for me in front of my hotel room. The woman on the very left said they were from the local community, and that they wanted to do a covid test. We did the test, then the woman said: "You're a newspaper journalist from Shenzhen, right?"

(Foreign correspondents in China are here on a journalist visa, and whenever they check into a hotel, their passport information is being given to local authorities.)

A man, who was previously hiding, appeared. "What service do you need?", he asked, "who do you want to get in touch with?" I don't need any service, I said, I'm just travelling. The two repeated similar questions several times, I repeated my answer.

The whole situation felt threatening, not least because they were standing in my door, getting closer and closer (social distancing, anyone?). I ended up saying bye-bye, I pushed the door shut, took my stuff (bike bag, helmet) and left.

From the moment I left the hotel on my bicycle, two guys on a motorbike followed me, plus a van without license plates.

I zigzagged through Qianxi city, looking for a café and a bike shop, sometimes taking narrow lanes. The followers lost me. Three hours later, around noon, they found me again well outside the city, on a road to the nearby mountains.

I took a break at a convenience shop. At least one car stopped nearby, and two guys came closer to watch me. When I approached one of them, he pretended to check seedlings on agricultural land.

The other guy passed by several times, until I invited him to come over. "Who are you?, I asked. "What's your job, where do you live?" He just said he didn't have a job and lived here. The shopkeeper said he didn't live here.

I asked him why they were following me, he said something about covid prevention, while sitting pretty close to me and taking his face mask off so I could hear him more clearly.

As I entered the mountain area, I had to go through a covid control check point. A man in plainclothes, surrounded by policemen and health workers, checked my health and travel codes, then offered a ride. "Can we take you somewhere?" I declined, saying I just wanted to cycle.

A guy on a scooter followed me. I tried to talk to him, but he would only confirm that he was a Guizhou local.

Later he disappeared, and a couple of other cars followed me for the rest of the afternoon, most of them always staying behind me, others waiting in front of me, with some guys taking pictures of me.

I hoped that all this would end once I crossed the county boarder, but it didn't. So I called a taxi and went to neighboring Sichuan province. Once there, I thought that the same situation might repeat itself if I checked into another hotel in a smaller city, so I went ...

... all the way to the provincial capital Chengdu to visit two friends, one European, one Chinese. Again, I thought everything was okay, but on the second evening, the three of us were followed by several guys in plainclothes while going for a drink at a tourist site.

On the third and last evening, the two friends, their Chinese wives and three kids (aged 2, 4, and 5) and I went for dinner at a truly impressive and beautiful tourist site, the 2200+-year old irrigation system Dujiangyan, just out of Chengdu. Again, we were followed by around...

... 10 guys in plainclothes. There were at least two groups of guys each walking close to us in turns in the tourist crowd, seemingly to overhear our conversation. One group of three at least twice took photos of this bridge exactly when we were walking through the picture.

The same group disappeared in another direction when we turned left, but ended up sitting on the terrace of the same restaurant we had dinner in. During dinner, one of the guys seemed to film himself standing in front of this river, then turned around, apparently filming us.

I later told one of the friends what was happening, but didn't want to scare the others, so only took a few sneaky videos of our followers. The group of three waited for us as we left the restaurant. Here are screenshots.

The next day, on a 8+-hour train ride back to Shenzhen, several guys, all apparently without any luggage, seemed to check where I went whenever I went to the dining car or the toilet.
To this day, I don't know why all of this happened.

I suspect the problems in Guizhou are related to the problems @EmilyZFeng had after reporting a story on poverty alleviation in Bijie, which is close to the area I visited. globaltimes.cn/page/202110/12…. But that doesn't seem to explain what happened in Chengdu.

Already back in 2013, Spiegel China correspondent @bzand had big trouble while reporting in Bijie: bangkokpost.com/world/329729/g…