Josh Chin and Paul Mozur:  Journalists in the Crossfire

Part 1

About the event

China has expelled at least 16 foreign journalists this year, by far the most since the country began its “opening and reform” era in 1978. Most are Americans, and all are from U.S. news organizations. The United States, meanwhile, has declared five Chinese media organizations to be “foreign missions” of their government and ordered them to reduce their staff of Chinese nationals by a combined total of 60. It has put most Chinese reporters in the United States on 90-day renewable visas.

These rapid-fire U.S.-China tit-for-tat moves against journalists have no precedent. Why are both governments targeting journalists, and how might this effect the quality of information that decision-makers on each side are able to obtain about the other? Could it accelerate the already rapid deterioration of U.S.-China relations? How can journalists caught in the middle just do their job?

Part 2

About the Speakers

Paul Mozur is a technology correspondent for the New York Times, focused on the intersection of technology and geopolitics in Asia. He has been twice named a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He has covered China's innovation boom, the global spread of disinformation on Facebook, the rise of new surveillance technologies and the emerging tech competition between China and the United States. His articles have revealed how Chinese police automated racial profiling in video surveillance, quietly covered the country in phone trackers and used technology to target minorities in Xinjiang. He has also written about the spread of China's surveillance tools to South America, the fight for digital privacy in the Hong Kong protests and the ways the Myanmar military used Facebook to incite ethnic hatred.

He has worked as a journalist in Asia since 2007. A Mandarin speaker, he previously worked for The Wall Street Journal, The Standard and The Far Eastern Economic Review.

Josh Chin is the Wall Street Journal's deputy China bureau chief, and oversees coverage of general news and China's impact on the world outside its borders. He has covered China for the Wall Street Journal for more than a decade. As a politics reporter in the Journal's Beijing bureau, he wrote about civil society, cybersecurity, the social credit system, state hacking and surveillance, including the overwhelming surveillance apparatus that the government has erected to control Muslims in Xinjiang. He is concurrently a national fellow for New America, and is writing a book about China’s surveillance state.