I’ve been censored!

I almost made it two whole months!

But finally, it’s happened!

Something I wrote did not fly with the powers-that-be who mine articles for personal opinions at China.org.cn. Unbeknownst to me, I had inserted “personal opinion” into an article I wrote on two Swiss photographers, Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer. Personal opinion is a huge no-no in traditional journalism. I was pretty embarrassed.

Here is the disputed original. See if you can spot the opinion.

Braschler and Fischer could not dodge the bureaucratic red tape so easily at other times. In Shaanxi Province’s Yan’an to shoot at the only retirement home for revolutionaries of the Chinese civil war, the institution’s director insisted on having official permission to take pictures. Despite the new press freedoms, Braschler and Fischer were forced to seek authorization from the media department of the local government, where they were bounced around from official to official because no one wanted to take the responsibility.

They also were arrested three times. “For no reason — that would not happen in other countries,” Fischer said.

“We’ve never been arrested before, so that was quite a surprise,” Braschler said. “Particularly for us, it [photography] was just the most natural thing we did.”

[Here, I describe the situations that led to their arrests.]

This is what appears in the final version (emphasis added for your convenience):

The photographers faced many other challenges on the road. They battled a respiratory infection, a gastrointestinal infection and three cases of food poisoning. They took countless gambles on where to find hotels or places to stay. In the Taklimakan Desert, near a military nuclear test site, they were allowed to stay at a hotel only after negotiations and on the condition that no one saw them. Foreigners were not allowed in the region without proper paperwork.

Braschler and Fischer could not dodge the bureaucratic red tape so easily at other times. In Shaanxi Province’s Yan’an to shoot at the only retirement home for revolutionaries of the Chinese civil war, the institution’s director insisted on having official permission to take pictures. Despite the new press freedoms, Braschler and Fischer were forced to seek authorization from the media department of the local government, where they were bounced around from official to official because no one wanted to take the responsibility. They also were questioned at the local police station three times by authorities.

In China, it is not exactly an arrest if police show up, take you in their car to the police station and question you for hours before releasing you. That, I will admit, was a mistaken assumption on my part. I offered to change it to something that more accurately reflected their situations. Here were some of the unapproved suggestions I made:

They were detained by local authorities …

They were taken to the police station by local authorities who were uneasy about what Braschler and Fischer might show the world.

They were taken to the police station and questioned for hours, twice after taking portraits and once after talking to protestors involved in a property dispute.

It seems that Braschler and Fischer, who were there and all, may have misunderstood exactly what was happening when the police took them down to the station and grilled them for hours about photos they had taken (twice) and their conversation with some local protestors. It was irresponsible of me to write something so blatantly biased about Chinese police without even consulting them about what happened. (I did try enlisting my editor/supervisor to help me contact the police, but she said she was too busy.)

Anyway, here is how Braschler viewed what happened to him and Fischer concerning the three arrest-like situations they found themselves in:

We’ve never been arrested before, so when we got arrested, that was quite a surprise. Particularly for us, it [photography] was just the most natural thing we did. We took a portrait of the mechanic, and the Communist leaders of a town in Liaoning took offense at us for photographing someone who wasn’t wearing proper clothes. And that was quite a shock because we didn’t expect to be arrested for something like that …

In the west if a mechanic is dirty in the evening, it means you’ve worked hard all day, and that’s OK. If you wear proper clothes, it means you’re lazy.

In Xinjiang, there, it was not such a big surprise. We photographed a railway security guy. In a way we knew it was sensitive: it’s Xinjiang, there are the problems with the Uighurs — it can happen. We kind of thought, OK, we take the risk, get arrested, and sure enough …

The really shocking one was the third one that was like a land dispute in Wuhan [in Hubei Province]. We didn’t even take out any cameras, nothing — we just talked to people. It was an area where they already have the modern high rises … and people were insisting they [residents] move out of their houses. These people saw us, they came to us, realizing this was their chance to make their call public, but in five minutes we were arrested.

It was pure intimidation. And it worked, obviously. I mean, what can you do? If they arrest you, what do you do?

I so wish I can get the police’s side of this story. It didn’t help that my supervisor took this issue up with me 30 minutes before the end of the workweek, which also happened to be my last day of this internship.

But really, all of my stories here have been biased and reflect the views of only one person or side. It’s tough to find people to interview and is a huge inconvenience to need to go through so many other people just to schedule an interview and then have it translated. Sigh. I am learning …