China: CFWIJ Condemns The Smear Campaign Against Journalist Vicky Xu
Location: China, Beijing
Date: April 13, 2021
The Chinese authorities resorted to a slander campaign against the Chinese Australian journalist, Vicky Xu. The journalist, who regularly reports on the human rights crisis in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, opened up on Twitter regarding the state-backed harassment she has had to face through new media outlets and online trolls for her work.
In a Twitter thread, posted on April 6, journalist Vicky Xu opened up about the numerous attacks she faced, on her character and her well-being, as a result of her work on the Chinese mistreatment of the Uyghur community in Xinjiang. The articles and published about her accused her of recreational drug use, and sexual misconduct, as well as labeled her a “traitor to the race”, referring to her as a “demon”. Vicky alleges that this is proof that the government wants to hide the human rights crisis currently underway against a minority population, and these are tactics to intimidate her into silence.
7.36 mil people clicked on #许秀中 (my name), read about a “race traitor”, “female demon” who writes about Xinjiang AND gets involved in gang bang, drugs. A wonderful way to alert the public something is up in Xinjiang, something echoing the cultural revolution and worse pic.twitter.com/VZPHiubfdw
— Vicky Xu / 许秀中 (@xu_xiuzhong) April 6, 2021
It is important to realize that Vicky Xu is not the only journalist writing for a foreign publication that the Chinese government targeted. Earlier this year, the Chinese government officially arrested another Chinese-Australian journalist Cheng Lei after almost six months of detention on charges of "illegally supplying state secrets overseas”. During her time in detention, Cheng Lei was neither given access to a lawyer nor was allowed to contact her loved ones, despite no formal charges against her. Similarly, Haze Fan, who worked in the Bloomberg News bureau in Beijing, was arrested by plain-clothed officials on December 7, 2020, and remains in state custody on vague charges.
The Coalition For Women In Journalism is seriously concerned about the blatant attempts that the Chinese state is employing to silence the women journalists reporting for foreign news outlets. It appears that where the authorities cannot directly interfere with what goes to print, it attempts to intimidate journalists into silence. This is utterly reprehensible and in violation of several human rights laws. It is a travesty that countries around the world are not doing more to secure the rights of their journalists stationed in China. The Chinese state needs to issue an urgent apology to Vicky Xu for the vicious campaign against her.
The CFWIJ strongly condemns the police brutality against journalists. We demand the immediate return of the press cards seized from the security forces. Policies to intimidate journalists should be abandoned, and journalism should be practiced under the criteria of freedom of the press.
If you have been harassed or abused in any way, and please report the incident by using the following form.