What working conditions can foreign journalists travelling to China for the Games expect?
Jonathan Watts: They can expect a heavily censored internet, despite assurances from the International Olympic Committee that website access would be unfettered. At the Olympic media centres this week, reporters were unable to open sites critical of the authorities, such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. They can expect local people to be cautious about speaking critically in public about the government, the communist party or the Olympics. Several critics, including the human rights activist Hu Jia and the petitioner Liu Jie, have been put in prison or re-education through labour camps, partly because they spoke out at this sensitive time. They can expect to travel more freely around China than would have been the case three years ago. The new Olympic reporting regulations have made reporting trips easier than in the past, but the rules are only patchily applied. Many Tibetan areas are still off limits or very difficult to enter. The same is true of districts in Sichuan where parents
