Harrowing account of the foreign journalist in China...
"The Chinese Communist Party rejects what it sees as Western values: no democracy, free speech or rule of law. Under Xi Jinping, China has taken a turn to even greater tyranny, locking up dissidents, lawyers, artists. Xi has jailed his rivals, clamped down on protest. The Party controls the narrative, it controls the media and has sent the message that there is a diminishing place for the pesky prying eyes of foreign reporters...Journalists are an enemy of the state in Xi Jinping's China. I experienced this first hand in a decade of reporting China for the American news network CNN.
During that time I was detained by Chinese authorities on several occasions, at other times I and my TV crew were physically attacked, punched, kicked and had our equipment smashed by plain clothes secret police.
My family was under constant surveillance, if we had a meal outside our home with friends, police would take photographs. My phone was tapped and our house was bugged. When I was away on assignment the police would come to my home, question and intimidate my children.
People I had organised to meet or interview for stories would be warned off if they went ahead and some of them were arrested and held sometimes for several months with no contact with their families.
Stories that CNN broadcast were monitored and regularly censored. TV screens would go black while the story was being aired.
China is obviously not the West. The freedoms we take for granted do not exist there. Yet for decades there has been a blind faith in the belief that the Communist Party would collapse or at least have to reform.
So the logic went: as Chinese grew richer they would demand greater freedom. The opposite has happened...a richer China means a more powerful Communist Party.
Xi Jinping is determined to complete what he calls 'the rejuvenation of China', his 'China Dream' is a nation returned to the apex of global power...His vision is a nation in harmony, but that means locking up a million ethnic Uighur Muslims in what human rights groups have called re-education camps, 'brainwashed' to pledge allegiance to the Party.
Xi has cracked down on protest in Hong Kong and threatened Taiwan not to pursue independence but work toward reunification with the China mainland. If this is harmony, it is harmony by force.
For decades China pursued a policy of 'hide and bide': hide your intentions and bide your time. No longer. Xi Jinping wants to finish the work of his predecessors and strengthen the hold of the Party.
After taking power, he told the Party leadership in 2013, to prepare for a long period of conflict against what he called ‘forces at home and abroad' trying to overthrow the Party. The world is at a tipping point. The tensions with China are accelerating."
