China Says It Will Expel French Journalist
By MICHAEL FORSYTHE

HONG KONG — China’s Foreign Ministry said Saturday that a French journalist would be expelled from the country for writing an article about ethnic violence in China’s northwest, one that the government viewed as sympathetic to terrorism.

In her Nov. 18 article for the French newsweekly L’Obs, the reporter, Ursula Gauthier, discussed the terrorist attacks that had killed 130 people in Paris several days earlier, and she criticized the Chinese government’s attempt to link them to the intermittent violence in the Xinjiang region of China. She said the attacks in Xinjiang, often carried out by members of the Muslim Uighur minority, had “nothing in common” with the Paris killings and stemmed from China’s own hard-line policies toward the Uighurs.

In a statement on Saturday, Lu Kang, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, said that because Ms. Gauthier had failed to apologize for the article, “which incited the outrage of the Chinese people,” it was “not suitable for her to continue working in China.”

“China has consistently safeguarded the legal right of foreign news organizations and foreign correspondents to report in the country,” Mr. Lu said. “But it absolutely does not tolerate the freedom to embolden terrorism.”

Ms. Gauthier, who has reported from Beijing for L’Obs since 2009, said she was told on Friday that unless she apologized, she would have to leave China on Dec. 31, when her visa and accreditation expire.

“What can you say to such an absurd thing?” Ms. Gauthier said on Saturday by telephone. “They are not indicting me, they are just expelling me and trashing my name. So it is only rhetoric, that’s all. They don’t believe a word of what they say.”

Hundreds of accredited foreign journalists live and work in Beijing and Shanghai, and it is rare for a reporter to be expelled from the country. Ms. Gauthier would be the first since Melissa Chan, an American citizen working for Al Jazeera’s English-language service, was forced to leave in 2012 after reporting on issues such as forced land seizures and China’s illegal detention centers, known as “black jails.”

Ms. Gauthier’s case illustrates the sensitivity with which the government views coverage of Xinjiang, an area about the size of Alaska where Uighurs, an ethnic Turkic group, make up about 40 percent of the population. Some Uighurs have pushed for a separate state, frustrated by decades of settlement by China’s majority Han ethnic group, as well as restrictions on Uighurs’ movements and limits to their economic opportunities.

“Human rights organizations say the violence in Xinjiang is more a result of the radicalization of young people pushed to the limit by the pitiless repression that is wiping out all aspects of Uighur life — culture, language, religion, access to education, jobs, even a passport,” Ms. Gauthier wrote in her article.

Chinese citizens who publicly criticize the government’s policy toward the region risk imprisonment. Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent human rights lawyer who was given a suspended three-year jail sentence on Tuesday, has criticized the government’s assimilation policies in Xinjiang on social media. Ilham Tohti, a Beijing-based Uighur economist known for his efforts to promote Uighur rights within the Chinese system, was convicted of separatism in 2014 and sentenced to life in prison.

As a foreign reporter, Ms. Gauthier risked no such punishment. But her article was denounced in editorials in the state-owned news media and publicly rebuked by a government spokeswoman, and she was subjected to a torrent of online criticism that was often vulgar.

Her article focused on a deadly knife attack in September on ethnic Han miners in a remote region of Xinjiang. More than 50 people were reported to have been killed. China’s state-run news media did not report details of the attack, or the ensuing manhunt, until after the Paris attacks two months later, and the official reports depicted China’s battle against Xinjiang militants as part of a global struggle against terrorism. Before the Paris attacks, only foreign news organizations had written about the mine attack.

The state-owned China Daily, in a Nov. 23 editorial, said that Ms. Gauthier “did not show any sympathy for the victims of the terrorist attacks in China.”

法記者批新疆政策 陸拒發簽證

法國「新觀察家」雜誌駐北京記者高潔（陸譯郭玉），因批評北京當局對待新疆維族人的手法，記者簽證未獲延期，形同驅逐出境。大陸外交部發言人陸慷昨回應此事，稱高潔的相關報導「公然為恐怖主義行徑張目」，已不適合留在大陸工作。

中方因不滿高潔在巴黎連環恐襲後發表文章，抨擊北京的少數民族政策，決定不再續發高潔簽證，她必須在月底簽證期滿前離開大陸。法國外交部就此風波表示遺憾，文化部也表示，會持續和中方溝通，希望避免發生遭驅逐出境事情。

美聯社報導，高潔對中方的指控表示「很可笑」，認為鼓勵恐怖主義於道德及法津上都不對，若她作出這種行為，應該被起訴；但這只是中方藉口，藉此威嚇駐大陸的外籍記者。

高潔該篇報導批評中國大陸，指大陸當局將巴黎恐攻連結到大陸打擊新疆暴力的活動，但她認為新疆的情況和巴黎恐攻毫無共同之處，並提及新疆維族人長久抱怨受到歧視，而且在文化和宗教上受管制。

報導引發大陸環球時報等陸媒強烈抨擊，陸外交部發言人華春瑩更在記者會中指名道姓斥責。紐約時報指出，大陸外交部三度召高潔前去，要求她道歉認錯，但高潔說，「我一個字都不會改」。

「新觀察家」周刊表示，這是北京給外國記者發出的極差訊息，無法接受陸對新聞自由的攻擊。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/world/asia/china-says-it-will-expel-french-journalist.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytimes.com/china/20151227/c27china/zh-hant/

2015-12-27．聯合報．A12．兩岸．記者郭玫君