“It doesn’t make sense to keep an empty office when we could easily create one elsewhere in a different country that welcomes journalists and respects journalistic scrutiny,” CBC News editor-in-chief Brodie Fenlon said in announcing the move in a blog posted on Wednesday. “Closing the Beijing office is the last thing we want to do, but our hand has been forced.” The decision follows numerous exchanges and requests for meetings with the Chinese consulate in Montreal since October 2020 to secure a visa for Philippe Leblanc, a journalist for Radio-Canada, the CBC’s French-language counterpart. Another attempt was made in April, with a letter to China’s ambassador to Canada, Cong Peiwu. While receipt of the letter was acknowledged, Fenlon said, nothing else followed. “While there has been no dramatic expulsion or sharp public statements, the result is the same. We cannot get visas for our journalists to work there as permanent correspondents,” he wrote. CBC’s latest Beijing correspondent, Saša Petricic, has returned to Canada following China’s lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The CBC has since returned to China, Fenlon noted, to cover the 2022 Winter Olympics, and coverage has been severely limited. In January, a report published by the China Foreign Correspondents’ Club said he was “concerned by the breakneck speed at which media freedom is declining in China.” The report also said officials were using the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to delay approvals for new journalist visas, cancel reporting trips and deny interview requests. While the CBC looks for a new home in East Asia, Leblanc will work from a new location in Taiwan for the next two years. The closure of the Beijing bureau also comes as CBC journalists continue to be barred from Russia. The network’s Moscow office was forcibly closed in May in retaliation for Ottawa’s broadcast ban on Russian channels RT and RT France. The expulsion of CBC journalists from Russia comes after 44 years in Moscow and is believed to be the first time in the broadcaster’s history that a government has forced the closure of one of its offices. “We hope that China will one day open up to our journalists again, just as we hope that Russia will one day reconsider its decision to expel us,” Fenlon wrote on his blog. “When it comes to Russia and China, for now at least, we will have to find new and different ways to continue to bring Canadians the best in international and global coverage of events and people in the region.”
