China accuses foreign media of stirring trouble over quake

A Chinese official accused some foreign journalists yesterday of travelling to the Sichuan earthquake zone to incite insurrection against the government.

Hou Xiongfei, vice-head of the Sichuan Communist party committee's propaganda department, made the claim at a press conference.

He was asked why foreign journalists, including Financial Times reporters, had been harassed and prevented from reporting on sensitive topics in the build-up to the first anniversary of the quake, which killed almost 90,000 people.

Mr Hou denied that any reporters had been harassed or detained in recent weeks and said the government had not received any complaints, despite many accounts from foreign journalists of official interference in their work.

“A very small number of [foreign] media and journalists did not go to the earthquake zone to conduct interviews but to incite trouble and we have proof of this,” he said. “[They] didn't go to interview the masses in the earthquake zone on the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the earthquake zone but to ask [the people], ‘Why don't you organise yourselves and fight the government?' ”

He did not say which foreign media were involved and did not offer proof.

This week alone, journalists from organisations including the Irish Times, Finnish Broadcasting Company, Agence France-Presse and the FT have been stopped from interviewing parents of children who died when shoddily built schools collapsed in the earthquake on May 12 last year.

An Irish Times reporter was briefly detained and a Finnish television crew and FT reporters were physically attacked by government officials in separate incidents while trying to interview bereaved parents who are calling for an investigation into why so many schools collapsed in the quake.

At least four other media organisations have reported similar incidents in the past month.

Sichuan officials gave the first official estimate yesterday for the number of children lost in the quake, saying 5,335 died and 546 children were left disabled.

Independent estimates of the number of children killed in school collapses have reached a similar figure but are believed to be incomplete.

Some parents have filed lawsuits alleging that faulty construction contributed to the school collapses, but no courts have accepted these cases. Human-rights groups have documented numerous cases of parents being harassed, detained and in some cases assaulted by officials and security forces.

The Sichuan government repeated its official verdict, saying the collapses were caused solely by the force of the quake, which measured 7.9 on the Richter scale