Simon Elegant guesses what was behind the new rules for journalists:

…Actually, I think it’s an interesting reflection of the way, perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, that foreign reporters actually function as an aid to central government efforts (or perhaps I should qualify that even further and say efforts by some parts of the central government in Beijing) to control the excesses of provincial and local offcials in areas such as corruption, the rape of the environment etc. Beijing is always play a complicated and delicate game with both its own media and the foreign media. In this case, I think they’d rather not have had the criticism which might have accompanied a decision to revert to the bad old days. But I don’t think that was a major factor: if it was really important, as they have demonstrated on many occasions in the past, there would have been no hesitation in going back to the old days. But I think on balance, it was calculated that as foreign reporters are an unavoidable evil, they might as well be put to some use…

A decree makes new freedoms permanent, but some limits remain:

BEIJING - China took a further step toward opening itself to the world, announcing Friday that an easing of restrictions on foreign journalists enacted for the Olympics would become permanent.

Premier Wen Jiabao signed the new decree, which took immediate effect, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao at a late-night news conference.

Under the new regulations, which had been anticipated by journalists, foreign reporters would not be required to get government permission to travel within the country or to interview Chinese citizens.

“This is not only a big step forward for China in opening up to the outside world, it is also a big step for further facilitating reporting activities by foreign journalists,” Liu said…

On Dick Ebersol and the great lengths that made the Olympics and NBC event:

“Mr. Ebersol also made a very early decision to use Mr. Phelps — and his mother — as the centerpiece of NBC’s marketing. The first promotions for Beijing focused on Mr. Phelps’s relationship with his mother and played during NBC’s coverage of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The network followed that the same day with another promotion featuring Mr. Phelps and his dog, Herman, placing it in the network’s coverage of the National Dog Show, which followed the parade…”

Will at Imagethief looks into the official transcripts of Wednesday’s IOC/BOCOG press conference:

“‘Chinese culture always emphasizes the concept of harmony.’ In principle perhaps. In practice, I can safely say after four years here, less so. Still, track record to date: Zero protests approved. Very harmonious. You have to give Wang props for having the data points to support his thesis. You also have to admire the bureaucracy’s perfect ability “resolve” these cases. How they might be resolved Imagethief will leave to his readers to imagine. …
There is nothing inherently wrong with providing a transcript to journalists who have often anyway recorded the interview themselves. In fact, when dealing with foreign spokespeople and interpreters, a translated Chinese transcript can be a big help to journalists trying to find relevant material. The problem is that such transcripts are often “cleaned up” prior to distribution…”

Tanks in Beijing have left the impression that they’re aimed at the reporters themselves:

“The move, which was imposed over the heads of the Beijing Olympic Committee, was a vivid illustration of the continuing power of the Communist Party even as the country has been opened to unprecedented from the outside world.
It followed a letter sent to the editors of all newspapers in the country containing 21 rules for reporting during the Olympics.
The letter, leaked to The Daily Telegraph, lays particular stress on anything to do with foreigners and is clearly aimed at preventing any events that undermine the show of national unity that has surrounded the Games being released to the general public.
The armoured personnel carriers, unprecedented at recent Games, were stationed at either end of the main press centre, one of a number of increased security measures put in place around Beijing. Armed police stood with sub-machine guns in key areas, including at the press centre entrances.”

Writer Evan Osnos answers questions about his New Yorker article “Angry Youth”:

“You’ve identified an important disconnect between Tang’s appetite for Western ideas and his own hypotheses for the roots of Western attitudes toward China. As he sees it, Westerners are brainwashed through education and media on issues such as Tibet and China’s human-rights record. Intellectually, he admires the skepticism of Western thinkers; it is one of the elements that attracted him to study them. But he gives less attention to dissident voices because, from where he sits, he doesn’t see the impact of their views on foreign attitudes toward China. His understanding of the mechanisms of Western public opinion is comparatively weak. When presented with a range of articles and photos that were, to his mind, flawed in similar ways, he imagined an unseen hand, an editorial conspiracy. (I spent much of our first conversations answering questions about the basic workings of a free press: the origin of story ideas, the role of editors, etc.)”

A look at the influential Chinese journal ‘Dushu’ in its heyday, the years 1996-2005:

“The publication date for this long-planned selection of articles from Dushu—probably China’s leading intellectual journal of the past decade, as well as its most controversial—has turned out to be highly ironic. In July 2007, even as the six-volume Essentials of Dushu collection was appearing in the bookshops, its two chief editors, Wang Hui and Huang Ping, were being dismissed from the monthly magazine by its parent company, SDX Publishing. The official grounds for this seemed scarcely plausible: initially there was talk of falling circulation, although in fact the number of Dushu subscribers had risen under Wang and Huang, from around 60,000 to well over 100,000. SDX then announced that it was implementing a company policy that required all chief editors to be full-time, rather than complement their work with university teaching, as was the case for Wang and Huang. The company could provide no explanation, however, as to why it had suddenly ‘remembered’ this policy, which had existed for many years without ever being enforced.”

Human Rights Watch releases an authoritative report on China’s broken promises to the world’s press:

“While this report focuses on foreign journalists, it must be noted that Chinese journalists, who already operate under far greater constraints, are being subject to further controls in the countdown to the 2008 Olympic Games. In late 2007, the Central Publicity Department issued a notice which instructed Chinese journalists ahead of the Olympics to avoid topics which generate ‘unfavorable’ publicity in the foreign media, and to be extremely careful in reporting about subjects including air quality, food safety, the Olympic torch relay, and the Paralympics; which occur in Beijing in September 2008. In June, President Hu Jintao urged China’s domestic media to ‘maintain strict propaganda discipline…and properly guard the gate and manage the extent (of reporting) on major, sensitive and hot topics.’”

An entire episode of NPR’s On The Media from China.

“From WNYC in New York, this is NPR’s On The Media. I’m Brook Gladstone, reporting this week from China. We’re lingering near a restuarant window in Beijing — OTM producers Jamie York, Megan Ryan, and I — listening to the sweet sound of music pouring out into an alley. Caught eavesdropping, we’re waved in to watch a rehearsal of China’s Olympic theme song, “We Are Ready” …

On The Media’s China blog leaves mainland China on an optimistic note:

“We’ve done about 25 big interviews on this trip and one thing they’ve all had in common is optimism. We’ve waited, day after day after day, for someone to tell us about the bad, the really bad, parts of doing journalism in China. That day never came…

“By all accounts China is more open, and Chinese people more free to express themselves then they were 10 years ago. That’s it. Things are in motion here. There’s a long and unknown road ahead but they are on it and don’t want to pull over for an interview about the past. That would only slow the traffic even more.”