[W. Knight]

CBC News is closing its China bureau in Beijing, after pleas for an incoming journalist's working visa went unanswered:

Our French-language service, Radio-Canada Info, applied for a visa for its then-new China correspondent, Philippe Leblanc, in October 2020. Despite numerous exchanges with the Chinese consulate in Montreal and requests for meetings over the last two years, there is still no visa.

(...)

This past April, my counterpart at Radio-Canada, Luce Julien, and I wrote to China's ambassador to Canada, Cong Peiwu. We requested once more the visa for Leblanc. As we told the ambassador, "We still believe in the importance of bearing witness to current issues that affect your country. In the absence of a journalist on-site, we are obviously unable to do this work and will have difficult decisions to make."

Receipt of our letter was acknowledged and nothing else.

(...)

There is no point keeping an empty bureau when we could easily set up elsewhere in a different country that welcomes journalists and respects journalistic scrutiny.

Closing the Beijing bureau is the last thing we want to do, but our hand has been forced.

(From CBC News' editor-in-chief Brodie Fenlon)