China Orders 7th Reporter to Leave : 2nd Voice of America Journalist Expelled; U.S. Protests

Amid intensifying anti-American rhetoric from China’s leadership, security officials ordered the expulsion of another American journalist Saturday, bringing to seven the number of Western reporters who have been ordered to leave the country since the beginning of the crackdown on the student-led pro-democracy movement five weeks ago.

Mark Hopkins, a correspondent for the U.S. government’s Voice of America, was summoned to Beijing’s State Security Bureau and given 72 hours to leave the country. He was accused of violating terms of his tourist visa and of spreading “rumors and false propaganda.”

He is the second Voice of America reporter to be deported. Alan W. Pessin, the network’s resident bureau chief in Beijing, was given three days to leave on June 12, after authorities criticized the reporting of Pessin and Associated Press correspondent John Pomfret, who was expelled at the same time.

The Bush Administration responded to the latest expulsion by lodging an official protest Saturday with the Chinese Embassy in Washington. “We regret the continuing attempts by Chinese authorities to restrict the coverage of news in China,” a State Department spokesman said.

He would not respond to the Chinese government’s charges that Hopkins was engaged in violations of martial law while on a tourist visa. “VOA has a worldwide reputation for reporting accurately, fairly and objectively,” the spokesman said.

The Voice of America, which broadcasts in China’s predominant dialects and has millions of listeners throughout the country, has been criticized almost daily by Communist Party leaders as part of their propaganda effort to regain popular support for aging paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and the other hard-liners who authorized the crackdown and subsequent purge of moderates from Communist Party ranks.

Last week, in its initial response to a formal U.S. Embassy protest over a June 7 incident in which army troops opened fire with assault rifles on a diplomatic apartment building housing many Americans here, the Foreign Ministry attacked the Voice of America for “false rumor-mongering” in reporting the U.S. protest.

Saturday’s expulsion of Hopkins came against a backdrop of increasingly strident anti-American articles and editorials.

Under the headline, “Who Is the Real Protector of Human Rights?” the party newspaper People’s Daily declared that “the American policy of racial discrimination, racial separation, selling slaves, racial elimination, persecuting refugees on a large scale and commiting terrorism should be forbidden, since they invade human rights.”

On Thursday, the newspaper charged in another article that the U.S. House of Representatives, in unanimously approving limited economic sanctions against China, had “wantonly distorted the facts” and was “arbitrarily interfering in China’s internal affairs.”

Declaring that the harsh steps China took last month were necessary to put down a movement it considers a long-planned, conspiratorial “rebellion” aimed at overthrowing the Communist Party and it system, the People’s Daily said an “anti-China current” has developed in America. And it charged that “some legislators in the United States pose as ‘guardians of democracy and freedom’ to make indiscreet remarks about and criticism of the internal affairs of other countries.

“Those legislators, who said nothing when the rulers of their own country used armed soldiers and police to suppress black people in their struggle for basic human rights and the students who were against the Vietnam War, attacked the quelling of the counterrevolutionary riots in China as a ‘bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy movement.’ ”

Non-American diplomats in Beijing speculated that most of the anti-American propaganda appears to be meant for domestic consumption. U.S. officials have confirmed that diplomatic contacts between American Embassy personnel and senior party leaders have resumed, and Washington, along with most European capitals, has begun to soften its line against Deng’s increasingly consolidated new leadership.

Times staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this story from Washington.