A DELEGATION from the World Association of Newspapers (FIEJ) is leaving Beijing today frustrated and pessimistic about the prospects for press freedom in China and the fate of imprisoned Chinese journalists.
The group came to Beijing on Sunday at the invitation of the official People's Daily, hoping to engage Chinese newspaper executives on human rights issues.
However, "all our appeals for solidarity among journalists fell on deaf ears", the FIEJ director general, Mr Timothy Balding, told a press conference in Beijing yesterday.
The delegation from FIEJ, the Paris based association founded in 1948 to promote press freedom and the economic independence of newspapers, also had an hour long meeting with the Chinese Foreign Minister, Mr Qian Qichen.
In all their meetings they raised the cases of 26 arrested Chinese journalists, 10 of whom are known to be in prison. They focused in particular on Ms Gao Yu (49), former deputy editor of Economics Weekly, who was awarded FIEJ's annual Golden Pen of Freedom in 1995.
On October 2nd, 1993, two days before she was to depart on a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism research fellowship, Ms Gao was arrested on charges of leaking "state secrets" about Chinese reforms in articles for the pro Beijing Hong Kong magazine Mirror Monthly.
She was sentenced to six years in prison on November 11th, 1994, without consul or family members, Mr Balding said.
"We believe the charge to have no grounds. She is in ill health and kept in a cell with 12 other prisoners, common criminals, including five murderers.
"The only thing standing between her and early release is her refusal to sign a confession but she has not done so on the grounds that she is innocent of the charge."
On Friday, Ms Gao was also given the world press freedom prize by UNESCO and this will be awarded on May 3rd, World Press Freedom Day, Mr Balding said.
The reaction of the Chinese foreign minister and senior officials at the People's Daily was that they said they did not know about her, said the FIEJ's chairman, Mr Jayme Sirotsky.
They also said that "this is a matter of Chinese justice it is out of our hands," he said.
Mr Pedro Ramirez, publisher of the Spanish newspaper El Mundo referring to an alleged "charm offensive" by Beijing against critics like FIEJ, said: "I haven't been charmed at all - on the contrary. They have been polite but it has been a disaster to realise how far they are from understanding what freedom of the press should be. It has been very disgusting to hear what arguments, they use."
Among the leading Chinese officials the group met were Mr Shao Huaze, president of the People's Daily, which is the official organ of the Chinese Communist Party, Mr Xu Zhongtian, vice president, and Mr Zhu Xinmin, general secretary.
Mr Ramirez appealed for world newspapers to take up the case of Ms Gao. "On May 3rd the world will know who is Gao Yu," he said. "Any time a Chinese leader goes to a country one of the items he will have to deal with is Gao Yu," he added.
He believed "they were disturbed by our way of talking to them: we used completely non diplomatic language we had nothing to lose."
Mr Balding added: "We were very upset by the general attitude of our hosts. They considered press, freedom a trivial matter in China. All our appeals for solidarity among journalists fell on deaf ears."
Their hosts had even advised the group not to raise the Gao Yu case with the Foreign Minister and implied that the meeting would be cancelled if they insisted.
The list of journalists imprisoned in China includes well known democracy activists Liu Ziaobo, Wang Dan and Wei Jingsben.