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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

I worry if this reporter will now end up in jail. Does that happen?

According to Southern China Morning Post article, her media accreditation to cover the National People's Congress has been revoked, her Weibo (twitter equiv in china) taken down, and search results of her name online also taken down.

SCMP is a paper in Hong Kong, so should be credible.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/213...

Tried this little experiment, here's the reporter in red on baidu:

https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%BC%A0%E6%85%A7%E5%90%9B/979...

Tried the reporter in blue on baidu and no relevant results to her:

http://www.baidu.com/s?ie=utf-8&f=8&rsv_bp=0&rsv_idx=1&tn=ba...

Jail-wise, hard to say, but her livelihood is going to suck for awhile.

In general yes: people get tortured and killed for stuff like that but maybe she's too prominent

Don’t be silly. China is not a paragon of free and fair government but it is not North Korea. She will not be “tortured and killed.”

German news media of highest reputation (including Zeit and Spiegel) regularity report about political torture and murders in Zimbabwe, Turkey, Syria and yes: China.

Of course that happens to persistent political activists, but it's far more likely that she will just be frozen out of state press conferences, boycotted for interviews and briefings and her employer pressurised to 'let her go'. A bit of general administrative and police harassment and obstruction is also probably in order.

fair enough

Can you provide some links?

I tried to find the relevant articles (admittedly I read the most striking ones two years ago, but I assume the regime hasn't improved that much since then?). If you are really interested I can google again.

If you really don't know where to begin, poke around on amnesty.org, which has reports on various countries. You'll be able to get more information on any given story or situation by using google.

Hopefully not. They usually jail people for disrupting the harmony of their society but I think intent matters.

E.g. organizing protests or selling banned books, but I don't think an unintentional meme starring oneself is up there as a jailable offense.

However I do see her job getting harder as a result. E.g. getting assigned to more boring stories, being denied a press pass.

China is not what many people make it our to be. Comparing to just a couple of decase ago, it now has a huge educated middle class.

I don't think China is a free country, but if you dig a little, you'll see that many people openly speak up and protest. Big labor protests that don't make it into western media are quite regular.

You wouldn't want the unemployed masses of Europe and America to feel a connection with chinese workers, would you? Better to cover a story on how they're stealing our jobs and making billions.

And this is why moral equivalence sucks. Yes Europe is not perfect, and America isn't either.

Do reporters get ruined for body language implying they might disapprove of what a single congressman says (but it might be a held-in sneeze too) ?

No.

Imperfect democracy IS NOT THE SAME as a dictatorship.

BTW: let's hope being ruined for life is all that happened to this woman. She wouldn't be the first one to be brutally murdered.

You speak for those who can't.

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