Though the Chinese have made efforts to increase press freedoms for foreign journalists covering the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, reporters are still expecting to encounter some challenges based on long-standing restrictions and mentalities.

To accommodate the more than 20,000 journalists expected to arrive in Beijing for the Olympic Games in August, the Chinese have increased access to government sources, locations and the Internet.

Director of Media Operations for the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games Sun Weijia said in an official statement that treating the members of the press coming to Beijing "kindly" was important.

"Olympic media operations are expected to have a deep impact on China's future media services as it is a brand new subject matter in the country's higher-learning and academic institutions," he said in the statement.

Some journalism advocates are hoping the Olympics will provide an opportunity to help push China toward liberalizing its approach toward press freedoms in general.

"We also want to make better known (the) media conditions in China, which are quite complex and are not just cut and dry authoritarian censorship," said Bob Dietz, Asia program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. "It's a really dynamic situation. And we've been trying to capture that in the writing and reporting we've been doing."

2007 reforms
According to Dietz, foreign journalists are treated differently than Chinese journalists -- reforms enacted in January 2007 allow foreign reporters to go anywhere and talk to any source they want. Chinese journalists, however, work under the confines of an elaborate, but not airtight, system of government censors, and can face jail time for violations, Dietz said.

The reforms themselves are temporary -- they expire in October 2008 after the Paralympic Games. And though they are aimed at increasing access, they are not always adhered to, he explained.

Dietz said local officials around the vast country -- who are accustomed to having some autonomy -- do not always abide by mandates to expand access to sources and locations. Since the reforms were enacted, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, an association of Beijing-based professional journalists, has reported 230 instances of foreign journalists saying they were harassed by local officials, he added.

The Chinese have set up a government hotline for foreign correspondents to report such cases.

When violence broke out in Tibet leading up to the Games, the issue of press access was put to the test. Tibet is a semi-autonomous region under Chinese control since the 1950s, which has been trying to assert its independence ever since.

After riots in March, when anti-Chinese protesters clashed with police and burned vehicles and shops, the Chinese government barred foreign journalists from entering the area.

When China sentenced 30 people to prison for participating in the riots, foreign journalists could not cover the trial in Tibet's capital Lhasa, according to the Washington Post.

Government-media relations
In a broader sense, foreign journalists in China often have trouble finding people willing to be interviewed for fear of government retaliation if they speak to the press.

Jocelyn Ford, a freelance journalist based in Beijing and a chairwoman of the media freedoms committee for the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, said she has been followed by Chinese authorities and had to abandon reporting trips and continue them later in order to get her story.

"You have to realize that China is coming out of a soft authoritarian type of state where the government doesn't think the public is necessarily entitled to information, so you're working in that environment. They're used to not having to tell people [the information] they want," she said.

When Ford worked for an English-language program on China Radio International, her Chinese coworkers referred to the state media as the "mouthpiece of the government," says Ford.

But now, the government is trying to transition out of that mindset, focusing more on public relations than on absolute control of information, and that transition has been rocky, she said.

Chinese media are caught between competing market and political forces as China has gone through significant reform in the past several decades, according to Peter H. Gries, a professor and the director of the Institute for U.S.-China Issues at the University of Oklahoma.

"More and more media outlets sink or swim based on circulation numbers and advertising revenues, which creates incentives to publish politically sensitive stories that will sell. But this can put the media's two 'bosses' at odds. One Chinese Communist Party response to competition from the 'market' boss has indeed been not just to censor the press, but to seek to guide and influence its direction," Gries explained.

He added that China seeks to promote its international image in order to increase nationalism among its citizens through the press so when Western journalists report negative news, a backlash can emerge.

"There is also a tendency in China to 'blame the messenger,'" Gries said. "So it will be the Western press reporting on negative aspects of China's rise, rather than the domestic sources of those problems, that are likely to become the target of Chinese nationalist ire."

Internet access
While the Chinese government spends considerable effort and expense to monitor and control what its citizens look at on the Internet, foreign journalists will largely enjoy unfettered access during the Olympics.

China and Iran have highly extensive Internet filtering systems, said Stephanie Wang, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, who works on the center's Open Net initiative, a global study on Internet censorship. The Chinese government can block access to certain Web sites, such as the YouTube video-viewing site, or cut off access to the Internet altogether, she said.

The International Olympic Committee in early April called on China to allow unfettered Internet access to the press after complaints that the Chinese had stepped up its interference after the Tibet protests, the Associated Press reported.

Wang said the question is what the Chinese government will do if a major event happens during the Games.

"There won't be a big problem accessing information [for foreign journalists], but I think if something unexpected happened and they went to report on it, it could get interesting," she said.

-- By Quinn Bowman, Online NewsHour