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When bird flu hit the Chinese city of Tianjin in February 2004, I went there on assignment for Kyodo News with two friends from a Hong Kong newspaper. We wanted to report on the mass poultry graves and quarantines being used in China to control the disease. About twenty minutes into our walk through a dusting of white disinfectant powder, some official called the police. A smiling uniformed officer stopped us on a dirt road, took our ID cards, and called in a district foreign affairs director.

A foreign affairs car took us to the district government office, where we met with the district publicity chief, Yang Jinsong. He questioned us for about fifteen minutes and shook his head. “Very regrettable,” he said three times. As foreign correspondents, we shouldn’t have approached the ranchers without a Tianjin interview permit. We shouldn’t have freely examined the charred and feathered burial plots in a cordoned area guarded by traffic police officers (one of whom had let us through).

Yang looked over at the foreign affairs guy, conferring in silence on what to do. “Let’s eat lunch,” Yang said. In a diner next door, our captors ordered a banquet — including chicken. Yang said: “We’re not afraid to eat that,” and he proved it. We chatted about nonsense until they sent us back to our news bureaus in Beijing.

Another incident occurred last summer at a hotel in the coastal city of Qinhuangdao. My colleagues and I were meeting with a group of laid-off workers — they had invited us there to talk about their demands for severance pay from a bankrupt military-uniform factory. Suddenly, three plainclothes officers stormed in, yelling, “Police!” We were told we should have applied to the city foreign affairs office for permission to cover the dispute.

At Qinhuangdao city hall we were interrogated individually after stonewalling a panel of cops and foreign affairs officers. I worried about what they would do later to the laid-off workers, so even though my interrogator was courteous, I withheld everything. He called me uncooperative. Another officer erased digital photos that we’d been allowed to take hours earlier in the panel room (Kyodo News software resurrected some shots later). The day ended with a dinner invitation. We declined it and returned to Beijing.

That’s about how almost every detention ends, at least for foreign reporters. I’ve been detained six times in the last two years and, for the most part, I’ve found gentle grilling more common than high-heat roasting. Chinese police, probably afraid of causing some kind of diplomatic incident, seldom touch foreign detainees except for an occasional come-this-way shoulder slap. They serve us water. No handcuffs. We can make cell-phone calls. We rarely need to remove or surrender anything but our IDs, which we get back.

After detaining me for two hours in early 2004 over random Shanghai street interviews about old houses being demolished for redevelopment, the interrogating officers apologized for wasting my time. When a Beijing officer detained me for talking to people outside the State Council citizen-complaint office in mid-2004, he helped my research by taking me through a typical complaint letter and explaining how citizens exaggerate their cases. In thirty minutes, I walked.

To read the articles in the May/June 2006 issue, click here.

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