<span style="color: #222222;">A new report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has said China is the world's biggest captor of journalists with at least 127 reporters currently detained. China has justified the arrests of reporters and citizen journalists by accusing them of provoking trouble. The report titled 'The Great Leap Backwards of Journalism in China' reveals China's violations against its own international commitments to freedom of opinion and expression. The report demonstrates how Beijing views journalism – not as a tool to provide information to the public to make informed decisions, but as an instrument of state propaganda.<br />''<br />''The Paris-based RSF also noted that press restrictions had worsened with the pandemic. At least ten journalists and online commentators were arrested in 2020 for the simple act of informing the public about the COVID-19 crisis in Wuhan. To this date, two of them, Zhang Zhan and Fang Bin, are still detained.<br />''<br />''The advocacy group's report also listed how Chinese authorities used the fight against terrorism as a pretext to detain Uyghur journalists reporting on Xinjiang. China has been accused of committing crimes against humanity against what it sees as Islamists and separatists in the majority-Uyghur region.<br />''<br />''As per the report, other methods which China used are using its overseas diplomatic missions to attack journalists; media blockades; censorship of rising number of topics which included #MeToo movement, natural disasters in addition to sensitive topics such as Tibet, Taiwan, Corruption etc; forcing local journalists to study Communist Party ideology and download a propaganda application on their phones; visa blackmail and expelling or intimidating journalists. It also focuses on the deterioration of press freedom in Hong Kong, which was once a model of press freedom but now has an increasing number of journalists arrested in the name of national security.<br />''<br />''Foreign journalists too are facing trouble. China's intimidation of foreign reporters, based on surveillance and visa blackmail, forced 18 of them to leave the country in 2020. Gui Minhai, Yang Hengjun and Cheng Lei, three foreign journalists of Chinese descent, are now being detained on espionage charges, RSF said.<br />''<br />''Referring to the partial opening up under the previous government, RSF Secretary General Christophe Deloire wrote that President Xi Jinping, in power since 2013, has put a brutal end to this partial opening and restored a media culture worthy of the Maoist era, in which freely accessing information has become a crime and to provide information an even greater crime.<br />''<br />''RSF ranks China 177th out of 180 in the 2021 World Press Freedom Index, just two places above North Korea.</span><br />