Last December, when Alice Su touched down in Xinjiang, in northwest China, she was immediately picked off her flight by the police.
Su wasn’t exactly surprised. As the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, she was used to having government minders harass her as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to blunt foreign reporting. Su certainly expected it in Xinjiang, where she aimed to report on the Party’s mass detention and surveillance of Uighurs, an ethnic minority. With international outrage over the situation in Xinjiang growing, Su knew her movements would be closely watched.
When she was eventually allowed to leave the airport, minders trailed her everywhere, interrupting her interviews and even manhandling her in the street.
Some level of interference has come to be commonplace for journalists in China, but the stakes for Su on this trip were higher than ever. Su is one of the few American reporters left with on-the-ground access to th
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