Tokyo has lodged a protest with the Chinese Foreign Ministry for barring a reporter with the conservative Sankei Shimbun daily from participating in pool c
Tokyo has lodged a protest with the Chinese Foreign Ministry for barring a reporter with the conservative Sankei Shimbun daily from participating in pool coverage of a high-ranking bilateral meeting in Beijing, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Thursday.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s exclusion of the reporter from the Sankei, which is often critical of China, is “extremely regrettable,” and runs counter to Tokyo’s stance that “basic human rights, including freedom of expression, and the rule of law are universal values shared by the international community,” Suga said.
“Those values must be guaranteed in any country,” he added.
Vice Foreign Minister Takeo Akiba and Yutaka Yokoi, the Japanese ambassador to China, each made a protest to the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Wednesday, the top government spokesman said.
The incident involved a media pool tasked with covering the talks on Wednesday between Akiba and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
A day before the meeting, the Chinese Foreign Ministry notified the Japanese Embassy that it cannot grant the Sankei, whose reporter had been chosen as a member of the pool, access to the meeting “in accordance with the ministry’s policy,” the Sankei said in an article published Wednesday.
Further negotiations between the ministry and the embassy went nowhere, with Beijing adamantly rejecting a reversal of course on its decision, the paper said.
