Covid-19 tests and remote reporting await media covering China’s ‘two sessions’

Fewer journalists will be allowed to attend the country’s biggest annual political event when it gets under way next week

All but a small group of state media outlets will be limited to live feeds and video chats

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Press conferences will be conducted online during this year’s “two sessions”. Photo: Simon Song

Published: 5:20pm, 15 May 2020Updated: 6:34pm, 20 May 2020

Stricter rules will be placed on participants and journalists for this year’s the “two sessions”, the annual gathering of the country’s legislature and advisory body.

Fewer journalists will be allowed at the event, and those who do enter will be restricted to viewing live-streamed sessions at the media centre. Foreign journalists will also have to be tested for Covid-19 in advance.

Beijing delayed the annual sessions this year for the first time in decades due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which has sickened more than 82,000 people across the mainland, killing over 4,600. Originally scheduled for early March, the National People’s Congress will start in Beijing on May 22, while the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference will convene a day earlier.

Only journalists from the state-run People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency and Central China Television will be allowed into the Great Hall of the People, where the meetings are held, according to the Association of China Industrial Newspapers, an organisation overseen by the All-China Journalists’ Association.

Press conferences and other interviews will be conducted through video chats or phone calls, and the public will have access to live feeds of the proceedings.

Sources told the association that the quota for journalists has been cut from 3,000 in the past to a few hundred this year.