US paper says its reporter was interrogated and held by police while covering Inner Mongolia language protests

Print reporter ‘grabbed by the throat’, held in cell and denied call to US embassy, says Los Angeles Times

Journalists from China, America and Australia have made the news recently amid trade spats and international tensions between their governments

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The Los Angeles Times says one of its journalists was held for four hours and then sent from Inner Mongolia back to Beijing after reporting on protests against a new school language policy in the autonomous region. Photo: AFP

Published: 12:44pm, 4 Sep 2020Updated: 9:44pm, 25 Nov 2020

An American newspaper says one of its journalists was detained and then expelled from China’s Inner Mongolia region while covering tensions over a new policy that reduces the use of the Mongolian language in education.

The Los Angeles Times said in a story published online on Thursday that the reporter was interrogated at a police station, grabbed by the throat and pushed into a cell and held for more than four hours before being forced to leave the northern Chinese region.

The incident comes amid broader tensions between the United States and China over journalists stationed in each other’s country.

The reporter was surrounded by plain-clothes men at a school in Hohhot, the region’s capital, and put into a police car to be taken to a police station, according to the account. It says she was not allowed to call the US embassy.

“One officer grabbed her throat with both hands and pushed her into a cell,” the story says.

Three government officials and a police officer went with her to a railway station and stood at the window until the train left for Beijing, the Los Angeles Times said.