Cornelia Vospernik is the former Beijing Bureau Chief of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) and current Head of News, of ORF Eins. She began her career freelancing for a local ORF studio in the Austrian province of Carinthia at the age of 15. From 2000 to 2002, she was the ORF London bureau chief, and was ORF’s Beijing-based China and Southeast Asia bureau chief from 2007-2010. She has published two books, China Live (2008) and In China (2009), about her work in China. She was named Austria’s foreign political journalist of the year in 2009 and has received two Austrian human rights awards for her work in China.

IPI: Is it accurate to say that you started the ORF office in China?
CV: Yes, I did. I opened our office in February 2007.

IPI: Did your experience with reporting in China change during the years you were there?
CV: What I experienced was a shift in how we were treated. When I first went there, I found China quite open, willing to allow reporting, mainly for the run-up to the Olympics … . There was an earthquake in 2008 and it was very surprising for all the foreign correspondents that we were allowed to go there and to report from there. We were hoping that the openness would last — but it didn’t really. With the economic crisis, the regulations got tighter again, and they got tighter and tighter up until the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize [to jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo], which was the last big story I covered before I went back [to Vienna] at the end of 2010.

IPI: Would you say it is more difficult for foreign media to work in China, as opposed to the Chinese media?
CV: Well, it depends. It’s certainly more dangerous for the Chinese to work in China, because people often get threatened. You hear cases of bloggers or local newspaper journalists who are beaten, also killed. You never hear about anything like that happening to Western journalists. I also didn’t like taking Chinese citizens with me, because whenever I did they were the first ones to get interrogated by the police, who get stopped. So in a way, being a Westerner protects you, but being a Westerner also makes it very, very difficult to access certain stories, because very often, the first idea the authorities have about you is that you are an enemy, that basically whatever you do is against China.

IPI: Did you ever have any notable incidents with the Chinese authorities?
CV: What I actually found most prevalent in China was that it was often not the police who stopped you or harassed you, it was the local thugs. We went to film a collapsed school in Sichuan once after the earthquake, and we wanted to go there and film what happened to it. And there were police there, but they didn’t stop us. But there were some locals who were attacking us, as in physically, and the policemen stood by and watched it. So you wouldn’t have the police actually doing anything against you, it’s that the police don’t prevent other people from doing something to you. I’m often convinced that these other people are — well, I wouldn’t say they are playing the police, but they can only act the way they act because the police allow them to.

IPI: So from your experience, do you think that Chinese censorship is overblown by foreigners?
CV: It depends. When you hear about the Internet in China in the West, people sometimes must get the sense there is no Internet at all. So in that respect, I believe it’s overblown, because … for the vast majority of Chinese people, it’s no issue. For the vast majority of Chinese people, just like the vast majority of the people on the planet, they just want to make a better life for themselves. So, is censorship overblown? Yes and no. It’s overblown in the respect that sometimes you get the impression that nothing is possible, which is not true. But there are certain red lines that you don’t cross. And whenever you try to cross these lines, whenever an issue gains the potential to grow into some civic discontent, you’ve reached a red line and you notice censorship. You notice very harsh and immediate censorship.

IPI: Do you think China deserves more positive attention from foreign media?
CV: Well, I’ve had discussions with officials … trying to convince them, trying to explain to them the role of the Western journalist, that we don’t always positively report on our own politicians. But I never get very far … . I’ve very often experienced a big suspicion towards us, even from people who are really Western-educated. But “deserves positive attention”? In a certain respect, yes. On the other hand, no, because of the way they treat us.

When you live and work in China, you see topics in a different way. In some countries in the West, especially in America, you get things like “Chinese factories flooding America, forcing the Americans with a gun pointed at their heads to buy Chinese products.” Sometimes the China-bashing takes on a size that is just overblown. In Europe, I think we are not so dramatic. But like I said in the panel, there are certain expectations from home media to go with the Chinese cliché, and you have to work towards these expectations as well. I often said that working in China for me was like working between two millstones: on the one side you would have Chinese censorship and propaganda trying to crush you, and the other millstone would be the expectations at home, and you’re trying to fight against both of them.