HONG KONG

It was business as usual for the foreign correspondents covering the June 18 Olympic torch relay through the city of Kashgar in China's Xinjiang province. "Usual" meant being confined to roadsides patrolled by police guards and prohibited from interviewing bystanders while a foreign ministry minder insisted, "We are still giving you reporting freedom." Ditto for the Associated Press reporter whom police dragged from the scene of a June 3 public protest by grieving parents in the Sichuan earthquake zone.

Welcome to just two of China's many media "forbidden zones" – geographical areas such as Tibet and Xinjiang, and sensitive issues like public protests and dissidents. In these zones, officials, security forces and plainclothes thugs have free rein to use tactics ranging from obstruction to violence to foil foreign journalists from freely reporting.

Business was not supposed to have been "usual" this year. In 2001, the Chinese government solemnly promised the International Olympic Committee that if Beijing hosted the 2008 Games it would allow greater media freedom and let the world see China as it really is. The Chinese government's "fulfillment" of that pledge was a set of temporary regulations which on paper – but not in practice – granted greater freedom to foreign journalists. Local reporters, however, must still toe the official propaganda line or risk severe reprisals for bucking the system.

China's largest geographical forbidden zone is Tibet, where the government banned all access by foreign journalists in March following protests that turned violent in Lhasa. On June 26, China's foreign ministry suddenly announced that Tibet was officially reopened to foreign media, but stressed that access will be granted "in line with previous procedure" – procedures that rarely resulted in permission to visit Tibet. Foreign journalists will likely remain unable to report on what prompted the Lhasa unrest or to ever verify the number of people killed, injured or arrested in the biggest government crackdown since the June 1989 Tiananmen Massacre.