OSAKA -- For Yukihisa Nakatsu, former Beijing correspondent for Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, when he heard about the expulsion last month of three Wall Street Journal reporters based in the country's capital, it was a case of the same old-fashioned repression of foreign media by the Chinese government.
"It's been 22 years since I was expelled, and China seems to have changed a lot, but in its essence, the politics and the one-party rule have not changed a bit," Nakatsu, who was ousted from Beijing in October 1998, told the Nikkei Asian Review. Like the trio from the U.S. news group, Nakatsu was ordered to leave China even though his press accreditation had not expired.
