Michael Peuker (36) works for the French-speaking Swiss television RTS in Shanghai and is currently reporting on the major protests. Since the weekend, people across China have taken to the streets to protest against the strict zero-Covid policy and the restrictions that come with it.
When Peuker positioned himself with his cameraman for a live broadcast of the TV program “7.30 pm” on Sunday evening, he saw the red-blue flashing lights of a police patrol stopping behind him on the monitor. And that five minutes before he had to go on the broadcast.
“The agents opened the window and shouted ‘Control!'” Peuker Blick reports on the phone. Since the journalist did not have his identity card and press card with him, but had left them in the nearby office, the police asked him and the cameraman to go inside immediately. Peuker managed to stop the agents by telling them he would go live in five minutes.
cameras seized
During the broadcast, Peuker also reported on the slogans chanted by the demonstrators and mentioned the name of Chinese President Xi Jinping (69). When the police noticed this, they approached the reporter, who held out his right hand to defend them. “Because they were getting closer, I finished my sentence early and closed the broadcast,” Peuker tells Blick.
The police confiscated the expensive cameras and asked Peuker to fetch his ID from the office. “They told us there would be an investigation against us to see if we were breaking Chinese law.”
At the office, Peuker called his boss in Switzerland and asked him to inform the embassy if he did not get in touch in the near future. When the journalist returned to the police vehicle, the officers urged Peuker and the cameraman to hurry.
Suddenly free
“But then the tide suddenly turned,” reports Peuker. After a call to headquarters, the police returned the journalists’ equipment and let them go. “They told us that they had spoken to headquarters and that they had been ordered to release us.”
They would only have asked Peuker what he had been talking about on TV. “When I told them it was about the demonstration, they just asked, ‘What demonstration?’.” The interlude with the police lasted about 40 minutes and made him angry, Peuker told Blick.
The situation in Shanghai has now calmed down somewhat. Many people just come to watch. Peuker: “But many see simply observing something that is forbidden as a silent protest.”