Shortly following the start of protests in Tibet on March 10th, the Chinese government expelled all foreign journalists from Tibet, including areas traditionally part of Tibet that are currently outside the Tibetan Autonomous Region. This has brought a loud outcry from the international community and media outlets.

Now, rather than responding to this pressure by opening up all of Tibet to foreign journalists, China is launching a three day propaganda tour with with twenty-six journalists. Bloomberg reports:

Journalists from 19 organizations including the Associated Press, the U.K.’s Financial Times, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post and Taiwan’s Central News Agency, set off today for a three-day guided tour, state-run Xinhua News Agency said. Bloomberg News wasn’t invited to participate in the event, arranged in response to media requests for access to the region.

The New York Times adds more disturbing details:

To sway international opinion, Beijing allowed a group of about 26 hand-picked foreign journalists to travel to Lhasa on Wednesday to witness the damage in the city and interview victims of the riots, according to the state-controlled media.

Very few journalists have been able to report from inside Tibet. Shortly after the March 14 riots, the government began forcing foreign journalists out of Lhasa. Government blockades have also prevented foreign journalists from reaching Tibetan areas in neighboring provinces.

A Tibetan-American friend, sharing the Times article with me, writes:

The crazy thing is, the TAR has always been a special case of “off limits” to journalists, but now even parts of Tibet incorporated into other provinces are blockaded. This is in clear violation of the explicit commitment made by Beijing ahead of the Olympic Games that everywhere in China (except TAR and Xinjiang) would be free for reporting.

To recap, China banned foreign journalists from Tibet. Then they picked 26 journalists that they are comfortable with and invited them on a guided tour of Tibet. They are scheduling interviews with Chinese government approved “victims of the riots,” a term that almost certainly applies to Han Chinese settlers who may have been hurt in protests. Undoubtedly, these journalists will not be given access to Tibetan political prisoners, or monks, nuns, and lay people shot by the Chinese security forces, or Tibetans whose family members were killed in this crackdown.

I am always hesitant to make comparisons between contemporary events and the actions of Nazi Germany, but this propaganda junket immediately reminds me of the charade put on for the Red Cross at Theresienstadt concentration camp. It will be up to these Communist Party-approved journalists to see if they see through the hoax better than the Red Cross did.

Hand-picked journalists being given a “guided tour” is propaganda and window dressing, not press freedom. This cannot be welcomed one bit, as doing so would only credit the PRC propaganda machine for achieving the response that they seek to receive. I hope those governments and organizations pressing for media access to Tibet do not accept this junket as anything other than a continuation of China’s propaganda and disinformation campaign regarding Tibet.