NEW DELHI – India has expelled the last remaining Chinese reporter as he was denied a visa extension earlier this month, it emerged on Wednesday.
The reporter, from China’s official Xinhua news agency, left New Delhi around one week ago, reports cited sources as saying.
It is for the first time since the normalisation of relations between the neighbouring countries in the 1980s that there is no Chinese journalist present in India.
There is currently only one Indian journalist from the Press Trust of India news agency who remains in Beijing.
On June 12, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the Indian reporter was “still working and living normally in China” but hinted at taking countermeasures if India denied extension in visa to the “the last Chinese journalist in the country”.
“Since 2020, the Indian side has refused to review and approve Chinese journalists’ applications for stationing in India and limited the period of validity of visas held by Chinese journalists in India to only three months or even one month,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin told a press briefing. “As a result, the number of Chinese journalists stationed in India has plummeted from 14 to just one,” he said then.
