A journalist with the media group Bloomberg has been released by China after being held for over a year, the news agency said on Tuesday.
Haze Fan, a Chinese citizen, was released in January this year but the news agency was made aware of the development last weekend.
Bloomberg has not yet been able to contact Fan.
It’s not clear why the news of her release wasn’t made public for over five months.
“Haze Fan, a member of Bloomberg News’s bureau in Beijing, was released on bail in January, according to the Chinese embassy in Washington, more than a year after she was detained on suspicion of national security law violations,” Bloomberg said in a report on Tuesday.
Fan’s case remains under investigation while she is on bail pending trial, the embassy said on its website.
“The statement, dated May 6, was issued in response to a World Press Freedom Day advert published in the Washington Post on May 2, which featured Fan. Bloomberg News was made aware of the embassy statement over the weekend,” the report said.
“At the request of Fan’s lawyer, China’s state security authority decided to release her on bail in January 2022,” the Chinese embassy statement dated last month said.
Information about Haze’s release was possibly released by the Chinese embassy in Washington because Bloomberg is a US media company.
Haze was last seen being escorted out of her apartment in 2020-end but was formally arrested only in July 2021.
“We are encouraged that Haze is out on bail,” Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait said in the report, adding, “She is a much valued member of our Beijing bureau – and we will continue to do everything possible to help her and her family.”
A report by journalism watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said last December that at least 127 journalists were detained in China, calling the country the “world’s biggest captor of journalists”.
The report indicated how Beijing views journalism: not as a tool to provide information to the public to make informed decisions, but as an instrument of state propaganda.
A high-profile case involving a foreign journalist is that of Canadian Cheng Lei, a mother of two and a former anchor on Chinese state broadcaster CGTN, who was detained in August 2020 and formally arrested last year for “illegally supplying state secrets overseas”.
In March, a Chinese court deferred sentencing Cheng, an ethnic Chinese, at a closed-door trial that Canberra condemned for a “lack of transparency”.
