Bomb threats shadowed international reporters who covered Chinese celebrity dissident

Reporting on Wang Jingyu, a Chinese celebrity dissident, can be perplexing, stressful and scary. Ask Marije Vlaskamp, a correspondent with de Volkskrant, a leading Dutch daily newspaper.

In the fall of 2022, Vlaskamp said Wang told her that people he thought were working for the Chinese government were harassing and threatening him. Wang asked if she would publish a story, but Vlaskamp declined.

“He was giving me lots and lots of information in a really chaotic way,” Vlaskamp told NPR in an interview last month. “It was so difficult to check everything he was saying and so time consuming, also a lot of . . . information he (gave) me was really not a news story.”

Then something happened that was news.

The Chinese embassy in the Hague told Dutch police they had received a bomb threat in Wang and Vlaskamp’s names. Police cordoned off the area. Vlaskamp and Wang denied any involvement. Another bomb threat in their names followed at the Chinese embassy in Norway.

Read more: NPR