At an unusual late-night press conference called for 11:45 PM Friday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao announced the Olympic reporting regulations for foreign correspondents were becoming permanent. This is welcome news.  Without such a decision, temporary Olympic rules would have expired at midnight -- and we would've reverted to 90's-era regulations that required us to get government permission before traveling and conducting interviews in the provinces -- even if our interviewees were other foreigners.  

      This is another step in China's opening to the outside world, and moving closer to adopting international standards. It is also a positive legacy of the Olympic Games, which were the initial rationale for relaxing the antiquated decades-old rules in January 2007. Since then, Chinese authorities have concluded that foreign media coverage during the Olympics was generally positive for China's image -- and this undoubtedly gave more open-minded officials added confidence to push for a permanent liberalization.

     I've always felt it was impossible to revert back to those 1990-vintage regulations -- like trying to put toothpaste back into the tube. (Disclosure: I was president of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China for three years, until May of this year.) However we're not out of the woods yet.

    One of the next steps for foreign correspondents here is to try to ensure that Chinese sources and interviewees are not intimidated, punished or (as has happened in the past) subjected to physical violence.  Despite the less stringent restrictions during the Olympics period, foreign reporters noted quite a number of implementation problems at the grassroots, including at least 30 incidents during the Games themselves.

     All too often in such cases, it appeared local authorities increasingly were pressuring Chinese citizens not to speak to foreign media. When such intimidation succeeded, foreign correspondents were unable to talk with their intended interviewees -- regardless of the more liberal rules. This is something to watch carefully.

     Here's a statement on the new regulations from the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, the president of which is Jonathan Watts of The Guardian: