The Communist Party deleted a host of public WeChat accounts this week without prior warning. The popular microblog, which boasts 271 million users, primarily functions as a means for people to communicate individually or in small groups. The website, however, also has more than two million public accounts, which can be viewed any WeChat user.

A recent study suggests that Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, censors Chinese language search requests in accordance with Communist Party directives. Tests run by Greatfire.org, an organization that monitors Internet censorship in China, show that Chinese language searches on sensitive topics return heavily sanitized search results on Bing. The same searches on Google, however, return a more ideologically diverse selection of search results.

The Chinese government dispatched ten busloads of police to harass and detain activists, petitioners, and journalists who gathered outside of Beijing’s Number One Intermediate People’s Court during the trial of Xu Zhiyong, a prominent lawyer and activist. Chen Yunfei, a Sichuan-based activist who was detained by police for gathering outside the court, claimed that several hundred police and plainclothes state security officials lined the streets of the intersection outside of the court.

The Chinese government renewed press accreditations for all Bloomberg journalists and some New York Times journalists who had been awaiting renewal. Chinese authorities, who normally renew press credentials and resident permits for foreign journalists in November or December, delayed renewal this year in apparent retaliation for the two American news outlets publishing stories on the wealth of senior Communist Party officials.

In part one of China Law & Policy’s three part series on China’s crackdown on foreign journalists, Elizabeth Lynch discusses the way in which the Communist Party has burdened muckraking American journalists operating in China through making it increasingly difficult to obtain a visa.