The group, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), stated that the Communist Party of China-state locked up 50 reporters last year—an all-time high among the countries that the New York-based group with correspondents around the world tracks. Myanmar’s military regime is the second with 30 jailed journalists. Israel, a democratic country, was the third with a record of 29 because of its imprisonment of Palestinian journalists following the start of the Israel-Gaza war in Oct 2023.
The CPJ report said that across the world, at least 330 journalists were jailed as of Dec 2025, down slightly from the record high of 384 reported the year before. China was not only the world’s worst jailer of journalists in 2025 but it also routinely tops CPJ’s prison census.
