Eight-square-metre photomontages showing the Chinese president making a gesture universally understood as “up yours” were to have been driven around Paris on five trucks all morning.

One truck managed to pass in front of the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe but the other four were stopped before entering the city. Photos of the photomontage were taken in front of some of Paris’ most emblematic monuments while RWB activists on bicycles, waving banners with a smaller version, completed the procession.

The police who stopped the four trucks were unable to provide Reporters Without Borders with grounds for the interception.

“It is not right that the authorities took this kind of action to prevent a reference to the situation of freedom of information in China,” said Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Christophe Deloire.

The aim of the protest was to highlight the open contempt that the Chinese authorities – led by Xi Jinping, who holds the posts of president of the People’s Republic, Communist Party general secretary and chairman of the Central Military Commission – show for their citizens, denying them freely reported news and information and subjecting them to constant propaganda.

“The disconnect between the official discourse about the Chinese dream and the ruthless persecution of independent journalists shows the degree to which Xi Jinping is making fun of the world,” Deloire said.

“Article 35 of China’s constitution says that its citizens enjoy ‘freedom of speech [and] of the press,’ but more than 100 Chinese citizens – professional journalists and netizens – are currently in prison simply for trying to report the country’s reality.”

In China, the state media are government propaganda tools, and the propaganda bureau sends more than 1,000 directives a year to all of the country’s journalists. News conferences are stage-managed with bogus journalists asking questions, while an ideological test has just been reintroduced for journalists when they need to renew their press card.