Journalists increasingly pushing the envelope with eyeball-grabbing exposes, juicy scandals
By Tracy Quek 15 December 2008
BEIJING: Driving across Beijing on a winter’s night, cabby Bei Dong switches on the radio. A while later, he turns it off, sighing: ‘Is there anything other than the financial crisis in the news these days?’
News junkies in China will tell Mr. Bei that, in fact, they have been spoilt for choice of late, with the slew of eyeball-grabbing exposes and jaw-dropping scandals the local media is covering.
A few juicy stories that have emerged just this past week include: petitioners thrown into mental asylums in Shandong province; players in China’s professional basketball league found to have faked their ages to better their chances at team admission; officials taking free vacations to the United States on the pretext of going on ‘study trips’.
These caused a stir because of their controversial subject matter. More noteworthy, though, was that the tightly-controlled Chinese press was responsible for digging up the dirt.
More and more, newspapers and muckraking journalists in China are pushing the boundaries, even though they run the high risk of being sacked, banned or shut down if they cross the censors.
In the past, it was mostly China’s southern press such as the Southern Metropolis News and Southern Weekend that stood out for strong investigative reporting, influenced to some extent by the freewheeling press in nearby Hong Kong.
Many have paid a heavy price for pushing the boundaries too far. Numerous editors have been removed over the years.
Now, despite the dangers, newspapers elsewhere in China appear to be following their lead. The Beijing News, a reputable mass-market daily, for example, broke the petitioners’ story last Monday in a lengthy article detailing how public security officials in Shandong’s Xintai city had locked up residents in mental institutions to prevent them from complaining about local injustices.
People.com.cn, the website of the Communist Party’s flagship People’s Daily, picked up the story. The official English-language China Daily on Tuesday ran a scathing commentary that condemned the practice as ‘barbaric’.
The articles prompted a higher-level government in Shandong to investigate. The authorities have also responded to the reports on fake study tours, sacking two officials involved so far.
Some have linked the media’s recent envelope-pushing to a post-Olympics media tolerance, arguing that China’s mostly incident-free hosting of thousands of foreign journalists during the Games has given leaders confidence to unofficially relax their grip on the domestic press.
Others reckon that the Sichuan earthquake opened eyes to the media’s constructive role. The Chinese press was allowed unprecedented freedom in the immediate aftermath of the quake, winning some praise for moving reportage that helped unify the nation during that trying period.
These views can be debated, but some analysts identify the more likely reason: the Internet and other new technologies, which have made the sharing of information easy, convenient and lightning-fast.
The trend is driven by concerns with credibility and market pressure, said Professor Yu Guoming, a vice-dean of Renmin University’s School of Journalism.
‘If citizen journalists and bloggers write about something that attracts a lot of attention but the mainstream press does not, it hurts the media’s own brand name, as well as the government’s credibility,’ he pointed out.
China’s leaders, too, have had to adapt to a new environment in which easy access to technology has made it impossible to manage information the way it used to be.
In June, when visiting the People’s Daily, President Hu Jintao urged improved ‘news reports on sudden-breaking public events, releasing of authoritative information at the earliest moment, better timeliness, an increase in transparency’.
Accordingly, pages and websites of Chinese state-run and mass-market media these days are filled with detailed reports on labour disputes, work strikes and protests - topics that a decade ago seldom made it past the censors.
Still, muckraking remains a high-stake gamble, said Professor Yang Dali of the University of Chicago.
‘The Party’s propaganda department is watching closely. Some exposes have helped the central government by reining in wayward local officials. Yet, the muckraking has its limits,’ he said.
Some, however, are fighting back.
In October, a journalist of the China Business Post, whose article led to the authorities in north China closing her newspaper for three months, sued the government in a rare act of defiance.
Officials had closed down the national paper from Sept 8, saying Ms. Cui Fan’s July article - alleging wrongdoing at a branch of the Agricultural Bank of China in Hunan province - breached news propaganda discipline.
The assertiveness of the media, however, may be a short-lived affair.
Next year will see several politically-sensitive anniversaries, including the 20th anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen crackdown, the 60th of the founding of the People’s Republic, and the 50th since the exile of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader.
Against such a backdrop and given the growing fears that the economic crisis will spark social unrest, it might not be long before limits are once again imposed on the media.
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China’s Press Tests its Boundaries
Journalists increasingly pushing the envelope with eyeball-grabbing exposes, juicy scandals
By Tracy Quek
15 December 2008
BEIJING: Driving across Beijing on a winter’s night, cabby Bei Dong switches on the radio. A while later, he turns it off, sighing: ‘Is there anything other than the financial crisis in the news these days?’
News junkies in China will tell Mr. Bei that, in fact, they have been spoilt for choice of late, with the slew of eyeball-grabbing exposes and jaw-dropping scandals the local media is covering.
A few juicy stories that have emerged just this past week include: petitioners thrown into mental asylums in Shandong province; players in China’s professional basketball league found to have faked their ages to better their chances at team admission; officials taking free vacations to the United States on the pretext of going on ‘study trips’.
These caused a stir because of their controversial subject matter. More noteworthy, though, was that the tightly-controlled Chinese press was responsible for digging up the dirt.
More and more, newspapers and muckraking journalists in China are pushing the boundaries, even though they run the high risk of being sacked, banned or shut down if they cross the censors.
In the past, it was mostly China’s southern press such as the Southern Metropolis News and Southern Weekend that stood out for strong investigative reporting, influenced to some extent by the freewheeling press in nearby Hong Kong.
Many have paid a heavy price for pushing the boundaries too far. Numerous editors have been removed over the years.
Now, despite the dangers, newspapers elsewhere in China appear to be following their lead. The Beijing News, a reputable mass-market daily, for example, broke the petitioners’ story last Monday in a lengthy article detailing how public security officials in Shandong’s Xintai city had locked up residents in mental institutions to prevent them from complaining about local injustices.
People.com.cn, the website of the Communist Party’s flagship People’s Daily, picked up the story. The official English-language China Daily on Tuesday ran a scathing commentary that condemned the practice as ‘barbaric’.
The articles prompted a higher-level government in Shandong to investigate. The authorities have also responded to the reports on fake study tours, sacking two officials involved so far.
Some have linked the media’s recent envelope-pushing to a post-Olympics media tolerance, arguing that China’s mostly incident-free hosting of thousands of foreign journalists during the Games has given leaders confidence to unofficially relax their grip on the domestic press.
Others reckon that the Sichuan earthquake opened eyes to the media’s constructive role. The Chinese press was allowed unprecedented freedom in the immediate aftermath of the quake, winning some praise for moving reportage that helped unify the nation during that trying period.
These views can be debated, but some analysts identify the more likely reason: the Internet and other new technologies, which have made the sharing of information easy, convenient and lightning-fast.
The trend is driven by concerns with credibility and market pressure, said Professor Yu Guoming, a vice-dean of Renmin University’s School of Journalism.
‘If citizen journalists and bloggers write about something that attracts a lot of attention but the mainstream press does not, it hurts the media’s own brand name, as well as the government’s credibility,’ he pointed out.
China’s leaders, too, have had to adapt to a new environment in which easy access to technology has made it impossible to manage information the way it used to be.
In June, when visiting the People’s Daily, President Hu Jintao urged improved ‘news reports on sudden-breaking public events, releasing of authoritative information at the earliest moment, better timeliness, an increase in transparency’.
Accordingly, pages and websites of Chinese state-run and mass-market media these days are filled with detailed reports on labour disputes, work strikes and protests - topics that a decade ago seldom made it past the censors.
Still, muckraking remains a high-stake gamble, said Professor Yang Dali of the University of Chicago.
‘The Party’s propaganda department is watching closely. Some exposes have helped the central government by reining in wayward local officials. Yet, the muckraking has its limits,’ he said.
Some, however, are fighting back.
In October, a journalist of the China Business Post, whose article led to the authorities in north China closing her newspaper for three months, sued the government in a rare act of defiance.
Officials had closed down the national paper from Sept 8, saying Ms. Cui Fan’s July article - alleging wrongdoing at a branch of the Agricultural Bank of China in Hunan province - breached news propaganda discipline.
The assertiveness of the media, however, may be a short-lived affair.
Next year will see several politically-sensitive anniversaries, including the 20th anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen crackdown, the 60th of the founding of the People’s Republic, and the 50th since the exile of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader.
Against such a backdrop and given the growing fears that the economic crisis will spark social unrest, it might not be long before limits are once again imposed on the media.
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