In a country with one of the most sophisticated media and Internet censorship systems, Mr. Zhang and other bloggers must exercise great caution when writing about politically sensitive content — often skirting the label “citizen reporter.” But as Mr. Zhang told me during filming: “If they want to get you, they can find a way. Not even a wise man can be wise all the time.”

In 2010, he was taken by the police and put under house arrest for 10 days, during the country’s annual parliamentary meetings. News spread quickly. That day he received more than 2,000 text messages — good wishes poured in from concerned friends and readers who supported his efforts to help flooded villagers, defrauded farmers and the Beijing homeless. On this day, he said, he “felt the true power of the Internet.” [Source]

Zhang was the subject of a recent full-length documentary film, High Tech, Low Life, about citizen journalists in China. In 2007, CDT translated a series of posts by Zhang documenting his travels. Read the introductory post here.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bloggers, citizen journalism, Laohumiao
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With his five cellphones constantly ringing, it is not easy these days to get the undivided attention of Zhu Ruifeng, a self-styled citizen journalist whose freelance campaign against graft has earned him pop-star acclaim and sent a chill through Chinese officialdom.

[…] A former migrant worker with a high school education, Mr. Zhu has become an overnight celebrity in China in the two months since he posted online secretly recorded video of an 18-year-old woman having sex with a memorably unattractive 57-year-old official from the southwestern municipality of Chongqing. The official lost his job. Mr. Zhu gained a million or so new microblog followers.

The takedown was just the opening act, Mr. Zhu says. He promises to release six more sex videos that he predicts will make a number of other men run for cover. “I’m fighting a war,” he said with characteristic bombast, his voice a near-shriek. “Even if they beat me to death, I won’t give up my sources or the videos.”

[…] Mr. Zhu, who began his Web site in 2006, largely relies on whistle-blowers to funnel damning evidence to him. Through the years, he said, he has exposed 100 officials, bringing down more than a third of them. He has been threatened and beaten; more than once, he says, he has been offered huge sums of money to delete an incriminating post from his site, which is called People’s Supervision.

Zhu’s “characteristic bombast” may seem excessive, but is at least in part a matter of self-defense: by courting attention from traditional and social media, he hopes to deter attempts to silence him. That he credits Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption speeches, the Chinese Constitution and his own love of country with inspiring his activities may confer some measure of additional protection.

Nevertheless, his crusade has cost him. He has chosen to end his marriage, he says, rather than see his wife, a P.L.A. officer, suffer retaliation from his adversaries. “To be honest,” he told The Times’ Jonah Kessel, “I would like to tend to the big family in sacrifice of the small family.”

Kessel has also posted outtakes from their conversation on Vimeo, including an extended account of a recent police visit to Zhu’s Beijing home. Chongqing authorities appear determined to contain the sex tape scandal by acquiring Zhu’s remaining videos, but as in the recent New York Times hacking attacks, identifying sources seems to be their primary goal. From Tom Lasseter at McClatchy:

Powerful interests were searching for his sources, he explained over lunch last Friday [January 25th]. Police detained one contact in the southwestern city of Chongqing, where the scandal had erupted, Zhu said. They traced a second source to Henan province, hundreds of miles away, and had questioned that person at least twice.

Two days after that conversation, the police showed up at Zhu’s home in Beijing. They banged on his door Sunday night and demanded that he come with them. He refused but reported to a police station Monday morning, where he was held for more than seven hours. Police officers from Chongqing pressed him to hand over five sex recordings he hasn’t made public and to tell them the identities of his informants. They threatened that “if you don’t present evidence, you will be in violation of national law,” according to Zhu’s account.

The pressure on Zhu suggests that despite Communist Party rhetoric about an all out campaign against corruption, limits remain. The party’s leader, Xi Jinping, said shortly after being installed in November that failing to crack down on corruption would risk the downfall of the state. But while Beijing has dismissed some wayward officials and canceled extravagant banquets that stoked resentment among average Chinese, it so far seems set on keeping a tight grip to keep the process from spinning out of control.

Undaunted, Zhu has offered a cash reward to anyone who can verify the identity of a state-owned enterprise president allegedly caught on one of the videos. Meanwhile, the woman in the videos was formally charged with extortion last week, though she too has been hailed—perhaps less plausibly than in Zhu’s case—as an anti-corruption crusader. From Keith Zhai at the South China Morning Post:

“Zhao was officially arrested on December 31 for extortion,” Zhang said yesterday, adding that she had been “brainwashed” by a company she left in 2009 to secretly record herself having sex with officials to give the firm leverage. “After all, she was young and a victim herself.”

[…] Zhao has drawn support on social media, with internet users hailing her as a heroine for exposing corrupt officials.

Many have compared Zhao’s case with that of Deng Yujiao , a hotel waitress who in 2009 stabbed to death a local party official in Hubei and wounded another after they tried to force themselves on her.

Deng was charged with assault, rather than murder, but walked free on grounds of diminished responsibility after having received widespread support from the online community.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-corruption, Beijing, bloggers, Chongqing, citizen journalism, citizen journalist, constitution, corrupt officials, Deng Yujiao, extortion, journalistic ethics, lei zhengfu, migrant workers, muckraking, PLA, sex scandals, Xi Jinping, Zhu Ruifeng
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Witnesses said that in the early afternoon on Wednesday, four Chinese men wearing surgical masks and gloves rushed into the ninth-floor office of In-media, an independent online publication known for its outspoken, critical attitude toward the governments of both Hong Kong and mainland China. Two women in the office at the time told police the men used hammers to smash a number of computers, scattering parts across the floor.

[...]Started by activists, In-media began publishing online in 2004 as an outgrowth of the massive antigovernment rallies the year prior that effectively ousted Tung Chee-hwa, the city’s leader at the time. The online-only publication is small, with just three full-time staffers, and stays afloat with the help of 10 interns.

[...]Readers and fans of the publication were likewise outraged by the attack. “Hong Kong is getting more and more like the mainland,” one said on In-media’s Facebook page.

Still, Mr. Chu said there was perhaps a backhanded compliment in the assault. “The incident may indicate that the quality of our website is not too bad,” he said on Thursday. “What we do actually touches on the people in power.”

本社團相信，這次強行入屋破壞的行為，是有計劃及針對公民媒體的行為。該四名戴口罩及手套的歹徒，在短短幾分鐘內，針對破壞辦公室內的電腦，明顯是要以暴力行為，恐嚇香港的獨立及公民媒體。
我們譴責這種惡勢力，同時，亦憂慮更多黑手伸向香港的媒體，扼殺港人的言論自由。我們呼籲市民站出來，投入更多人力及物力，支持所有獨立於政府與財團的公民媒體！

Our organization believes that the violent breaks in is a carefully planned action against local citizen media. The four masked men destroyed our computer in a matter of two to three minutes. Their objective is to instigate fear among the community of independent and citizen media.
We condemn such evil and dark force and are worried that the people behind this would extend their reach further to other media organization in Hong Kong, destroying the freedom of press and speech in Hong Kong. We urge citizen to stand out and support independent media by donating money, resources and actively participate in citizen journalist practice which are independent from the control of government and big corporates.

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Post tags: citizen journalism, media violence, vandalism
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From the film’s synopsis:

As the Chinese government expands its efforts to police the Internet and block websites in the country, the rising tide of censorship has aroused a wave of citizen reporters committed to investigating local news stories. Two such rogue bloggers include Zola and Tiger Temple. When tech-savvy Zola noticed that local newspapers were selectively reporting the news, he took matters into his own hands, posing as a curious onlooker at crime scenes and snapping photos and videos that he posts to his site. Called upon for help by rural farmers and displaced city dwellers alike, Tiger Temple bicycles around the Chinese countryside drawing attention to societal issues in communities that otherwise would not have a voice.

And the trailer on Kickstarter:

Read more about Zuola and Tiger Temple via CDT, including a 2007 profile of Tiger Temple (Laohu Miao) and translations of his dispatches from a bicycle trip across China.

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Post tags: bloggers, citizen journalism, Laohumiao, Zuola
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On April 10, China’s Environmental Press Awards recognised the efforts of more than 20 environmental journalists. Their articles have exposed inconvenient environmental truths throughout the past year: from offshore oil leaks to accidents at chemical plants; from food-safety problems to the destruction of forests.

This is the third year that chinadialogue and The Guardian newspaper have awarded these prizes. The awards have become China’s most important for environmental reporting. This year the Chinese media company Sina was also a partner, with support from the Society of Entrepreneurs & Ecology.[...]

Another post at ChinaDialogue profiles Feng Jie, this year’s “journalist of the year”:

Feng Jie, 30, won her award for three stories written for Southern Weekendcovering offshore oil (the Bohai oil leak series); air pollution in cities (“Testing the air for the motherland”); and urban water shortages (“Water crisis in China’s northern cities: transfer or desalinate”). These touched on some of the key areas involving environmental protection in China: oil, smog and water shortages.For years, China’s city-dwellers have been breathing air that is “healthy by China’s standards, unhealthy by America’s”. While people stay indoors to avoid choking outside, official air quality remains “good”. With the people and officials so out of step, Feng Jie wrote “Testing the air for the motherland”, about environmental NGOs and urban residents buying their own air-testing equipment, taking readings on the streets of Beijing and then posting the results online.

Her report was soon widely available and spurred unofficial testing in a number of cities. Meanwhile, the government, which had long worried that a new standard would undermine earlier achievements, announced that it would include PM2.5 levels in national air-quality standards. The public would know the truth about the air. Feng’s article and other media reports on PM2.5 levels can be seen as China’s people and public opinion bringing about policy change.

ChinaDialogue has been posting the award-winning pieces on their website. Below is an excerpt from the story the took the prize for “best scoop” this year, by Yunnan based journalist Feng Wei. This article brought the contamination of water by illegal disposal of chromium waste into public awareness.

The goats are dead, the pigs are dead and you can’t drink the water.

Residents of Yuezhou township, Qujing city, are in despair: their well water has turned yellow, their livestock are dying and their crops are withering.

For months, chemical waste illegally dumped near the shores of Chachong Reservoir, in this corner of Yunnan province, south-west China, was quietly poisoning the community’s main water supply. Rainwater, contaminated after falling on piles of poisonous chromium tailings, flowed into the 300,000-cubic metre reservoir, turning it toxic. Levels of deadly hexavalent chromium peaked at over 200 times permitted levels.

The local government has said that the crisis is now under control. The water has been made safe, they say, through chemical precipitation and dilution techniques and the treated water – declared “no longer dangerous” by Qujing city’s environmental authorities – is being pumped into the Nanpan River, the source of the Pearl River.

This year’s awards gave special recognition to the  growing importance and success of new-media and citizen journalism in spreading awareness of environmental issues, offering awards to three people who use their microblog accounts to inform the public. Another ChinaDialogue post introduces us to the winner of the newest award category, “best citizen journalist,” 65-year-old Liu Futang:

For many years, Liu piloted a fire-spotter plane in China’s north-east. When later he moved to Hainan, in the south-west, he discovered that the island’s rainforests were “dying a glorious death”. “Glorious,” he said, because the destruction and damage to the environment were often presented as grand achievements.Liu first became a critic of this deforestation during the 1990s: he courageously helped to expose large multinational companies that wrecked Hainan’s forests as they claimed to develop the economy and enrich the locals. But despite his efforts, the impact of deforestation on Hainan’s natural ecology was ruinous.

[...]In his retirement, Liu started a blog about environmental problems. On April 10 last year two reporters persuaded him to start a microblog (on the Sina Weibo platform) under the handle ＠海南刘福堂 (“Hainan Liu Futang”).[...]

An article from The Guardian has more to say about Feng Jie, Liu Futang, citizen journalism, and how microblogs are working to change the media landscape in China. The article ends with a note of realistic cynicism from a government official:

While many participants cited censorship as the biggest problem facing Chinese journalists, the spread of microblogs has made it far more difficult for the authorities to control the flow of information, which is now coming from so many different and unexpected directions.

“There is more transparency, but it’s not yet at a fundamental level. That is the biggest difficulty in China’s environmental journalism,” said Gong Jing, who picked up an award for revealing how cadmium pollution through the soil is contaminating rice stocks. “A lot of information should be public, but journalists have to work very hard to get it.”

That hard grind is paying dividends. Media analysts and environmental NGOs said journalists, bloggers and civil society groups are opening up new information territory.

[...]Among the 100 or so audience members, fewer than one-fifth believed that China’s environmental problems have peaked, but the majority were optimistic of improvement within the next 10 years.

A more cautious note, was struck by the most senior government participant, Sun Zhen, deputy counsel at the National Development and Reform Commission. “I don’t think we will see the peak that soon,” he said. “The improvements can’t keep pace with the speed of destruction.”

ChinaDialogue has also translated and posted the story about cadmium contaminated rice that won Gong Jing the award for “biggest impact.” Be sure to stay tuned to ChinaDialogue as they continue to release translations of the award winning works.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chinadialogue, citizen journalism, environmental activism, environmental degradation, journalism, microblogs
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On Sept. 21, 2008, Xu visited one of Beijing’s black jails after receiving an SMS message from a detainee inside the jail. (See CDT’s post from earlier last week on the topic.)

The Youth Hotel in Beijing: Guests go in, but they can’t come out.

When Xu arrived at the jail, he confirmed that the petitioner who had sent him a text message was in fact there. When he tried to get her released, he was beaten up. This translation, of his blog post about the incident, from Black and White Cat:

Very quickly, six or seven men rushed out around me and one of them reached out to grab my camera. The bare-chested guy suddenly rushed up and punched me in the chest, acting like a crazy devil and carrying a chain-lock.

I was very calm and submitted to their insults and occasional blows. At one point they wanted to drag me into the black jail, but they were stopped by their boss. When they’d spent all their aggression I said, “Can I go now?” They said no. Then they must have thought of something because they let me go. As I was leaving, I looked back and said “You’ll regret what you did today, whether it’s because you’re punished or because of your conscience.”

I will go back. This isn’t meddling in other people’s business. Black jails are a tumor on Beijing. They’re a tumor on China. In the broad light of day, that there should be such dark and ugly corners. As a Chinese man, I have a duty to rise up in indignation.

Xu returned to the jail, this time with a journalist friend. (Again, translated by Black and White Cat):

Before I reached the entrance to the black jail, four or five guards were already waiting. As soon as I got close, they demanded to know what I was doing. I said I was looking for someone. They told me to leave right away. One of them, wearing a red jacket, looked familiar. If my memory is right, this person is Deputy Director Liu Fengxiang of the Kaifeng Bureau of Letters and Visits. Three years ago he and a group of other people picking up petitioners beat me up in an alley in front of the State Bureau of Letters and Visits. I hadn’t thought I’d bump into him here. I said, “You’re illegally detaining petitioners. It’s illegal.” Director Liu said, ” Who says we’re detaining people? They’re all here volutarily.” I said, “Well, for example, is Wang Jinlan voluntary?” He said, “How do you know she’s not?”

I fished out my cell phone and was about to call Wang Jinlan who was locked inside. Director Liu snatched my phone. A fist hit my face and he yelled at me to fuck off. He said, “This is government business. It doesn’t concern you.” I later learnt that Director Liu has been the fiercest in beating petitioners. Many petitioners are afraid of him and they all know the guards all call him “Director Liu.” I suppose this is the only kind of person from the Bureau of Letters and Visits who’s suitable to come and work here.

Xu Zhiyong and journalist Guo Jianlong near the black jail.

This time, he managed to get the petitioner who had contacted him via SMS out of the jail. According to Xu:

There are at least four black jails in Beijing where Henan province locks up petitioners: the Youth Hotel, the Fenglong Youth Hostel, the Juyuan Hotel and the Jingyuan Hotel. These black jails are just like the custody and repatriation centers of the past and they’ve become an industry. If we take the Youth Hotel as an example, the general situation is this: the man surnamed Liu and another surnamed Yin rent a room from the Youth Hotel. They employ some hired thugs and they’re entrusted by the Henan representative office in Beijing to grab petitioners from the Jiujingzhuang shelter and bring them here. The county governments come and pick them up and pay 150 yuan a day for each person.

Here is an audio recording by citizen journalist Zhou Shuguang (Zuola) of an altercation that broke out during another trip to the jail (via Global Voices) on Oct. 5, along with journalist Chen Er (Doubleleaf). The event was reported in real time using Twitter.

On Oct. 14, Isaac Mao wrote on his blog that Zhou’s and Chen’s visit to the black jail proves the transformative power of social media in China. “There are lot of things that go on that we don’t know about in China,” he writes, “but the only way we’re going to have a bright future is if citizen all over share information.”

For more translations of blog posts from the multiple visits to the black jail site in Beijing, see Meng Zhang’s translations at Global Voices.

Also, see this 2005 report from Human Rights Watch on the violence and intimidation used against petitioners.

© Japhet Weeks for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: black jails, citizen journalism, social networking, Xu Zhiyong
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Chinese authorities and the country’s bloggers are waging an online battle over push-ups. This is no pre-Olympic fitness craze, but attempts by the government to keep a lid on dissent.

Push-ups are what two youths were reported to have been doing on a river bridge in the remote town of Weng’an in Guizhou province on June 21 when a 15-year-old schoolgirl, Li Shufei, fell into the water and drowned.

That at least was the Chinese authorities’ version of events. But residents believe the boys raped the girl before tossing her into the river and that the truth was covered up because the boys are related to local government officials. About 30,000 people gathered in the city centre, overturning police cars and burning the multi-storey police building.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: citizen journalism, Weng'an riot, Zuola
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In an effort to circumvent the sanctions on Chinese journalists, a Durham man, Weican “Watson” Meng, runs a massively popular site for news about China, supported by contributions from average citizens, many of whom conceal their identities for protection.

Restrictions placed on Chinese media outlets by the Chinese government censor a wide range of topics, and put journalists at risk of losing their jobs or being incarcerated.

In 2000, Meng, 42, started the site, called Boxun.com, (pronounced “bow shwin”), which includes coverage of top news, entertainment, finance and travel stories and by Meng’s count gets 500,000 daily views.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: boxun, citizen journalism
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In the moments following the quake, the world’s source of breaking news on the disaster was neither the Chinese government nor the Western media. As the first wave of shocks receded, Chinese and foreign residents across the country reached for the closest broadcast tools at hand, their cell phones and computers. Providing first-hand accounts of the earthquake and its immediate effects were thousands of “tweets”—blog entries posted to the Internet via text message. On QQ and MSN, two massively popular instant message services in China, friends traded second-by-second updates.

Minutes before the U.S. Geological Survey reported the quake on their home site and hours before media outlets ran their first stories, technology blogger Robert Scoble was publishing reactions to the quake from Chengdu to Beijing, giving voice to a corps of citizen journalists. With telecommunications severed, and more than 2,300 cell phone towers in the region toppled, news teams remained hours away.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, citizen journalism, text messaging
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China’s muzzled press and burgeoning Internet have given citizen reporters an audience and an opportunity — however fleeting — to spread news quicker than government censors can control it.

But the ability of bloggers to dodge censors and provide a voice for China’s poor and disadvantaged by covering news events Beijing would rather be left unreported has also given some bloggers the chance to profit from disseminating a rare commodity in China — uncensored news.

Zhou Muguang, who blogs under the name of “Zola,” is a citizen reporter who found that the initial admiration he received from Internet surfers for championing the downtrodden soon turned to scorn for taking their money. [Full Text]

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bloggers, citizen journalism, Zuola
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In the strictly controlled media world of communist China, “citizen journalism” is beating a way through censorship, breaking taboos and offering a pressure valve for social tensions.

In one striking example this month, the Internet was largely responsible for breaking open a slave scandal in two Chinese provinces that some local authorities had been complicit in.

A letter posted on the Internet by 400 parents of children working as slaves in brickyards was the trigger for the national press to finally report on the scandal that some rights groups say had been going on for years. [Full Text]

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: citizen journalism, Internet censorship, media control
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Well, leave it to a young Hunanese vegetable farmer-blogger with social conscience and hunger for fame to throw down his basket, grab a camera and head off to any number of Chinese internet bars to blog one of the biggest news stories in China of 2007 and, by doing so, establish a precedent and a step-by-step guide for NewAssignment, Reuters and many others to follow. One just needs some sisu, thick skin, no hesitation in asking people for money and then spending it. No tax declarations or NGO status to worry about doesn’t hurt either. And, in contradiction to an earlier blog post, Zola“one of the earliest contributors to China’s latest blog buzz initiative”is not even China’s first citizen reporter, he’s just the first to bring it mainstream. [Full text]

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bloggers, citizen journalism
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What happened here in Qinglong was typical of a new kind of journalism that is emerging in response to the Chinese Communist Party’s suffocating censorship of newspapers, radio and television. With no more investment than a computer and a taste for taking risks, several dozen Web-based investigative journalists have set up sites and started advertising their willingness — for a price — to look into scandals that traditional reporters cannot touch.

Official censorship still protects authorities, including corrupt authorities, more than two decades after China launched itself on a path to reform. In a society that is swiftly modernizing, the security-conscious Communist Party continues to fear, and filter, the spread of information.

(...)
Read the rest of China’s Muckrakers for Hire Deliver Exposes With Impact – Edward Cody (66 words)

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Post tags: citizen journalism, Li Xinde, media censorship, media conditions, online media
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As mainstream media were forced to abandon coverage of the “nail house“, Mr Zhou’s site became a popular alternative source of updates. At its peak, it attracted more than 37,000 visitors a day.

Others hoping to negotiate better deals with developers or to highlight violations of their legal rights have asked Mr Zhou, a 26-year-old vegetable seller from Hunan, to feature their causes on his blog.

In a country where many feel the legal system and governments have failed them, people are increasingly turning to the media — official and unofficial — to get redress. The Chongqing saga is a case in point. [Full text]

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Post tags: bloggers, citizen journalism, nailhouse, Zuola
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When people are armed with camera phones, information is harder to quash.

Much has been made of the great democratizing impact of the new media – the fact that anyone with a laptop, a modem, and a website can be a journalist.

…… Eric Zhang, a former staffer at the China Daily news organization based in Beijing, has launched www.molive.cn, a site that lets ordinary people gather news with their camera cellphones. The site, launched three weeks ago, lets people post photos they have taken to their own personal websites with small descriptions of the scenes. Editors comb the postings and put the best ones on Molive’s home page. The site is young but already has more than 100 people posting on it from all around the country and more than 20,000 readers a day. [Full Text]

Technorati Tags: Citizen Journalism

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: citizen journalism, Eric Zhang
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