Zhang, who was in his hometown on a personal visit, told Wang his parents had been hit by a car. The driver turned out to be driving without a licence, and refused to pay medical fees, he said. Zhang suspected the local police were not handling the case properly, and asked Wang whether he was interested in covering the issue. He had hoped that media attention would pressure the police into re-examining the case.

Without answering directly, Wang asked Zhang what job he held and which newspaper he worked for, according to their Weibo accounts. Upon hearing the name Global Times, Wang said: “Then I don’t care” and hung up.

“I hope Wang will lay aside the dispute of ideologies and think twice when feasting on other people’s suffering,” Zhang later wrote on his Weibo.

[…] A majority of microbloggers applauded Wang for having “punished” an employee working for an “evil” newspaper. Others criticised him for abandoning journalism ethics and “universal values,” which many liberal papers seem to embrace, letting his own political views influence the coverage of a story. [Source]

Global Times’ outspoken editor-in-chief Hu Xijin has frequently attracted ridicule for “finding the tasty morsels in any turd [the authorities] stick in his mouth,” as one netizen put it. But a Cornell University study argued last year that the newspaper’s reputation for hardline nationalism is somewhat unfair.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Global Times, journalistic ethics, journalists, news media, state media
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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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“I also turned down their demand for the original version of those already exposed clips, for the safety of the person from Chongqing’s police bureau who fed me the information,” said Zhu, adding that he is not ready to publish the remaining evidence, as time is needed to authenticate them.

The negotiations came after Zhu claimed some local officials involved in the scandal haven’t yet been netted and accused local police of a coverup and destroying evidence.

[…] Si Weijiang, a Shanghai-based lawyer, told the Global Times there is no crime of withholding evidence, and that the process to compel Zhu to be a witness is not clear. The police have no right to forcibly request the evidence, he said.

The videos were recorded as part of an extortion racket targeting a number of Chongqing officials, 11 of whom have now been dismissed as a result. Former Chongqing Party chief Bo Xilai and his police chief Wang Lijun reportedly covered up an earlier investigation into the case. While Zhu says that his source is associated with the Chongqing police, the police now claim that he may have obtained the videos from a member of the gang itself.

The Washington Post’s Wang Juan highlighted Zhu’s use of social media for protection:

Zhu’s lawyer, Li, said he believed the policemen originally intended to detain Zhu when they tried to get into his house Sunday night but were forced to change their plan once Zhu’s online posts for help and calls to Chinese and foreign media drew widespread attention.

[…] Before leaving his home for the police station on Monday, Zhu posted a picture online of a signed legal document. The document named several people he was officially authorizing as his lawyers and representatives and said that any confession or change of lawyers after he is imprisoned would likely be made under duress. Mindful of several recent high-profile cases in which detainees have been cut off entirely from the outside world and with their lawyers switched out for government-friendly ones, Zhu said in the document that the lawyers he named are the only ones he wants, “even if I later write a letter in blood asking for a change of lawyers.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, Bo Xilai, Chongqing, Chongqing corruption, drinking tea, extortion, Global Times, journalistic ethics, lawyers, lei zhengfu, police, Si Weijiang, sina weibo, social media, Wang Lijun, Zhu Ruifeng
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I began looking into the business dealings of Wen Jiabao’s family late last year. I had been working on a series called “Endangered Dragon,” which looked at China’s government-managed economy, and wanted to include a piece that would give deeper insight into how China’s capitalism worked at the top. It is a broad subject, which I decided would be made more manageable by focusing on one family. I chose the prime minister’s family because I had heard conjecture about their business dealings for many years. People talked openly about the family’s wealth as if it was fact, but there was really no reporting on the subject that I could find that cited hard evidence backing up the claims. I kept scratching my head about why no one had tried to truth-squad the widespread rumors.

My only real source for this lengthy article was a filing cabinet full of documents I requested from various Chinese government offices over a period of about a year. After having some luck with my initial requests for corporate registration documents from the State Administration for Industry and Commerce bureaus, I went on a reporting spree: requesting and paying fees for the records of dozens of investment partnerships tied to the relatives of Wen Jiabao.

Barboza has previously explained how he gathered publicly available corporate records.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei, who accused the article last week of having “ulterior motives” and trying to “smear” China, attacked it again on Monday. “There are always some voices in the world that do not want to see China develop and become stronger,” he said, “and they will try any means to smear China and Chinese leaders and try to sow instability in China. Your scheme is doomed to failure.”

People’s Daily’s former international news editor Ren Yujun has also attacked The New York Times. Instead of challenging Barboza’s report itself, however, he brought up the Jimmy Savile sexual abuse scandal in which the Times’ new chief executive, formerly at the BBC, has become embroiled. In another article [zh], Ren wrote of “an explosion in plagiarism and fabrication” at the newspaper, pointing out the 2010 Zachery Kouwe and 2003 Jayson Blair scandals. The Financial Times’ Simon Rabinovitch noted, however, that Ren’s own piece consisted almost entirely of unacknowledged passages from other articles, from Xinhua, People’s Daily and beyond.

While Barboza accused neither Wen nor his family of anything illegal, Donald Clarke wrote at China Law Prof Blog that Wen may still have broken Party disciplinary rules which “as written are arguably tighter than is reasonable”:

The bottom line is that Wen appears to be in violation of a Party rule requiring senior officials to prevent their close relatives from engaging in business in areas (geographical or subject-matter) under their jurisdiction or, failing that, to resign. Since Wen is the premier, all of China falls within his geographical jurisdiction, and pretty much all areas of business would be within his subject-matter jurisdiction as well. This, of course, means that his close relatives can’t engage in any business in or even relating to China at all. I don’t claim that this is a reasonable or practical result, or that it was intended by those who wrote the rule, but that’s how I read it. My reasoning is below.

Following a statement from Wen family lawyers on Saturday, Clarke also briefly discussed the prospect of legal action by Wen’s family within the United States. He linked to a more in-depth analysis by Jonathan Turley, who concluded that:

Wen may have lawyers but he may not have a particularly good lawsuit. The most important defense to defamation remains truth. That could put the family in a difficult position. As a highly secretive family in a highly secretive country, they are not used to American discovery rules. They could be forced to disclose copious amounts of financial records to make their case. Many could find that even a few million dollars as opposed to hundreds of millions as a curious nest egg for “Communist” leaders and their families.

Legal action at home might be more easily controllable; Isaac Stone Fish suggested at Foreign Policy that the Times’ past legal defeats in Singapore offer a precedent. But both He Weifang and Pu Zhiqiang told the South China Morning Post that even this would probably be considered too risky. Evan Osnos, assessing the fallout from Barboza’s report at The New Yorker, agreed, and dismissed “conspiracy theories” that the newspaper had been manipulated by Wen’s political enemies. He concluded:

• Not Surprised by This Story? Perhaps you should be. One of the standard lines going around in recent days has been the notion that this subject is somehow old news, that people already “knew” that Chinese leaders benefit from public office, so why bother? To me, that’s akin to saying that since we “knew” that campaign finance corrupts American government, we shouldn’t have bothered to unearth the crimes of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff; and since we “knew” British tabloids would walk a fine line to get a story, we shouldn’t have gotten so exercised about digging out the details of phone-hacking and the paying of police for information. In the end, that’s the nature of investigation: it puts details on what we don’t know but think we do. Sometimes the conventional wisdom is right, and sometimes it’s wrong, but you never know until you look. Corruption in China, after all, is hardly a scoop in itself. Lin Yutang, for one, wrote, “In China, though a man may be arrested for stealing a purse, he is not arrested for stealing the national treasury.”

He wrote that observation in 1935.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: donald clarke, He Weifang, investigative journalism, journalism, journalistic ethics, legal dispute, Lin Yutang, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, new york times, people's daily, plagiarism, pu zhiqiang, singapore, transparency, Wen Jiabao
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As spokesman for the Ministry of Health, it’s reasonable that Mao [Qu'nan] should want journalists to stick to the facts, but that ought to be the domain of journalist ethics. The media is scared and concerned by the idea of a blacklist.

If every ministry makes its own blacklist, it will be impossible for the public to hold them to account and the central government ‘s proposal to promote public supervision of the government will be merely an empty promise. What frightens journalists is the presumption that they are to blame and that ministries are free to punish or reward them as they like. If, among existing newspapers, television channels, radio stations or websites, we want to choose some that enjoy spreading false information and misleading the public and label them as “unhealthy”, then we need to be very clear about the criteria. Otherwise, it’s not hard to imagine that the category will be used to block honest reporting of problems with food safety.

It’s well known that the main reason for problems with food safety is the aggressive cost cuts by businesses in search of greater profits, but the lack of public supervision is also a factor. The Ministry of Health’s planned blacklist shifts the responsibility for problems onto the media. It is as though the problems don’t originate within the food industry but because of the media.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: food safety, journalism, journalistic ethics, Ministry of Health
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For the past few weeks, Sohu.com has been polling readers opinions’ in the case of Bai Rundai. The senior investigative journalist for the Henan Commercial News, a six-time winner of the province’s highest prize for reporting, became the subject of his own story in August after he volunteered to cover the cost of one man’s life-saving treatment. His beneficiary? A suspected murderer named Guo Baoshang, who on July 25 allegedly stabbed to death a married couple during a drunken fit, and then turned the knife on himself. Even Guo’s family didn’t want to pay to prolong his life, partly because they were sure he’d get the death penalty; interviewed at the hospital, his estranged wife also portrayed him as a deadbeat dad. Local police and civil affairs officials were not legally bound to help the accused culprit either, Bai was told. He wrote an editorial about it, entitled: “A criminal suspect approaches death; why no one will pick up the bill.”

(...)
Read the rest of Chinese JSR (Journalistic Social Responsibility)?? (618 words)

© Jonathan Ansfield for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Foxconn, hospital fees, journalistic ethics, She Xianglin, Wang Binyu, Xiang Fei
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