Editor’s Note: As a journalist, Zhao Ling, 30, currently a scholar at UC Berkeley, has made impressive headway uncovering corruption in China. But as the Chinese government cracks down on China’s fledgling media, her efforts are increasingly seen as dangerous and unwelcome.
BERKELEY, Calif.–When the knock came at the door, Zhao Ling knew what to do. She shoved her notes into an envelope and threw them out the window of her 12th floor hotel room. She shut off her cell phone. Then she held her breath.
Zhao was working undercover, reporting on Chinese farmers in the Sichuan Province city of Zigong who had been left homeless and jobless after the government took their land for development — part of the rapid modernization process sweeping this traditionally agricultural society. Government officials tapped her phone and sent agents after her.
Zhao managed to escape out a side door and retrieve her notes, where they had landed in a parking lot. A sympathetic worker hailed a taxi for her. She fled the city, traveling on an abandoned highway in the middle of the night with a driver she didn’t trust.
Zhao, who is spending the year in the United States as a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, says it was all a normal part of her job.
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