Out of Mao's Shadow

by Philip P. Pan

  It was past 5 P.M. by the time Chen and Wang returned to the office, and they were planning to write their story the next day. By coincidence, though, they ran into Yang Bin, the senior editor, and when he asked how the reporting was going, they mentioned that they had tried to interview the police that morning. The editor’s face dropped, and he got worked up. He told the reporters they should have waited until the last minute to contact the police, in case officials called the propaganda authorities and tried to squash the story. Then he told them to sit down and start writing immediately. He wanted to publish the story that night.

  Chen and Wang skipped dinner, wrote quickly, and finished the article by 9:30 P.M. They recounted the efforts of Sun’s friends to bail him out. They catalogued in clinical detail the injuries that caused his death. And they raised the question of whether it was right for police to hold him in the shourong station. Only the homeless, the unemployed, and those without a national identification card were subject to shourong, they pointed out, but Sun’s friends had provided the police with his ID card and demonstrated that he had both an apartment and a job. It was an impressive piece of journalism, at once dramatic and restrained. Only at the very end of their story did Chen and Wang quote friends and family describing what kind of person Sun was—artistic, hardworking, stubborn. They closed with an image of Sun’s family traveling to Guangzhou from their little village in Hubei, and showing reporters copies of the awards he had won as a young student. “He was the first person to go to university from our hometown,” they quoted Sun’s father saying. But if he had not studied so hard, the father continued, maybe he wouldn’t have been so stubborn, and maybe he wouldn’t have been killed.

  Yang splashed the article across two pages inside the tabloid, and put a large headline near the bottom of the front page: “The Death of Shourong Detainee Sun Zhigang.” A smaller one beneath it added “University Graduate, 27, Dies Three Days After Being Detained on Guangzhou Street, Autopsy Shows Violent Beating Before Death.”

  The presses were scheduled to begin publishing the next day’s paper in a few hours. When the night editor read the Sun Zhigang story, though, he hesitated to send it on. Yang told him that Cheng had read the piece and approved it, but the night editor wanted to give the editor in chief one last chance to reconsider. There was still time to pull the story if he changed his mind. When the night editor reached him at home, though, Cheng gave the order to publish.

  CHENG KNEW THE story was a blockbuster, and he slept restlessly in anticipation of its publication. He was certain people across the country would be talking about it. Before leaving the office, he had reminded his staff to send a copy to the editors of the nation’s top Web sites, Sina and Sohu. The two portals attracted more readers than any newspaper or magazine in China, and because private firms ran them, they had a little more room to maneuver against the censors. Though they were barred from producing news stories themselves, the Web sites could link to the best articles in publications across the country. Their huge national readership allowed them to draw attention to stories, influence opinions, and set the public agenda in a way no party media outlet could. The rise of papers like the Daily had already transformed the nation’s media landscape, but the Internet was accelerating the process. Cheng recognized the potential of the Web early on and cultivated a partnership with Sina and Sohu, making it standard practice to send the Daily’s best pieces to their editors at about 2 A.M. every morning. When they highlighted the Daily’s stories on their home pages, the number of people who saw them jumped exponentially. The Web sites magnified the paper’s influence and impact, and by distributing its stories, they made it more difficult for the propaganda officials to censor them. When the report on Sun Zhigang’s death appeared on the Web, Cheng knew, it would no longer be just a local story that local officials could hush up. It would be a national story, with a national audience and national implications. And he was looking forward to it.

  The Southern Metropolis Daily had published other big stories, but the response to the Sun Zhigang report was unlike anything Cheng had ever seen. The story spread across the Internet in e-mails and instant messages, and copies proliferated in the nation’s most popular Web forums. The newspaper was overwhelmed with phone calls and faxes from readers who wanted to express their outrage or share their own stories of abuse in the shourong system. Tens of thousands of people posted messages on Sina and Sohu. Sitting in his office, watching the message count on the two sites climb, Cheng realized something remarkable was happening, and his newspaper was in the middle of it. It had tapped into a deep well of public resentment against the shourong system, and people were acting on their frustration and speaking out. The newsroom was buzzing as reporters began following up on the phone calls and faxes. Chen Feng and Wang Lei wrote a follow-up story based on an interview with Sun’s father. But late in the afternoon, an official from the provincial propaganda department called and ordered the paper not to publish anything else about the case.

  Cheng wasn’t surprised by the call. He had been waiting all day for a response from the authorities, and their silence had been making him nervous. He had worried it might mean they were preparing to take severe action against him or the paper. Now he knew where he and the paper stood. He called his editors and reporters into a meeting, and he told Chen and Wang to keep following the Sun story, even if the paper couldn’t publish their articles. He said the propaganda department’s ban was a temporary setback, and he vowed to find a way around it. If the party prohibited the Daily from writing about the Sun case, then they would write about other shourong cases. If it blocked the paper from reporting on other cases, they would write about the shourong system itself. The paper should continue to question and challenge the shourong system, he said, because a good newspaper should promote progress in society. If the Daily did its job, shourong could be abolished. That, he argued, was the paper’s ultimate goal.

  Chen and Wang looked at each other. The idea of the government abandoning shourong was so far-fetched, they thought their editor in chief had lost his mind.

  But as the weeks passed, it began to seem possible. The party’s new leaders had just ended the SARS cover-up, and hopes for political reform were running high. All the talk of honesty and openness in government had knocked the censors off their game. The propaganda officials in Guangdong had blocked reporting on the Sun case, but their counterparts in Beijing had not done the same, and newspapers there picked up the coverage where the Daily left off. Even the first follow-up story that Chen and Wang wrote, and that the censors prevented the Daily from publishing, appeared in a Beijing newspaper. Chen had sent it to a friend who was an editor there, and she had published it under a pseudonym.

  Reporters across the country began digging into the shourong system, and editors reassigned stories on the subject that they had buried in the past. The picture that emerged was not flattering. Laws the party said were intended to help runaways and vagrants in the cities return to their rural villages were being used by police to “clean up” neighborhoods and generate income. Officers were arresting as many as two million people every year, holding them in a network of seven hundred detention camps, and demanding cash in exchange for their freedom. The newspapers—and the Internet—were full of stories of abuse, of men and women who were picked up for no good reason and not only shaken down but also roughed up. There was a middle school student who was taken to a shourong station after getting lost in the city of Nanning; he returned home in a daze four days later, bruised, stripped of his belongings, and babbling incoherently. There were the two thirteen-year-old girls who were forced into prostitution in Beijing after a pimp “purchased” them at a shourong station in Jiangsu Province. There was the young woman who presented her residency permit to a police officer only to watch him tear it up and detain her anyway; in the shourong station, she was raped.

  Cheng tried to keep the Southern Metropolis Daily on top of the story. The government announced a high-profile invest
igation into Sun’s death, and he put reporters up in the hotel where Sun’s family was staying so they could monitor developments more closely. He assigned others to interview legal scholars about regulations limiting the use of shourong, then ran an article pointing out that a senior city official had arbitrarily expanded the categories of people who could be detained. The Daily also published a series of hard-hitting editorials. In effect, the newspaper was on a crusade. This was no time for objectivity, Cheng felt. Too much was at stake. The institutions that supported shourong were too strong and the forces fighting for justice were too weak for the newspaper to hold back and not take sides.

  Cheng’s sources in the party apparatus told him the provincial party committee had convened an emergency meeting to discuss the Sun case. During the meeting, party officials watched the video of Sun’s beating that had been captured by closed-circuit cameras in the shourong station’s hospital ward. It was brutal footage. A gang of men covered Sun with a blanket and beat and kicked him for several minutes. The party officials were also told that the ward had been open for less than a year, and in that time, nearly one thousand people had been admitted and close to one hundred of them had ended up dead. Cheng pressed Chen Feng and Wang Lei to find out what happened to the others who died in the ward. If they could get a copy of the video, that would be even better.

  The two reporters tried their best, but had no luck. None of the officials in Guangzhou wanted to talk to the Southern Metropolis Daily anymore. But Chen did write another remarkable investigative report detailing the operations of a shourong station in Hunan Province that paid police in Guangdong a bounty of about thirteen dollars for each prisoner they transferred there. The station wasn’t collecting enough money from the people that local police brought them and had resorted to “buying” prisoners from other areas. It would then charge the prisoners a higher fee to be released. Those who couldn’t raise the money were forced to work on the prison farm, hired out as slave laborers, or “sold” to still other shourong stations. Over the course of five years, Chen wrote, the station made a profit of nearly half a million dollars.

  It wasn’t just the press that was campaigning against the shourong system. Three young legal scholars in Beijing caused a sensation by petitioning the National People’s Congress to review the constitutionality of the shourong regulations and strike them down. They had discovered an obscure law that gave citizens the right to make such requests and were apparently the first to ever take advantage of it. A week later, five well-known law professors endorsed their interpretation of the law and submitted their own request for a constitutional review. Meanwhile, public outrage continued to build on the Internet, where Sun’s friends and classmates set up a site to memorialize him. There was even talk of organizing a protest vigil in Guangzhou.

  Throughout it all, the party’s new leaders maintained a public silence on the subject. If they acted on the calls to abolish the shourong system, they would be following their reversal of the SARS cover-up with another bold reform and further distancing themselves from their predecessors and the party’s old ways. They appeared to be giving the decision serious consideration, but no one knew for sure and no one expected them to act quickly. Even the Southern Metropolis Daily dared not speculate about the leadership’s secret deliberations. Then one evening at about 9 P.M., less than two months after the Daily published its report on Sun’s death, the official Xinhua news agency moved an item: the new premier, Wen Jiabao, had convened a meeting of his cabinet and abolished the shourong regulations, effective immediately. The system’s seven hundred detention centers were going to be shut down. In the newsroom of the Daily, someone rushed a copy of the Xinhua article to Cheng Yizhong. He was stunned. He turned to one of his colleagues and expressed wonder at how the leadership had acted so quickly. Never before had any newspaper in China influenced national policy in such a dramatic fashion. The front page for the next day’s paper was already set, but Cheng ordered his staff to add one more headline. He assigned a writer to compose a quick editorial. And then he went out to celebrate.

  MANY INSIDE THE party celebrated the newspaper’s victory, too. They saw the Daily’s reporting on the Sun Zhigang case as a textbook example of how a more assertive press could help the party fight corruption and improve governance. But it was clear early on that not everyone was happy with the newspaper, and that some believed losing control of the media would be hazardous to their hold on power. Just days after the original article was published, the party chief of Guangzhou, a tough operator named Lin Shusen, pulled aside one of the Daily’s reporters at a news conference and threatened to take the paper to court if he found any inaccuracies in the report. Later, an old college classmate of Cheng’s passed on a private message from another senior city official warning him to back off. The provincial government made a show of launching a special investigation into Sun’s death, but it was obvious it wanted to put the case behind it as quickly as possible. A month later, it announced the arrest and conviction of eighteen people, including eight prisoners accused of beating Sun and five security guards who encouraged or condoned the assault. The police officer who first detained Sun was also jailed. Tough sentences were handed down, including the death penalty for one of the prisoners implicated in the beating. But their trials were closed to the public, and the government never provided a full accounting of the events that led to Sun’s death. Only a few reporters were permitted in the courtroom, and they were barred from taking notes and told to publish only an official press release. When the sentences in the case were announced, the censors ordered Web sites to restrict public commentary.

  Cheng understood from the start that the Daily’s crusade would make enemies of powerful people and institutions. The end of the shourong system deprived police across the country of both a convenient tool and a lucrative source of income, and the Sun Zhigang case had embarrassed party leaders in Guangzhou and damaged the careers of a host of officials. Publicly, more than twenty officials were formally disciplined, including the city’s deputy police chief, but Cheng’s contacts told him that members of the Politburo had also rebuked the city leadership through internal channels, an action that could derail promotions for many other cadres. Later, word filtered back to Cheng that party officials in the city were determined to exact revenge on the Southern Metropolis Daily. If the propaganda authorities could not act, then they would find another way.

  The first sign of trouble came just weeks after the decision to abolish the shourong system. Cheng and the paper’s general manager, Yu Huafeng, were in Shanghai on business when Cheng received a phone call from an executive with Kodak, one of the tabloid’s top advertisers. She told him that police in Guangzhou had visited her office and questioned her about her interaction with the Daily’s top senior officials. In particular, she said, they wanted to know about any potentially improper exchanges of gifts or cash. Later, Cheng received a similar call from the president of one of the province’s largest advertising firms. By mid-July, almost all the major companies that advertised in the Daily had been questioned. The Guangzhou party boss, Lin Shusen, had apparently ordered a criminal probe into the Daily’s finances in an attempt to find evidence of corruption at the newspaper. Cheng wasn’t worried at first. He knew he and his colleagues ran a clean business. He also felt confident the Daily enjoyed more support in the party than its enemies. When police detained Yu for questioning in late July, they were forced to release him a day later after the Southern Newspaper Group persuaded a senior provincial official to intervene.

  Except for the corruption investigation, the Daily was riding high in the aftermath of its victory in the Sun Zhigang case. Cheng continued to push the boundaries of permissible journalism, running a number of tough articles on police scandals in Guangdong, and the paper won several of the nation’s top journalism honors. Circulation climbed past 1.4 million readers for the first time, and profits for the year approached twenty million dollars. Cheng and Yu envisioned further growth and
made plans to expand into other cities. In a major breakthrough, the party’s central propaganda department approved a proposal in October for the Daily to establish a partnership with a state newspaper in Beijing and launch a new tabloid in the capital. It would be called the Beijing News and adopt the Daily’s feisty brand of journalism. The party appointed Cheng the editor in chief, a job he would hold while continuing to run the Daily, and Yu was named the general manager.

  Back in Guangzhou, though, the police continued to step up the pressure on the Southern Metropolis Daily. Advertisers were warned to stop buying ads from the paper, and some reported being threatened with prosecution if they did not provide evidence against the men who ran the Daily. Investigators seized several boxes of documents from the newspaper and scoured expense reports and insurance claims, searching for any irregularity. Then, in December, police showed up at the newsroom and detained Yu again. This time, even after the Southern Newspaper Group appealed to provincial leaders, the police didn’t release him. Cheng was upset but he believed his friend’s detention would be temporary. He worked to mobilize support within the party for Yu, drafting letters to senior officials and reaching out to influential party elders. He was nervous, but told himself the Daily would again prevail against its enemies.

  Ten days after Yu’s arrest, one of the Daily’s reporters returned to the newsroom with a terrific scoop. Provincial health authorities had diagnosed a suspected case of SARS in a Guangzhou hospital. It was the first case of the disease in China in several months, raising fears the virus could be making a comeback. Cheng was in Beijing at the time, running the new tabloid, but one of his deputies called and asked if the Daily should publish the information. Yu was still in prison, his fate uncertain, and the story was sure to anger the authorities. But Cheng was focused on the next day’s front page—there were no other strong stories lined up for it. So he gave the go-ahead.