A presentation by Ying Chan, Founding Director of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre, University of Hong Kong
Posted by Kristin Jones
Veteran investigative journalist and Chinese media expert Ying Chan led an audience of mainly American investigative journalists through some of China’s best watchdog journalism of the last decade.
The last few years have been a pioneering era in Chinese investigative journalism, she said. Chinese journalists have found material in the same topics that captivate watchdog reporters worldwide; corruption, abuse by police and government officials, as well as environmental and education issues. China’s muckrakers persist despite legal obstacles and threats to reporters in the form of ownership and licensing restrictions, administrative penalties, arrests, physical violence, a litany of banned topics, and corruption within the media itself, she said.
Chan used the Chinese media’s expose of an AIDS epidemic in the province of Henan in 2000 as one example. Local daily Dahe Bao wrote the initial reports of the crisis caused by a blood-buying scheme by the local government, a story picked up by the national and international media.
The year 2003 was a watershed year for investigative journalism, Chan said. That was year news outlets like Caijing and the Southern media group bucked the government’s efforts to censor SARS. Also in 2003, the Southern Metropolis Daily (Nanfang Dushi Bao) ignited public outrage with their story of a young man, Sun Zhigang, who was killed in police detention. The newspaper’s report changed the law, but also led to the nine-month imprisonment of the newspaper’s editor.
The media industry has grown exponentially in recent years, and so has technology. Mobile phones and portable cameras have been deployed by citizen journalists to capture fascinating stories like the Chongqing nail house, where a couple of homeowners refused to leave their home at the government’s request. Riots broke out in Weng’an County after online reports of the rape and murder of a teen girl. The footage is on YouTube.
The mainstream press, meanwhile, finds ways around government censorship by working quickly, or ganging up, as they did when the press corps ignored the government’s demands that they not cover the Sichuan earthquake, Chan said.
Chan called the press in China “a contradiction,” a mix of government control and an inventive and complicated press.
Journalism in China is still young. Chan offered this striking figure: Only a quarter of China’s citizens are online, but already there are 50 million bloggers and more Internet users in China than any other country in the world.
