Investigative journalists in China have always had to bow to censorship and worry about being arrested. But this year, the Communist party has stopped them from working altogether
Malcolm Moore By Malcolm Moore, Beijing7:00AM BST 17 Jul 2014
For years a journalist who I shall call Mr Chen has run the investigation unit of one of China’s most daring newspapers.
It has never been an easy job. Mr Chen’s editor is appointed by the Communist party and he has to joust each day with censors who dictate what he can and cannot publish.
Nevertheless he has scored plenty of triumphs along the way, exposing corruption and stupidity and catching some officials off-guard.
But this year Beijing has decided to stamp out even the smallest deviation from the party line.
“My editor came in one day and asked me to please just stop writing,” said Mr Chen, smiling wryly. “He promised he would keep paying me, but please could I just be silent?”
Mr Chen is not alone. Every journalist trying to produce original and thought-provoking reports, as opposed to copying out state-sanctioned bulletins, has become a target for a new rectification campaign.
Zhang Zhi’an, who produced a comprehensive survey of investigative reporting in 2011, estimates that the number of journalists responsible for “independent, public-interest, negative or sensitive” reports has fallen by 66 per cent in the last three years.
“There are no more than 200 of this type of journalist left in China, out of the million or so working in the media,” he said.
“The numbers are falling because of the government control. And it is very expensive for news organisations to retain large teams of journalists who cannot publish anything”.
Perhaps China’s most famous investigative journalist, 49-year-old Wang Keqin, was forced to leave his newspaper last year after exposing how a “gross failure” to refrigerate vaccines in Shanxi province led to the deaths of four children and sickened 74 others.
Today he works for a charity trying to publicise the dangers of a type of lung disease. “I would like to be a journalist, but I’m not allowed to be at the moment,” he said, before remarking that a “new ideological war” had begun.
“There is no way for the media to be a watchdog over the government at the moment,” he said, dismissing a recent wave of investigative reports about corrupt officials.