[When President Trump criticizes China, his words rarely appear in the mainstream Chinese press. A rapidly expanding list of topics is off limits to all but the party’s main official media outlets, among them the trade war with the United States, the #MeToo movement, gene-edited babies and the spread of African swine fever.]
By
Javier C. Hernández
 |
|
Zhang
Wenmin in Chengdu, China, in January. Once a widely read investigative
journalist, she
now has to live mostly off her savings. Credit Giulia Marchi for
The New York
Times
|
BEIJING
— She was once one of
China’s most feared journalists, roaming the country uncovering stories about
police brutality, wrongful convictions and environmental disasters. But these
days, Zhang Wenmin struggles to be heard.
The police intimidate Ms. Zhang’s sources.
The authorities shut down her social media accounts. Unable to find news
outlets that will publish her work, she lives largely off her savings.
“The space for free speech has become so
limited,” Ms. Zhang, 45, said. “It’s now dangerous to say you are an
independent journalist.”
China’s investigative reporters once provided
rare voices of accountability and criticism in a society tightly controlled by
the ruling Communist Party, exposing scandals about babies sickened by tainted
formula and blood-selling schemes backed by the government.
But under President Xi Jinping, such
journalists have all but disappeared, as the authorities have harassed and
imprisoned dozens of reporters and as news outlets have cut back on in-depth
reporting. One of the most glaring consequences of Mr. Xi’s revival of
strongman politics is that the Chinese press is now almost entirely devoid of
critical reporting, filled instead with upbeat portrayals of life in China
under Mr. Xi.
Critics call it the “total censorship era.”
“We’re almost extinct,” said Liu Hu, 43, a
reporter from the southwestern province of Sichuan who was detained for nearly
a year after investigating corrupt politicians. “No one is left to reveal the
truth.”
Since rising to power in 2012, Mr. Xi has
transformed China’s media landscape, restoring the primacy of party-controlled
news outlets while silencing independent voices. He has said that the mission
of the news media should be to spread “positive energy” and to “love the party,
protect the party and serve the party.”
Mr. Xi’s crackdown on journalists has left
China, with its nearly 1.4 billion people, in what sometimes seems like an
information vacuum. At a time when world leaders are asking what kind of
superpower China will be, public discourse within the country is remarkably
monolithic. Instead of policy debates, there are calls in the Chinese press to
defend China’s socialist system. Instead of scrutiny of Chinese leaders and
institutions, there are paeans to Mr. Xi and the party.
“The government has made its citizens
ignorant,” Mr. Liu said. “The public’s eyes are blind, their ears are deaf and
their mouths have no words.”
When President Trump criticizes China, his
words rarely appear in the mainstream Chinese press. A rapidly expanding list
of topics is off limits to all but the party’s main official media outlets,
among them the trade war with the United States, the #MeToo movement,
gene-edited babies and the spread of African swine fever.
Clayton Dube, director of the U.S.-China
Institute at the University of Southern California, said Mr. Xi was sending a
message that only the party had the power to criticize.
“Rather than seeing investigative journalism
as an aid to remedying social ills and improving governance,” he said, “Xi’s
party-state sees it as a threat to social stability.”
An exodus of journalists has alarmed free
speech advocates. Xue Lei quit his job two years ago as a reporter for the
Beijing Youth Daily, a party newspaper, to work in public relations at a
technology firm. He said he had grown tired of censorship orders and the
pressure to produce clickbait instead of investigative pieces.
“Issues that used to be covered a lot
suddenly became restricted,” he said, pointing to stories about crime and
corruption. “Sometimes you wouldn’t even know where a censorship order was
coming from.”
While it was once sometimes permissible to
report on corrupt politicians, journalists now can generally cover only
officials who have already been placed under investigation by the government.
Reporters joke that rather than exposing new cases of corruption, they have
been relegated to “beating up dead tigers,” a term used to describe already
disgraced officials.
When a ferry crashed in the Yangtze River in
central China in 2015, killing 442 people, Zhan Caiqiang and his colleagues at
Southern Metropolis Daily wrote a 10,000-character article about how bad
decisions by officials had contributed to the disaster. But propaganda
officials prohibited their story from being published, he said.
“We couldn’t do the stories we wanted to,”
said Mr. Zhan, who now works in public relations. “Society is moving farther
and farther away from journalism.”
Economic considerations have also contributed
to the disappearance of in-depth reporting. Many news outlets in China, like
those elsewhere in the world, are struggling with steep losses in print
advertising revenue and have eliminated investigative reporting teams, which
typically require more time and resources and produce fewer stories.
As traditional news outlets shed staff, the
rise of online media in China once inspired optimism about the future of
in-depth reporting. But Mr. Xi’s campaign has also targeted online news
outlets, with the government ordering many to close or shift away from critical
reporting.
Q Daily, a news site in Shanghai founded in
2014, was known for running feature stories on social issues, including
problems facing rural migrants in big cities.
But the authorities have repeatedly shut down
Q Daily over the past year, including in late May. The government has accused
it of illegally “conducting original reporting” and harming public opinion.
Yang Ying, the website’s editor in chief,
said the interference was crippling Q Daily’s business. The site has tried to
abide by the government’s strict controls by avoiding sensitive topics like
politics and the military. But she said it was often unclear what might anger
the authorities.
“There is no dignity running media here,” Ms.
Yang said.
Before Mr. Xi took control, Chinese
journalism had entered something of a golden age, with reporters publishing
investigations about faulty vaccines and shoddy buildings toppled by
earthquakes.
But under Mr. Xi’s rule, harassment of
journalists has worsened. At least 48 journalists were in prison in China as of
December, more than in any other country, according to the Committee to Protect
Journalists.
Experts warned that by reining in
journalists, Mr. Xi risked shutting off an important channel for the public to vent
frustration.
“Allowing the press some freedom would serve
as a safety valve,” said Yuan Zeng, a media scholar at the University of Leeds.
Despite the political climate, a small group
of investigative journalists are fighting to keep their profession alive,
publishing stories on social media and overseas outlets.
Mr. Liu, the journalist who was detained in
2013, continues to investigate serial killers and problems in the justice
system, among other topics, often under a pen name.
The best journalists in China are persistent
and aware of the risks of the job, he said. “Outside of China, journalists are
fired for writing false reports,” he said. “Inside China, they are fired for
telling the truth.”
Ms. Zhang, the veteran reporter, has written
in-depth features about the wives of imprisoned human rights lawyers and
opinion pieces on the dangers of censorship. She lives in fear that the police
will show up at her apartment in central China and force her to stop, she said.
“Control of the media is lethal,” said Ms.
Zhang, who is better known by her pen name, Jiang Xue. “But we are powerless to
solve it.”
At a two-week boot camp for aspiring
journalists in Chengdu, in southwestern China, organized this year by a
nonprofit group, Ms. Zhang spoke about the dangers of totalitarianism. Inside a
residential building, Ms. Zhang, in a quiet, gentle voice, urged about 30
students to stand up for the weak and vulnerable.
“Believe in the power of persistence,” Ms.
Zhang told the class.
Cheng Yuxin, 16, who paid more than $200 to
attend the camp, said she signed up because she was tired of the skewed
presentation of the news in China.
“I need to see the point of view of the
journalist,” she said, “and to know what good reporting should be.”
Follow Javier C. Hernández on Twitter:
@HernandezJavier.
Albee Zhang and Iris Zhao contributed
research.
