ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY HARRY HARRISON

Word Games
	As Beijing reins in China's muckraking publications, reporters learn that not all the news is fit to print
	By Hannah Beech Shanghai

Posted Monday, March 1, 2004; 21:00 HKT
It was the story of a lifetime, and Wang Keqin, a reporter with the Gansu Economics Daily in China's northwest, knew it. After months of digging, Wang had uncovered a huckster securities company that had bilked local punters of millions of dollars by setting up stock tickers and computer screens that listed real companies but utterly fake investment returns. More than 150 people were eventually jailed for their role in this boiler-room operation, but Wang won no accolades for his groundbreaking report. Shortly after his article was splashed across the front page in early 2001, Wang's newspaper was shuttered by the provincial publicity department as punishment for having printed his story. Members of the local Mafia that had masterminded the hoax told Wang he had a $600,000 price on his head, and they made threatening calls promising to "bathe his family in blood." "I was caught in an indescribable horror," Wang recalls. "Whenever I heard a noise in the corridor, I thought someone was coming to take revenge on me." When the financial daily—stripped of its investigative teeth and suitably chastened—was allowed to reopen four months later, Wang was told by local-government officials that he was being dismissed from his job.

Luckily for Wang, his scoop was reprinted by the China Economic Times, a national daily based in Beijing. Word of the audacious securities fraud reached then-Premier Zhu Rongji, who decided to look into the fate of the intrepid journalist who had exposed the securities scam. After several phone calls by Zhu, Wang was offered a job at the China Economic Times and given the Premier's guarantee that he could write serious, investigative stories. Today, at 39, Wang is a poster boy for China's burgeoning breed of muckraking journalists, and his stories influence national policy. A recent article on the stranglehold that taxi companies have over their drivers prompted current Premier Wen Jiabao to order a cleanup of the industry. Yet Wang realizes he is a rarity among China's still-manacled media. "I'm lucky that my reporting caught the attention of senior government officials," he says. "I know a lot of journalists are not so lucky."

That cautionary message has been made chillingly clear lately as a slew of enterprising journalists have been gagged for crossing the blurry line that defines the limits of news coverage in China today. As avian flu spread across China last month, reporters in Shanghai and Guangzhou discovered that their stories about how the epidemic had started far earlier than officially announced were being replaced by cheerier coverage from China's state news agency, Xinhua. In January, a medical writer from the Southern Metropolis Daily was taken off her beat for reporting—correctly, as it turned out—that a recurrence of SARS had struck the southern city of Guangzhou. The daily's editor is also being investigated for financial impropriety—which some staffers view as an act of retribution intended to mute the paper's crusading voice. Meanwhile, at Southern Weekend, a sister publication of the Southern Metropolis Daily that is also owned by the Southern Daily Press Group, at least five reporters have been pressured to leave their jobs over the past few months. The weekly's once hard-hitting coverage has softened considerably. Other publications have been shut down altogether, including the 21st Century World Herald (for publishing an interview with one of Mao Zedong's former secretaries, who advocated direct elections) and the Beijing New Times (for running a piece last summer putting the country's rubberstamp parliament on a list of "Seven Disgusting Things in China").

The crackdown has spooked China's journalists, always sensitive to the subtle barometric shifts that mark the difference between a good story and one that lands them among the unemployed. Last year, reporters had hoped that Premier Wen's public promise to disclose SARS information in a "timely, accurate and comprehensive" manner would lead to greater freedom for the media. There is no question that the censorship muzzle has loosened in recent years, heartening a younger, gutsier generation of journalists, yet China's press still remains hostage to the mood swings of the nation's leaders. The recent media blackout on the real bird-flu situation signals that, at least for now, caution may be taking precedence over candor. Even Wang Keqin, despite his status as a trailblazing journalist, declined to comment on censorship issues at this delicate juncture. Says an otherwise outspoken staffer at the Southern Metropolis Daily: "This is a sensitive time, and the staff has decided that the best course of action is not to talk about this publicly for a while. We don't want to risk our newspaper getting closed down."

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