Chen Zhengping owned a small eatery in Tangshan, a town outside China's onetime imperial capital of Nanjing, but his business wasn't nearly as brisk as another local café's. On Sept. 14, Chen got his revenge by lacing his competitor's fried dough sticks, sesame cakes and glutinous rice with rat poison before the breakfast rush. The toxin was so strong that customers fell in the streets, half-eaten cakes tumbling from their hands and blood oozing from their eyes, ears and mouths. Scores of the victims were children from nearby schools. It was a mass slaughter—more than 100 died, by unofficial estimates—carried out in broad daylight.

You wouldn't have known that from the news coverage that followed. Chinese authorities ordered a media blackout and all reporting of the event was relegated to Xinhua—the Communist Party's wire service—and the state-controlled electronic media. They refused even to release a death toll.

But two days after the tragedy, the 21st Century World Herald hit newsstands across the country. The fledgling weekly tabloid, published in Guangzhou and distributed nationally, headlined the poisonings, followed with four pages of reportage and grim photos of the dead. That evening, China Central Television finally broke the official silence. One Herald editor recalls with excitement, "I was getting calls from other editor friends saying we were flat-out awesome."

Muckraking, the most subversive form of journalism, has found a niche in China. Financial reporters are digging up corporate skulduggery. Tabloid TV shows such as Focus Report are airing racy segments on lifestyles of the rich and corrupt. In August, an unfortunate couple in northwest China was hauled out of their home by local police for watching a porno video. Print and online media jumped on the story, and last week the Beijing Legal Times used the incident to bemoan abuse of power in China—a serious charge for the press to make in a communist state.

Beijing remains an adamant overlord, of course. It issues warnings to the media, detains reporters who go too far and frequently demands the dismissal of editors. Many topics, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, are absolutely verboten. But the past decade has seen an amazing proliferation of publications beneath the once stifling canopy of China's propaganda machine—there are now an estimated 7,000 newspapers and 8,000 magazines. For many, the primary goal is to make money, and they've quickly discovered that pushing the envelope to get real news—the more sensational the better—is the best way to compete.

Caijing, a business magazine based in Beijing, started up four years ago with a monthly circulation of 10,000. Nowadays the magazine prints every two weeks, with 80,000 copies distributed countrywide. Caijing's defining scoop came in August 2001 when it reported that Shenzhen-listed Guangxia (Yingchuan) Industry Co. had inflated profits by $50 million. (When the Enron scandal broke in the U.S. three months later, the Chinese media labeled it "America's Guangxia.")

Caijing's hard-hitting reporting is well within the window of freedom allowed by Beijing: its stories are about business, not politics or international relations or human rights. The magazine also benefits from a unique ownership structure. Caijing is owned and published by the Beijing-based Stock Exchange Executive Council, which, despite its official-sounding name, is a group of private investors. "In this country, in some way, all media are guided by the government," says Caijing's chief editor, Hu Shuli. "But we have no direct or indirect relations with the government."

The Southern Daily Group, in contrast, is an arm of the Communist Party of Guangdong province, and its flagship paper is a propaganda rag. But over the past three years, the group has started several smaller papers, including the 21st Century World Herald. The new papers are expected to pay their own way rather than subsist on Party handouts. "Papers in the major cities need to consider first and foremost that they are businesses," says one Herald editor. The poisoning story edition was the Herald's biggest seller to date, moving 30,000 copies in Nanjing alone, four times the norm. Beijing may move the goalposts with regularity, but for China's muckrakers, that's half the thrill of the game.