One Scoop Too Many

• Share

Last April, China's Southern Metropolis Daily printed a story about Sun Zhigang, a migrant worker in Guangzhou beaten to death in official custody after being detained by police for not carrying ID. The story touched off a wave of public outrage that reached Beijing: in June, Premier Wen Jiabao led a Cabinet vote that proscribed the detention of migrants simply for straying far from their hometowns. The next morning, the paper editorialized: "This is a milestone in the history of citizens' rights that we should cherish forever."

The rights of citizens might have been buttressed by the Daily's scoop—but at a price. Officials in Guangdong province had previously censured the paper for its aggressive coverage of last year's SARS outbreak. At 3 a.m. on March 19—one year to the day after Sun was killed—authorities raided the Guangzhou home of Daily editor Cheng Yizhong, confiscating books, magazines and computer documents and taking him into custody. Last week, two senior staff members of the paper were sentenced to hefty jail terms on charges of corruption. (The prosecution said the two had embezzled company money. Their defense attorney asserts that the payments were standard performance-based bonuses.) In an open letter to authorities last week, Chen Feng, the Daily reporter who broke the Sun Zhigang story, wrote that such a crackdown, if politically inspired, could mean a big step backward for China's media. "The will of authorities," he wrote, "will be the black cloud that cages and smothers journalism."