Tiger Hunting at News Probe By Hugo de Burgh Turn on to investigative journalism in China. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Turn on to investigative journalism in China. You might be pleasantly surprised.

A land behind the big headquarters of China Central Television in Beijing. A two story building, deliberately chosen so as not to be intimidating. People at desks, talking on mobiles, then most of the staff saunter into the room with the big table and scatter themselves around it. An editorial conference is about to begin for a programme that is focus of the hopes and fears of many millions of people - News Probe (Xinwen Diaocha).
See the programmes: A police officer, trapped by his own clumsy attempt to cover up a murder, skewered by the reporter’s calm, analytic, sceptical querying. A hospital executive weeps as she admits that hundreds died of SARS because her department did not supply sterilised equipment. A forestry official is finally made to admit that, because he withheld compensation from peasant farmers, the men were driven to suicide as the only way they might draw attention to their plight. A woman, sold into prostitution by the managers of the refuge where she was billeted, leads us to the people responsible. We see the reporters going from witness to witness until someone finally has the courage - or the foolhardiness - to say what he saw from his window on the day of an interrogation.

What’s Going On?
The reappearance of investigative journalism in China since 1992 has been instructive because it has demonstrated that the approaches and techniques of investigative journalism, as Anglophones understand it, can be applied in different political and cultural circumstances. Or, to put it another way, what Anglophones assumed to be a product of their own wonderfully open and liberal societies are to be found somewhere quite different. It was a surprise to Western observers to find that the Chinese media (and investigative journalists in particular) are, despite limitations upon them, influencing public life today by introducing new and unconventional ideas, changing terms of reference, forcing the pace of reform, giving voice to concerns and calling attention to issues. At first this was thought to be heralding the collapse of authoritarian rule, but this was difficult to square with the enthusiastic way in which members of the CCP leadership appeared to endorse investigative journalism, an interesting corrective to Anglophones’ own parochial assumptions.

Live Tigers vs Dead Tigers
A criticism often made is that Chinese investigative journalism is circumscribed in subject matter and in vigour by the political controls on journalism, which are in conflict with the marketisation of the media. Commercial imperatives would have more exposure and sensational revelation of more targets, but, alas, politics takes command. This criticism can be justified, as is the criticism that Chinese investigative journalism rarely exposes until the problem it investigates has been sorted; it amounts to history as much as to revelation. The News Probe team is aware of that, and distinguishes its own favoured stories as “live tigers”, while those handled by other media are “dead tigers”. There are times, though, when it is either not politic or not possible to chase live tigers.
The chasing itself is done with verve. “How I wish we could do that”, sighs Andy Bell of BBC Panorama, watching a News Probe reporter march into a police station and get his interviews, interviews that eventually nail his subjects. “The Police Federation would never allow it”. True, Chinese journalists may be avoiding the biggest sharks of all, but they are putting terror into the hearts of some powerful local despots in ways of which the cynosures of Anglophone investigative journalism - such as Ida Tarbell, WT Stead, Seymour Hersch or Paul Foot - would be proud. News Probe is journalism at its most enthralling, rewarding, demanding. Around the table, behind the relaxed appearance, the team pulses with excitement as researchers read out their ideas for stories. Here are some of them.

Story 1
Jilin Province. A woman was infected by a liver disease. Needed blood transfusion and the provider supplied polluted blood such that she was infected. She sued the provider. But had no proof and decided to take it upon herself to collect evidence. She pretended to be an illegal blood collector and was arrested as such. She has explained her intentions to the authorities.

The researcher argued that the most important point of this story is that this woman used this subterfuge to do her own investigation, because it demonstrates how people are refusing to put up with corruption and maltreatment.

Editor: This is now under investigation by the Ministry. Although it might offer us a cameo for a widespread situation, probably it’s a “dead tiger” as far as we’re concerned.

Story 2
Zhejiang Province. An underground banking service managed to collect money from local people to the tune of 300 million rmb. They offered high interest and then scarpered.

Editor: Quite interesting because it is a common problem. It involves intimidation by local hoodlums but also reveals problems with the banking system and the state financial system. Problem: it is very difficult for journalists to collect evidence. The extent of the impact on the state banking service is important. We must demand to know how the authorities propose to deal with this matter. This kind of problem has been very common in Wenzhou where several tens of billions are known to have been stolen in this way in a similar case in 2002. It’s probable there are many such scams and we should show this to warn people but since we have covered similar stories it would be repetition.

Story 3
A girl student killed herself after knowing that she was suspected of stealing money by using her roommate’s credit card and pin numbers. At first it was thought she was a wealthy student, and the likelihood of her being the culprit improbable, but now it has been learned that she came from a poor family. It is believed that she put the money (about £100) in her bank account and telephoned her family to have them take it out.

Verdict: To be used as a case study within a programme dealing with psychological problems amongst students.

Story 4
Hunan Academy of Agricultural Science. Three researchers committed suicide because they were found to have got themselves into the hands of unscrupulous business people wanting to exploit the Academy’ research for profit. The interesting aspect is that the Academy was under financial pressure because of marketisation and forced these researchers to exploit commercial opportunities. They did not know how and were criticised by their bosses.

Editor: The value of the story is that it shows how state intellectual assets are not protected properly. It is a very sensitive issue because of the prestige of the academic research centre and therefore tough for journalists to investigate. Maybe unsuitable too, as the government has been campaigning to improve the credibility of the authorities, ever since the August the 4th Plenum of the 16th Chinese Communist Party Central Committee. Too much of this kind of report and people lose faith in the whole system.

Story 5
Sichuan Province. In the provincial Judicial Entrance Examinations, two students telephoned three lecturers and bribed them to release to them the exam questions in advance, paying them 190,000 rmb each. They then sold them on by telephone to large numbers of students. Among those who have been arrested are the Deputy Director of the university and the lecturer who had designed the questions.

Executive Producer: We did a similar story in Guangxi but we were not allowed to transmit it because of it being an ethnic minority dominated area, so it had to be used as internal reference (neican).

Editor: The cops and judges are at this scam all the time, the exam system needs sorting. There is something wrong with having a career decided on one exam, anyway. Let’s go with this one.

Honourable Officials…
News Probe was established in 1995 and today has an audience of between 30m and 50m people, transmitting 52 programmes per year (unless any are pulled) for 40 minutes each. Originally, says Editor Zhang Jie, they aimed for intellectuals but rapidly realised that they had a huge following among the peasants and migrant workers. Large numbers of them call in with harrowing tales of exploitation, expropriation and corruption. Every call is recorded in typed minutes. The attention given to these sometimes plaintiff, often moving, notes shows how seriously the journalists take their task of attempting to represent ordinary peoples’ frustrations and illuminate their sufferings. They are by no means merely investigating what the politicians want investigated, although that must surely come into it. In their work, the News Probe staff are both fulfilling a traditional Chinese role, that of the honourable official, immortalised in the myths of Qu Yuan, Hai Rui and Judge Di, but reflecting an international development of journalism which has come about as a consequence of technological change, market demand and the diffusion of techniques and practices once thought of as Anglophone alone.

…or Global Media Workers
All over the world influence is being attributed to journalists as never before. The collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe 10-15 years ago was hastened and assured by the news media. In much of Latin America, journalists are credited with forcing elites to let democracy flourish; Middle Eastern society today is supposedly being transformed in its attitudes to authoritarian regimes because of the introduction of new ideas by, principally, Al Jazeera. Georgia’s Rose Revolution appears to have been forced by a powerful media. In the Anglophone countries, journalists are widely blamed for the contempt in which politics is held, and the damage this does to democracy.

Thanks to technological changes and shared practices, a new transnational media class may be developing, or at least national classes with common characteristics. Since China probably has the world’s biggest media system, it seems logical to ask what is happening to the news media, or to journalism, there. What are emerging as the functions of journalists and journalism in China today? How do the changing political economy of the media, government exigencies, popular pressures and professional norms interact and influence the practises of journalists in China, at a time when, in different ways, their colleagues are becoming increasingly influential elsewhere?

A superficial glance at the media by a visitor to China gives the impression that Chinese journalists, in a variegated and highly commercial market, are indeed performing the same kind of tasks as their counterparts elsewhere. Even such a broad assumption is always qualified by awareness that in China, as in other societies, there are cultural inhibitions to the unfettered reporting, investigating or analysing of facts, and that the government in China has well established methods of political control in place that have not disintegrated even though commercialisation of the media has made them much more responsive to the customer, more populist, more critical, more neophilliac and impatient with wasting too much space on heavy politics.
However, the government remains the owner and operates the media, according to Dr Zhou He’s appealing analogy, as its imperial predecessor did the salt monopoly. The monopoly position, the strict licensing system and the low taxation are foundations of the industry’s prosperity.
Aside from the omnipresence of the Party cells, there are other arrangements which are supposed to ensure conformity in the media, such as the fact that journalists - or at least the senior ones - are state officials. In return for their privileged position, journalists have to cope with discrepancies between official ideology and everyday politics. There must also be contradictions between the pressures of the market, the expectations of the audience and the demands of the politicians.

Yet despite all these caveats the declaration of News Probe, in its promotional material, that it is “in pursuit of justice; balanced and in depth; getting at the truth” is credible. The investigations are real. Things change as a result of them, bad people are punished and systems reformed. Around the world Chinese achievements are astounding economists, artists, scientists, technologists, business people and engineers. Journalists too, if they only knew.

Hugo de Burgh is Professor of Journalism at the University of Westminster and Director of the China Media Centre, established January 2005. His books include Investigative Journalism (2000) and The Chinese Journalist (2003). Forthcoming from Routledge is Making Journalists (2005). He wishes to acknowledge the help of Xin Xin, University of Westminster, and of the leaders and team of News Probe, who made it possible for him to write this article.