Blackmailing By Journalists In China Seen As 'Frequent'

By Edward Cody | Washington Post Foreign Service
25 January 2007

SHENZHEN, China -- At 9 p.m. in a dark Shenzhen parking lot, Bai Xiuyu handed over a plain brown envelope containing 15,000 Chinese yuan, the equivalent of nearly $2,000, in what was supposed to be a discreet blackmail payment to a local reporter.

Hidden in Bai's car, Gou Hua, Shenzhen bureau chief for the Southern Metropolitan Daily, watched the scene unfold and recorded the transaction with his cellphone camera. His interest was more than journalistic; the reporter receiving the payoff was Zhou Yu, a 29-year-old newcomer to Gou's own bureau.

To his consternation, what Gou saw the evening of Sept. 21 was another instance of the blackmail journalism metastasizing through China's news media. Bai's money was supposed to buy silence on alleged wrongdoing at her health clinic in this southern Chinese city. But more generally, journalists and officials say, Chinese reporters are demanding such hush money with increasing regularity from businesses and government agencies in exchange for the withholding of unfavorable news.

"It's very, very frequent," said Ma Yunlong, an editor whose newspaper exposed an instance of extravagant extortion in central Henan province in 2005. Ma said the case involved 480 reporters and others pretending to be reporters who asked for "shut-up fees" to keep news of a mine flood out of the public eye.

In many ways, blackmail journalism grew naturally out of a system in which Communist Party censors control the news rigorously, barring reports that could be seen as unfavorable to the party or contrary to the government's political goals. If the ruling party distorts the news for political reasons, blackmailing reporters have concluded, why wouldn't they do it themselves for financial reasons?

In addition, local party officials, long used to manipulating information, have been complicit in the payoff system when it suits their needs. In the everybody-does-it atmosphere, even non-reporters have found ways to get in on the take by posing as journalists.

After the August 2005 mine disaster, for instance, reporters and their friends in Henan province dispatched a flurry of cellphone messages as soon as they heard the news -- not because they were eager to report on it, but because they knew local officials would be eager to hush it up.

By the time Fan Youfeng of the Henan Business News arrived at the mine, in a village in Jiliao county, local officials said they had already given money to so many reporters and phony reporters that the coffers were dry. But still more people showed up, Fan wrote, and the officials sought more cash, pressing the mine owners to chip in.

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