Killing Puts Focus on Corruption in Chinese News Media

By Howard W. French | The New York Times
31 January 2007

SHANGHAI, Jan. 30 - Lan Chengzhang sat in a car outside the office of a mining company while a colleague ventured inside to make inquiries.

It was his first month of work with the newspaper, and he had decided to take on what anyone in the area knew could be a most dangerous subject, the illegal coal mines that proliferate in the sooty hill country of Shanxi Province.

Within minutes, a band of men armed with lengths of pipe and other crude weapons set upon him, beating him so badly that within a few hours he succumbed to his injuries. Though severely beaten, his colleague from the China Trade News survived to tell the tale.

Attacks against journalists are not uncommon in China, even if deaths are rare. But in ways that few could have expected, the killing on Jan. 11 of this untested reporter for an obscure publication has become a watershed event, with reporters and editors around the country seeing in the murky contours of the case a cautionary tale for their booming but deeply troubled profession.

That Mr. Lan’s death has become a national event was helped in no small measure by China’s leader, Hu Jintao, who in an unusual statement a few days afterward demanded that justice be done.

But it also highlighted the culture of corruption that many journalists acknowledge pervades the industry, particularly the practice among some reporters of demanding money from subjects to avoid damaging articles.

Mr. Hu, who has spoken often of the need for the government to strengthen its control over the news media, has been seen as anything but a friend of journalists. Given that, many here said, and after several days of intense commentary about the killing in the international news media and on Chinese blogs and Web sites, Mr. Hu may have been moved to protect his country’s image.

“Hu Jintao is very much concerned about China’s international image,” said Zhan Jiang, dean of journalism at the Youth Politics Institute in Beijing. “Since this incident has been widely reported both at home and overseas, he had to do something.”

Inside the Chinese news media, introspection over the killing of Mr. Lan, 35, has been unusually forthright, mixing criticism of the government with harsh self-examination. Beijing is condemned for limiting the scope of honest, aggressive journalism, and the journalists themselves are condemned, indeed by themselves, for giving in to corruption as a professional way of life.

“This kind of control and degeneration are inseparable,” said Zhang Ping, a veteran reporter at Southern Metropolis magazine. “The control dims the hopes one has for a career in journalism, and many reporters, like people at Xinhua, don’t have any honorable feelings from being a journalist. They get no rewards the normal way and discover that in China only lie-telling can bring you income.” Xinhua is the main government news agency.

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