For China’s Leading Investigative Reporter, Enough Is
Enough
·
June 7, 2019
·
o BEIJING — Late at
night, a senior police officer guided Liu Wanyong, then a budding investigative
journalist, through the inner sanctum of one of the scariest domains in China,
the Ministry of Public Security.
The rooms were empty. Mr. Liu was
directed to a locked filing cabinet.
The officer pulled out a dossier, laid
the documents on a desk and — this being the era before cellphone cameras —
gave Mr. Liu 30 minutes to scratch down the contents.
The documents laid out the story of an
innocent businessman who had been jailed for the crimes of a corrupt
politician. That’s news in most places, but not of the stop-the-presses
variety. But in China in 2005, a leak like that was rare, and Mr. Liu’s account
of how a party official had used his power to arrest an innocent man created a
sensation.
Eventually,
the businessman was released and the politician, a retired Communist Party
secretary, went to prison, though not before his supporters attacked Mr. Liu
outside the courthouse. For that story, and many others, Mr. Liu earned the
nickname “Tibetan Mastiff” for his perseverance at the China Youth Daily, a
paper run by the Communist Party but with a reputation for sometimes bending
the rules.
More than a decade later, Mr. Liu, 48,
has quit journalism. More than just a personal decision, however, his departure
from the newspaper where he worked for 21 years represents the end of
investigative journalism in China, a profession left in tatters by the pressure
of Communist Party orthodoxy under President Xi Jinping.
Mr. Liu was about the last person
standing of a group of hard-hitting journalists who worked at places like
Southern Weekly and Caixin, the standard bearers of truth-seeking journalism
that ebbed and flowed before Mr. Xi came to power.
The departure of Mr. Liu meant
investigative journalism would never be the same, a social media account run by
Chinese reporters declared. He was the pillar of the trade, it said, adding:
“The most important figure in investigative journalism has disappeared.”
“If
China wants to develop in a healthy, normal way, we must have a huge amount of
media that can report justly,” Mr. Liu said as he poured tea in his spartan new
office at an asset management firm where he is tending to the company image. He
has given up the T-shirt and baggy pants look of the newsroom for a white
open-neck business shirt and tailored trousers cinched by a big belt.
“But
news is not like news anymore,” he said, and “journalism isn’t like
journalism.”
His
decision was a reluctant one, forced upon him, he says, by a tightening vise of
censorship, as at least 100 “juicy” stories were killed at the Youth Daily in
the past two years. He grew weary of the response “just wait” — code, he says,
for “Don’t even dream of tackling this topic” — when he discussed story ideas
with editors.
Sometimes, journalists were silenced,
forbidden to write for months as punishment for writing articles that ran afoul
of the censors. The journalists were then compelled to compile reports
confessing their mistakes.
Instead of investigations, the party
wanted “positive-energy stories” that would make people feel good as the
economy sours, he said.
In the last year, accounts of the
turmoil around financial scams that cost millions of people their savings were
banned in the interests of “social stability.” The facts behind a huge
explosion at a chemical factory were never explained.
“The question of who is responsible is
one of the first things people want to know in a calamity like that,” Mr. Liu
said. “But if you read our news, do you find this out? No.” The propaganda
chiefs demanded articles about the blast that told people how to remain safe, a
ludicrous notion since the explosion had already done its damage.
The toughened controls on journalists
began after Mr. Xi became president in 2012. It became impossible to chase
criminal and corruption cases in ways that were independent from the prosecutors,
Mr. Liu said. “Now, you just record the process,” he said. “The government’s
policy is that the government decides anticorruption cases, not the
journalist.”
In
early 2016, Mr. Xi visited the main media outlets: People’s Daily, Xinhua news
agency and the state-run television network, CCTV. During the highly publicized
events, he resurrected the Communist edict that journalists reflect the will of
the party. Editors interpreted that to mean that Mr. Xi’s political thought was
central to all articles. That was the official beginning of the end for
independent reporting.
A 2016 survey by Zhang Zhian, a
professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, had already shown a dramatic
drop in the ranks of experienced journalists, with more than half fleeing to
other professions.
“There is hardly any reporting in China
now,” said Zhan Jiang, a former professor of journalism at Beijing’s Foreign
Studies University. “We have returned to the propaganda of the Mao era.”
Mr.
Liu, 48, was born into poverty in a village less than an hour from the center
of Beijing. As the youngest of seven children of an illiterate mother, he never
went to the capital until he was in his late teens. There were no books in the
house, and well into the 1980s the family dumped human feces in the fields as
fertilizer.
“My
parents didn’t even know what news was,” he said.
He was young enough to miss the
Cultural Revolution, when the schools were closed, but was forced to learn
Chinese under a reign of terror imposed by a harsh teacher. “Every day you
lived in fear of having your palm hit by the teacher’s stick,” he said.
In college, he showed a flair for
journalism, writing campus news in the style of Xinhua, the state-run news
agency. He tried out for a job at the China Youth Daily, and sailed through a
test that required writing both in everyday Mandarin and classic Chinese.
“The
core of being a journalist is that you need to love your job,” he said. “The
text of the story is not so important. You either have compassion for the lower
class or you don’t.”
At the China Youth Daily, Mr. Liu
rapidly proved adept at unveiling the corrupt links between politicians and
businessmen. After the 2005 case, more leaks came his way, and he built a cadre
of reporters into an investigative unit. One of his favorite articles
foreshadowed the college admissions scandal that erupted in the
United States this year.
It involved the daughter of an
influential politician who lacked the grades to go to college. Mr. Liu showed
how she had used the identity of a much better student to dupe admissions
officers into granting her a place. After that, the Ministry of Education began
requiring photo IDs on application paperwork.
His string of reports on corrupt
politicians burnished his paper’s reputation and helped build its circulation.
He kept at it as the censorship screws tightened, writing even last year about
a businessman who was seeking compensation for wrongly serving seven years in
prison after himself being swindled by a provincial police chief. That was the
last. His once flourishing unit has been reduced to two inactive journalists.
He has not entirely given up on journalism.
He makes guest appearances at journalism classes, encouraging students to
persist even in the current hostile environment. He offers a slew of tips on
how to outwit the authorities. After checking into a hotel, he says, the first
rule is to canvass the room for drugs that the police have planted,
a time-honored trick to silence a journalist whose work is inconveniencing the
powers that be.
Despite leaving journalism, Mr. Liu has
remained true to his humble roots. He has barely traveled: a junket to the
Seychelles with a party propaganda unit here; a trip to India there; and
another to South Korea.
His passion remains the search for
truth, or as close as he can get to it under such dire censorship.
“When
I read the Chinese press, I know there are problems,” he said. “In the trade
war, when Trump said China had withdrawn from the agreement, there is no way
the Chinese media can say what China retreated from. I read the information in
the Western press.”
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