And a little more corruption...

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Nick-la
Wonder Wit

Joined: July 19, 2003
Posts: 3675
Location: Wasted on this site

Posted: Apr 17, 2004 - 03:27 PM
Post subject: And a little more corruption...

Publish and be damned

The imprisonment of editors of an outspoken newspaper has sparked new prοtests over the limits on China's media freedom, says Jonathan Watts

Friday April 16, 2004

A year ago, the editors of the Southern Metropolitan Daily were hailed as heroes for pushing back the boundaries of media freedom in China.
Now they are languishing in jail, the victims of a revenge campaign by the authorities whose corruption, incompetence and cover-ups they exposed.

That, at least, is the view of their supporters, who have launched an unusually vocal campaign to secure the release of the three in a case that has highlighted the growing pressure for press liberty in this authoritarian state.

Yu Huafeng, Li Minying, and Cheng Yizhong, the former senior editors of the pioneering daily, based in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, face up to 12 years in prison.

They are ostensibly being punished for embezzling state funds, but their biggest "crime" could more accurately be described as embarrassing local police and health officials with a series of powerful scoops.

Under the trio's leadership, the Southern Metropolitan Daily and its sister publication, the Southern Weekend, set new standards of hard-hitting journalism in China.

Although the newspaper is nominally controlled by the local Communist party, it was able to thrive in the relatively liberal climate of Guandong, which was the first Chinese province to benefit from the opening-up policy initiated in 1978, and is now a centre for domestic entrepreneurs and foreign manufacturers.

With its reputation and readership spreading nationwide, the paper last year ran several scoops that influenced central government policies and led to the dismissal of senior officials in Beijing and Guangzhou - something that would have been unheard of a few years ago.

At the start of the Sars crisis in late 2002, when the Southern Metropolitan Daily consistently broke news about the disease and official attempts at a cover-up, its circulation surged above 1.2 million, up by around 20% from two years earlier.

The daring stories, which were widely emulated by other media organisations as the outbreak spread across the country, contributed to the forced resignations of the health minister and the mayor of Beijing. This was hailed as a sign that the popular new Chinese government of the president, Hu Jintao, and the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, was ready to loosen constraints on the press.

Such hopes were raised by the response to another Southern Metropolitan Daily scoop last April. It told the story of the death in police custody of a college student who had been detained and beaten up for failing to show his ID - a common fate for migrant workers.

The Sun Zhigang affair, as it became known, forced the central government to rewrite police regulations and address the plight of the huge population of itinerant labourers.

But it may also have sealed the fate of the newspaper's editors. According to the local media, the Sun Zhigang report crushed the promotion prospects of the Ghuangzhou police chief, who begged the newspaper not to break the story, and then vowed revenge after it published.

The local government has denied that the subsequent crackdown is a form of retribution, but the timing of Yu's initial detention - only days after the Southern Metropolitan Daily broke the news of the return of Sars in late December - has created far more sceptics than believers.

Yu and Li were formally arrested in February, and sentenced to 11 and 12 years in jail for using advertising revenue to pay staff bonuses. Prosecutors argued that this was a form of embezzlement, because the income should have gone to the Communist party-run parent company.

Cheng, the former editor in chief, was arrested last month, and now faces similar charges.

A growing number of critics believe that the charges have been trumped up to punish editors for their refusal to toe the party line. In a rare challenge to the authorities, a group of prominent academics and media leaders have held symposiums, set up websites, and filed a petition against what they have described as "illegal measures" to limit press freedoms.

Unless the crackdown against the Southern Metropolitan Daily is called off, the petitioners warn that "the authority and credibility of the party, government bodies and the legislature will be questioned, and news media will find it difficult to survive".

After giving so much ground to the media during the Sars crisis, it would be astonishing if the authorities backed down again. Instead, Yu, Li and Cheng, the severed heads of the Southern Metropolitan Daily, are likely to be held up as a warning to other journalists about the perils of overstepping the tight limits imposed on the Chinese media.

However, that is unlikely to be the end of the battle. The increasingly competitive pressures at work in the Chinese media will push papers to print more circulation-boosting scoops.

The country's leaders, Mr Hu and Mr Wen, must also be asked how their image as "men of the people" can be reconciled with a crackdown on attempts to inform the public about official wrongdoing and health risks.

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