China’s Investigative Journalists Cut a Broad, if Cautious, Swath

The odd thing wasn’t that Bill Clinton shirked his income taxes, but that he paid them. What was the leader of the free world doing forking over money in China’s poverty-ridden Anhui province?

And it wasn’t just Clinton, local tax receipts showed. Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin also coughed up his share. So did the first emperor of China, who expired in 210 BC but has managed to prove that death and taxes can plague a person at the same time.

What’s going on?

Fraud, said the reporter on “Focus,” an investigative news show that has become one of China’s hottest television programs. Tax officials in Anhui invented taxpayers--some of them world-famous personages--and faked receipts to make it appear to their superiors that they had collected millions of yuan, which turned out not to exist.

Muckraking Shows Pile Up Top Ratings

The episode was the latest in the show’s catalog of exposes, watched nightly by 300 million viewers.

“Focus” is just the leading edge of a wave of muckraking journalism sweeping over China.

Much as programs like “60 Minutes” and “Dateline NBC” have multiplied across the U.S. prime-time landscape, investigative-style news shows are proliferating here, part of a tentative flirtation with greater press freedom in a land where expression has long been tightly supervised.

Like their U.S. counterparts, the Chinese programs are ratings-grabbers with slick graphics and catchy names, such as “News Probe,” “Oriental Horizon” and “Beijing Express.”

Reporters use hidden cameras and in-your-face interview tactics to unearth petty corruption, consumer chicanery and other illegal goings-on.

Producers pick hot-button topics likely to appeal to an audience that is increasingly angry with an unscrupulous government and uncertain about how to navigate China’s new consumerist society.

But unlike U.S. programs, the Chinese shows operate in a country where the media remain closely scrutinized and controlled by the state. This has forced journalists to strike a delicate balance between digging deep and staying on the good side of the Communist leadership, especially with a renewed crackdown on politically “subversive” publications.

“The government is allowing a lot more freedom of expression” than it has in years past, said Stanley Rosen, a Sinologist at USC. But “there are clear restraints.”

Still taboo is anything questioning the wisdom of the central government or its grip on power. Even the more adventurous media hew largely to the government’s agenda, which includes stamping out corruption and encourages exposure of official misdeeds.

Sensitive topics such as military policy are strictly off limits. While the investigative shows gleefully nail small-time Communist cadres, national leaders are portrayed only in flattering terms.

Nevertheless, there is still room to push gently at boundaries and reshape the delivery and content of news, away from Communist dogma and toward China’s more consumer-oriented economy.

“These investigative shows are a hybrid: entertainment along with serious journalistic efforts,” said Judy Polumbaum, a University of Iowa expert on the Chinese media.

Instead of endlessly spouting Maoist doctrine, the new TV newsmagazine programs concentrate on such subjects as medical malpractice, get-rich-quick schemes, how to get legal help and China’s worsening pollution.

Consider “The ‘Servant’ Loses the Family Fortune,” a recent “Focus” episode shot in the central province of Hubei.

The crew traveled to the village of Shishi to find out why its electricity and water supply had been cut. Villagers were adamant that they had paid all their fees, but they had no idea where their money had gone until a little digging turned up a stash of suspicious purchases by the local party secretary, a man named Wang.

The cameras caught up with Wang outside his office, literally backing him against a wall.

The reporter peppered him with questions in Mike Wallace fashion: Who approved the 30,000 yuan to buy cell phones? Especially at a time “when local people were in the midst of economic hardship”?

“I . . . I didn’t tell anybody,” Wang stammered. “I decided myself. . . . I don’t remember clearly.”

He continued to sweat as his questioner waved the receipts for other purchases that Wang “perhaps remembers even less clearly.” The expensive car never mentioned to the village committee. Countless meals out for “official business.”

In some ways, the government benefits from such shows by showing that it is serious about eliminating those practices. Thus, it can siphon off some public anger about corruption, which often ranks as the No. 1 grievance among ordinary Chinese.

Another benefit is money, which is of major concern now that the government-subsidized media outlets are under pressure to pay more of their own way.

At “Focus”--which first aired in 1994 on the state-owned China Central Television network, or CCTV--five-second commercial spots generate millions of dollars a year in ad revenue. The show’s nightly time slot after the national 7 p.m. newscast gives it a lead-in--more than 300 million viewers.

Although “Focus” is produced somewhat independently, staffers acknowledge that they must take heed of the government, which sometimes assigns specific stories or criticizes others.

During the summer, the program ran glowing reports on the efforts of the People’s Liberation Army to fight China’s devastating floods.

“We have a standard: to be liked from above and below,” one source close to the show said. Success is “if Mom and Pop like it, and if Zhongnanhai [the central government compound] likes it.”

Approval has come from both quarters. In a boost to the show’s profile, Premier Zhu Rongji visited the studio in October and even pronounced himself as being under the same “media supervision” that the show has doled out to scores of sheepish local officials.

“Supervision by public opinion points out problems in our progress, reflects the suffering of the masses. It encourages the masses; it causes the masses to see hope,” Zhu said.

Upper-Level Officials Beyond Criticism

The concept of the media as a public watchdog is taking limited root here, especially among younger journalists, media observers say. “There’s a better understanding of freedom of the press these days,” agreed James Zhang, a producer who has worked with CCTV on its investigative shows.

But criticism of officials and policies above the provincial level remains out of bounds, despite Zhu’s remark about wide-ranging “media supervision.”

Zhu himself once criticized a “Focus” episode as being too one-sided, sources say. Top editors at more daring news organizations still are lectured, or even removed, by propaganda gremlins if their coverage is deemed too negative.

The media, long considered the “throat and tongue” of the Communist Party, are waiting to see if the government issues a much-debated press law that may offer a measure of protection for the media’s right to criticize officialdom. Some journalists fear that the law might also spell out “obligations” to support the government that would restrict, rather than empower, them in doing their jobs.

Ironically, the flurry of interest in investigative journalism obscures the fact that the investigative tradition extends further back in China’s history--as far as the turn of the century--and includes none other than the father of Communist China, Mao Tse-tung.

In 1927 and 1930, Mao produced two studies of rural conditions in Hunan and Jiangxi provinces that were key in his developing theories on peasant mobilization and class struggle. The studies meticulously examined such aspects of rural life as the practice of selling children to pay off debts, the money made by local temples and differences between rich and poor farmers.

“His report on the peasant movement in Hunan, while threaded with polemics, is a careful and observant investigative report, and so are some of his other early writings,” Polumbaum of the University of Iowa said. “This sort of fact-finding may be even more like what we think of as investigative journalism than what [later] Chinese journalists have done.”

Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, also urged the Chinese people to “seek truth from facts,” a slogan used by journalists in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s to justify more aggressive reporting.

Stories With a Voyeuristic Bent

The new investigative TV shows are inheritors of that tradition. But to attract viewers, they have added an element of voyeurism as well.

Witness “Confessions of a Drug-Peddling Death-Row Convict” on CCTV’s “News Probe,” a popular Friday night program akin to ABC’s “PrimeTime Live.”

The show interviewed Dong Xiaoyang in her jail cell where she awaited execution, patiently folding a thousand origami swans in self-imposed penance. Dong tearfully described her confinement, how she missed her husband and what she wanted to say to her parents. Head-shaking relatives lamented her life of crime.

The news crew then watched as a judge heard Dong’s final appeal--and commuted her sentence to life imprisonment. Within seconds, the reporter thrust his microphone in Dong’s face as the 32-year-old sobbed with relief.

Not surprisingly, the episode avoided any examination of the death penalty, which is applied more frequently in China than anywhere else. A prison official was even trotted out to stress what good treatment Dong had received in her spartan surroundings.

But such a show, with its peek at society’s underbelly and occasional appeals to human sympathy, would probably never have made it on the air several years ago, let alone on the government’s main network.

“It’s significant that they’re taking on more challenging things,” USC’s Rosen said. “It’s a positive step.”

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Television Boom in China

The proliferation of investigative-style television news programs in China has come amid a sharp increase in the ownership of TV sets since 1985.

* Number of color TVs per 100 urban households

1985: 17.2

1990: 59.0

1995: 89.8

1997: 100.5

****

Number of TVs (either color or black-and-white) per 100 rural households

1985: 11.7

1990: 44.4

1995: 80.7

1997: 92.4

Source: China State Statistics Bureau

“Supervision by public opinion points out problems in our progress, reflects the suffering of the masses, it encourages the masses, it causes the masses to see hope.”

--Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji, discussing media’s role as public advocate against corruption