The party’s investigation into Jiang’s letter dragged on for another eight months. The government never charged him with a crime, and he was finally released from house arrest in March 2005. Afterward, though, Jiang disappeared from public view. When I last visited him, he turned up the volume on his television set because he believed his apartment might be bugged and he whispered that he was trying to avoid provoking the government. He said he still wanted to visit his daughter and grandson in California, and he believed that if he behaved, the authorities would give him permission to go. As I listened to him speak, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of disappointment. The state had been unable to break Jiang, but it had succeeded in silencing him.
After I left his apartment, though, I decided it was unfair to expect the elderly doctor to continue standing up to the party. He had already achieved more than most and paid a price for it. I doubted the government would ever let him visit his daughter and grandson, but how could anyone expect him to give up that hope? There was only so much one man could do, and only so much a nation could ask of him.
9
THE NEWSPAPERMAN
During that critical National People’s Congress session in 2003, when the party was still trying to keep the SARS epidemic under wraps, only one newspaper in China dared publish anything about the disease, a gutsy tabloid in Guangdong Province named the Southern Metropolis Daily. Like all newspapers in China, the Daily was owned by the state and the party appointed its editors, and like every major paper in Guangdong, it had been ordered to publish word for word the government’s statement before the Congress that the disease was under control. Like most journalists in the province with any experience, the paper’s editors knew when they put the story on the front page that it wasn’t true. It pained them to participate in such deceit, but that was not what set them apart from their peers in the propaganda apparatus. Many men and women in the nation’s newsrooms aspired to do more than repeat the party’s lies. What distinguished the editors of the Southern Metropolis Daily—a thick paper known for its populist style and color photos—was their refusal to drop the story, and their willingness to take matters a step further.
After reporting that SARS had been contained, the newspaper’s editors began looking for a way to publish a more truthful story about the outbreak that had originated in their circulation area. They wanted to make up for what they had done and get even with the bureaucrats who had forced them to lie. Their chance came a few weeks later. On the opening day of the Congress in Beijing, one of the paper’s reporters assigned to cover the session managed to stop a deputy health minister between meetings and ask a few questions. The minister’s answers, though carefully worded, gave the editors an opening. On the front page the next day, the paper broke the censors’ blackout on news about SARS with a headline noting that international experts had been invited to help conduct research into the epidemic. It was a minor development, chosen by the editors for the front page to soften the impact of their decision to defy the censors, but readers who opened to the article inside found a full page of coverage that directly challenged the government’s position on SARS. The deputy minister was quoted acknowledging that the illness could not be considered “under control” because no one knew what caused it or how best to treat it. The paper also quoted him saying officials should provide more information to the public about future outbreaks, to prevent the spread of rumors like those that had caused panicked hoarding of vinegar and other folk remedies in Guangdong.
Cheng Yizhong
The health official erred by wandering off message, but it was the newspaper the party blamed. As far as the propaganda czars were concerned, the editors should have known better than to practice real journalism and print what the minister said. They should have known to stick to the script of the Congress and keep SARS out of the news. Zhang Dejiang, the party chief of Guangdong, in particular, was furious. A thick-faced politician with a degree from a university in North Korea, he lost his temper at a meeting in Beijing with journalists from his province. He shouted at the Daily’s reporter and complained that the press in Guangdong had grown too independent and needed to be reined in. The Daily had embarrassed him while he was in Beijing attending one of the most important party events of the year, and now he demanded that it be punished. The paper was ordered to bring home the reporters assigned to cover the Congress and prepare for a shake-up.
But this was not the first time that the Southern Metropolis Daily had angered its superiors in the party, and the editors knew what they needed to do to survive. They quickly submitted a report confessing to a grave mistake and outlining the steps they had taken to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. The reporter who wrote the SARS story had been fired, they said, and the editor who put it on the front page was suspended. Ultimate responsibility, they said, lay with the editor in chief, a rising star named Cheng Yizhong, and he had been demoted. The sternly worded report appeared to satisfy the party bosses. None of them seemed to notice that the fired reporter continued writing for the newspaper under a different byline, or that the suspended editor continued to show up for work, only on a different shift, or that Cheng was still running the newspaper, even if he no longer held the chief editor’s title. Then, a few weeks later, when the SARS cover-up finally unraveled, it was as if the Southern Metropolis Daily had been right all along. The new president, Hu Jintao, condemned the lies and promised greater government openness. The party’s censors never lifted their ban on coverage of SARS, but everyone in the media knew the political winds had shifted and the epidemic was fair game again. It was a huge story, and Cheng marshaled his staff to fill the paper with the articles he couldn’t publish earlier. Even as he put SARS back on the front page, though, Cheng was getting ready to publish an even bigger story, one that would make the paper’s earlier transgression look insignificant—and push the party’s relationship with its journalists to the breaking point.
HE WAS A slim, compact man, with piercing eyes, handsome features, and the sly, confident smile of a smart aleck. He dressed casually at the office, usually in jeans and plain collar shirts, and he looked younger than he really was, which was young enough. At thirty-seven, Cheng Yizhong was probably the youngest editor running a major newspaper in China. And yet when strangers visited the newsroom of the Southern Metropolis Daily, they rarely mistook him for one of the reporters on his staff. Despite his slight frame and youthful appearance, there was an intensity and a natural air of authority about him that commanded respect even from older and more experienced journalists.
From the day he was hired out of college by the Southern Newspaper Group, the state media firm that later launched the Daily, Cheng stood out among his peers. In a room full of city folk, he was a son of peasants from Anhui. (He often pointed out that Chen Duxiu, one of the founders of the Communist Party, was born in the same rural county.) He was also the only new employee who admitted participating in the 1989 prodemocracy protests. Cheng had escaped the countryside to the Chinese literature department at Zhongshan University, the most prestigious college in Guangzhou, and in his senior year, students there and in cities across the country marched in support of the movement in Tiananmen Square. Unlike most of his classmates, who later denied taking part in the demonstrations, Cheng admitted his involvement when the Southern Newspaper Group vetted his job application. At the time, the men who ran the Group could boast to party superiors that none of the company’s employees had participated in the Tiananmen movement. The claim was true only on paper, but it gave them a bit of political protection in the crackdown that followed the massacre. If they hired Cheng, they would lose that deniability. After some deliberation, they hired him anyway.
It was not an entirely surprising decision. The Southern Newspaper Group was an oasis of open-minded thinking in the state’s hidebound media empire, and it was known for pushing the limits within the propaganda apparatus. Its most daring publication, a paper based in Guangzhou named the Southern Weekend, was winnin
g readers and inspiring journalists across the country by showing how aggressive reporting and elegant writing could be possible despite censorship. On the Communist organization charts, the Group was part of the propaganda bureaucracy, but it also occupied a special place in the informal web of interest groups that made up the party. Ideologically, it was a camp for the party’s liberal wing. The editors of its newspapers were heirs to a tradition that began in 1957 during the Hundred Flowers Movement, when their predecessors launched a paper that gave voice to opinions that differed from the party line. One of the founders of that paper, the Yangcheng Evening News, argued that even if political conditions made it impossible for journalists to always write the truth, they should at least refuse to publish lies. Generation after generation, the editors of the Southern Newspaper Group tried to live up to that standard.
The Group was also an arm of the party apparatus in Guangdong, the vast manufacturing region on the nation’s southeast coast that used to be known as Canton. With one hundred million people, the province is China’s most populous, its wealthiest, and, other than the ethnic regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang, its most independent-minded. Ever since Mao, the central government has tried to keep a rein on the Cantonese, who often take their cues from neighboring Hong Kong instead of faraway Beijing. In part because of its long history of interaction with the outside world—foreign traders colonized its ports while waves of Cantonese immigrants settled across Asia and the West—party ideologues have viewed Guangdong with suspicion, and the leadership has made a point of naming outsiders to senior positions in the province. But the locals take pride in their distinct identity and remain a political force to be reckoned with. In the 1980s, Guangdong helped pioneer the market reforms, sometimes pushing ahead with policy changes before they had been approved in Beijing.
For a college student like Cheng, who spent his summers working the family rice fields in Anhui, the Southern Newspaper Group was a new world. Cheng was drawn to the Group because of its reputation, but also because he wanted to stay in Guangzhou, the vibrant boomtown on the Pearl River that was the provincial capital. He was assigned a job as an editor for a literary supplement to the Southern Daily, the staid party mouthpiece that was the Group’s flagship publication. His college sweetheart, whom he would later marry, landed a position in another section of the paper. After a year, the newspaper sent him to work as a reporter in Zhanjiang, a port city in the province that served as headquarters of the navy’s South China Sea fleet. He quickly built a reputation as one of the staff’s most prolific and aggressive writers. He filed reports on social problems such as conflicts between rural clans, as well as on public corruption, detailing the crimes of local officials caught taking bribes and building themselves lavish new homes. Occasionally, he wrote articles that his editors felt were too sensitive to publish. They would transmit these pieces for party officials to read in internal publications or kill them entirely. Cheng told himself that such disappointments came with the job. He was not yet the idealistic newsman he would become, and he took comfort in the fact that his newspaper was better than most, and that conditions for journalists seemed to be improving. After the assignment in Zhanjiang, the paper brought him back to headquarters and gave him a job editing one of its feature sections. He was ambitious and hardworking, and he joined the party and tried to make a good impression. He always got to the newsroom before anyone else, so he could put stories and thermoses of hot water on the desks of the senior editors before they arrived.
By the mid-1990s, the Southern Newspaper Group faced a business crisis. Market reforms had stalled after the Tiananmen massacre as hard-line conservatives gained power, but Deng Xiaoping rescued his capitalist economic program in 1992 with a tour of southern China that included several stops in Guangdong. State media companies such as the Southern Newspaper Group were told they could no longer rely on government subsidies and had to finance their own operations. The Group tried expanding into real estate and other ventures, but after a string of bad investments, the men in charge decided to focus on the business they knew best—newspapers.
Their main product, the Southern Daily, was a money-loser, and they knew it would be impossible to turn it around. The paper was the mouthpiece of the provincial party committee, and like all official party newspapers, it was constrained by a rigid set of traditions and customs. In the 1980s, the party chief Zhao Ziyang had urged these papers to begin publishing stories that used “the language of humans” instead of the “language of officials,” but when he was purged and placed under house arrest, the party all but abandoned that effort. Papers like the Southern Daily were still required to carry front-page stories on tedious party meetings and the empty pronouncements of party officials. They were still barred from leading with articles the censors considered too downbeat or critical. And they still had to measure the photos of party leaders before publishing them, to avoid giving offense or sending incorrect signals about each leader’s political standing. The editors of the Southern Newspaper Group tried to make the Southern Daily better, injecting more real journalism into the mix, but they could only tinker with the old formula, not rewrite it. If they wanted to turn a profit, they needed to start from scratch and launch a newspaper that could break free from the old rules. The state would still own the new paper, and the party would still control it, but it would not be a dedicated mouthpiece. Instead, it would be a newspaper people wanted to read. If it succeeded, the editors reasoned, advertisers and profits would follow, and the party would have a new, more effective vehicle for influencing public opinion.
Cheng was only twenty-nine, but the Group asked him to help start the experimental new paper. Management wanted someone young involved, and he was well regarded by the senior editors, who considered him not only talented but also, equally important, likeable. It was a big promotion—he was one of only three people appointed to the committee that would set up the paper—and Cheng hardly felt prepared, but he threw himself into the project, studying newspapers across the country and around the world. The Group decided early on that the new paper would be a tabloid named the Southern Metropolis Daily, and Cheng focused on the handful of market-oriented tabloids that had been established by party newspapers in other provinces. Then he wrote a ten-thousand word plan of action to make the Southern Metropolis Daily better than all of them. Cheng even designed the new paper’s red-and-yellow masthead. The traditional approach was to use the calligraphy of a party leader—the masthead of the People’s Daily, for example, was penned by Mao—but Cheng didn’t want the newspaper associated with any official or party faction. Instead, he chose calligraphy used on monuments during the fifth-century Northern Wei Dynasty. That was how he thought of the newspaper he was creating: as a monument, something that would endure through history and remind future generations of the past.
The paper hit the newsstands in January 1997, with Cheng as the deputy editor. Its first issue had only sixteen pages. There were fewer than a hundred reporters and editors on the staff then, and Cheng put in long hours, editing and laying out several pages himself every night. He found it exciting and rewarding work. He felt as if he was on the ground floor of something special, something that could further the ideals he had fought for as a student in the 1989 demonstrations and fulfill his traditional duty as an intellectual to serve the nation. He had seen a bootleg copy of the Watergate film All the President’s Men, and he imagined he was building an independent newspaper like the Washington Post, one that could serve as a watchdog against the abuses of the powerful. He lived nearby in an apartment provided by the Newspaper Group, but he often slept in the office. His wife complained that she would sometimes go days without seeing him. The couple had a baby boy, but it was the newspaper he doted on.
“I loved my job,” Cheng told me. “It was a good fit with my ideals and my values, and I felt I was doing something big and important.”
The Southern Metropolis Daily lost money in the beginning. In its first year, it ran a defic
it of more than a million dollars, and some of the Group’s leaders expressed doubts about the project. But Cheng was confident, almost arrogantly so. In one meeting, he predicted the tabloid would emerge as the top-selling newspaper in Guangzhou, and officials laughed at what seemed at the time an outlandish claim. Their skepticism only seemed to fuel Cheng’s determination, though, and he kept pushing to improve the paper. The Southern Metropolis Daily broke one taboo after another, printing stories that never would have appeared in other papers, stories that people actually wanted to read. It put international news on the front page, which the traditional party newspapers never did. When Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris, other papers ran short articles but Cheng stunned the media establishment by filling a quarter of his tabloid’s pages with coverage. When the Starr Report on President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was released, the Southern Metropolis Daily published ten pages of excerpts. The censors expressed disapproval, calling the material “vulgar,” but Cheng wanted readers to draw a comparison at home, where party officials who did far worse went unpunished. At other times, though, the paper served the party’s propaganda purposes. When NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, it ran twelve pages of stories and photos on the attack and the anti-U.S. protests that erupted in cities across China.
Out of Mao's Shadow Page 29
