Cheng’s formula was simple. He asked himself what he wanted to read, and then he ordered up the stories. The paper was the first in China to offer daily consumer sections—automobiles on Monday, real estate on Thursday. It broke new ground with blowout coverage of the World Cup finals in 1998, publishing eight pages a day for forty-three consecutive days to the delight of a soccer-crazed nation. Cheng himself helped pioneer a new genre of journalism in China. A movie buff since college, he wrote reviews of the foreign films that were widely available on video CDs. His favorite was the prison movie The Shaw-shank Redemption.
But if he filled the pages of the paper with sports and entertainment, Cheng also saw to it that he provided readers with another scarce commodity they craved—journalism that challenged the government. There was certainly a market incentive to do so, but Cheng was motivated by principles as much as profits. At weekly staff meetings, he reminded his reporters that they worked for the public, and he urged them to act as a check against government officials and others with power. When reporters asked him whether a story might be too sensitive to publish, he expressed exasperation. It was bad enough that he and other editors had to act as censors. He wanted reporters who would push the limits, not censor themselves. Under his guidance, the Daily began to distinguish itself with critical reporting on social problems such as crime and corruption. In one memo, he criticized an article that picked on the city’s prostitutes, arguing the paper should speak for the weak and “supervise” the powerful. Other newspapers in China played it safe and avoided angering local officials by muckraking only outside their home provinces, but Cheng focused on hard-hitting reporting in Guangzhou and the rest of Guangdong, because that’s where his readers were. Early on, the paper caused a sensation with an investigative report detailing how restaurants in the city were using cooking oil extracted from kitchen waste. Local officials were furious and complained to the propaganda authorities that the Daily had hurt the city’s image. But Cheng coolly defended the report, telling the authorities that the officials were really angry because the paper had exposed their failure to enforce the city’s health and sanitation codes.
The mix of soft and hard news that the Southern Metropolis Daily offered was a hit with readers. Circulation climbed from 80,000 at the end of the first year to nearly 400,000 at the end of the next. In 1999, it rose past 600,000, and as the advertising money began rolling in, the paper eked out its first profit. By 2000, the tabloid was both the thickest and the most expensive daily newspaper in China, charging about twelve cents for seventy-two pages. Circulation soon hit the one million mark, and Cheng was promoted to editor in chief. A close friend, a talented ad salesman named Yu Huafeng, became a top deputy and the paper’s general manager. The two men were young, but the paper’s staff was even younger. The average age of its 2,200 employees was twenty-seven. The average age of its senior editors was just thirty-three.
It was a heady time for Cheng and his colleagues. The Daily leapt from one success to another, and it emerged as one of the most profitable and widely read newspapers in the country. Other party newspapers launched similar market-oriented tabloids and attempted to duplicate the Daily’s success. “It was exhilarating,” Cheng told me of those early years. “Sitting in my office, I could hear the sound of the newspaper growing. You would assign an article on some subject, publish it, and newsstand sales would go up. You knew that readers were embracing your newspaper, and you could sense your newspaper was getting bigger and better. That was the most satisfying feeling.” The paper published more photos, bought new color presses, and moved into a bigger, more modern headquarters in downtown Guangzhou. One of the few sources of frustration for Cheng was a bureaucratic holdup preventing him from putting the newspaper’s name in neon lights on the roof of the new building.
The paper’s success gave it more clout, and Cheng pushed his reporters to be more aggressive. “In the newspaper business, we have already learned to be without power,” he told them. “Now, we must learn to act like a newspaper with power.” But as the Southern Metropolis Daily asserted itself, it also made enemies. In Cheng’s first year as editor in chief, the nearby city of Shenzhen attempted to banish the tabloid from its newsstands. Not only was its brand of critical coverage unwelcome, the Daily was also winning advertising and readers from Shenzhen’s own papers. Cheng fought back, sending a team of twenty reporters into Shenzhen and hiring a thousand people to distribute tens of thousands of copies of the newspaper there for free. “Someone in Shenzhen Shamelessly Shut Out This Newspaper” read a front-page headline the next day. But Cheng was careful to focus his paper’s criticism on the officials who controlled the city’s newsstands instead of the city’s top leaders, and he published several flattering stories about Shenzhen as well. A month and a half later, the ban was lifted.
To read the Southern Metropolis Daily in those years was to read a newspaper with an attitude. When most papers in China reported on crime, the articles were edited to leave readers with the impression that police were doing a good job and that lawbreakers were always caught and punished. The Daily, however, published stories that suggested the opposite and pointed out problems with the administration of justice in China. One article that infuriated officials in Guangzhou, for example, told the story of a woman who was abducted and forced into prostitution in a neighborhood that the city had recently pronounced safe. “All of our negative reports had the same theme—that unchecked power is harmful to society,” Cheng said. “It was just common sense, but our reporting led readers to ask why our system was like this, and why it had so many flaws.”
The tabloid enjoyed a bureaucratic advantage when it angered party officials in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and other cities. The Southern Newspaper Group was part of the provincial apparatus, and thus outranked city officials in the party hierarchy. When an article in the Daily upset a local official, he couldn’t punish the newspaper directly. Instead he had to complain to the provincial propaganda department. Depending on the severity of the transgression, the provincial propaganda department might reprimand the Southern Newspaper Group and demand it take appropriate action against the Daily. Cheng had to respond in writing to each reprimand with a “self-criticism” that owned up to mistakes and explained what was being done to address them. There was an art to writing these memos that involved evaluating just how upset officials were and how much clout they had, and then proposing a punishment that would satisfy them. More than once, propaganda officials rebuked Cheng for treating their complaints too lightly and demanded he adopt more severe sanctions. Sometimes, the pressure on the paper was so great that Cheng was forced to print a retraction or an apology. He hated doing that, but he knew it was a small price to pay to continue publishing.
The Group did its best to protect the paper, but as the number and intensity of the complaints grew, Cheng devised a creative strategy for handling them. He hired an expert, a former propaganda official from a small city in Guangdong, to write the self-criticisms for him. The man understood exactly what the authorities wanted to hear. He knew when to fight, and, more important, when and how to retreat. Depending on his assessment of the situation, the newspaper would tell the authorities that it had launched an investigation, or required an editor to write a self-criticism, or punished people by docking their bonuses, suspending them or firing them. What he wrote for the benefit of the propaganda officials, though, rarely bore any relation to the reality in the newsroom. If the Daily had actually carried out the sanctions he proposed, some reporters would have been fired multiple times, and some editors would have lost three years’ worth of bonuses in a single year.
Cheng pushed the limits, but he recognized that some stories would always be out of bounds. He knew better than to ever directly challenge one-party rule or to broach taboo subjects such as the Tiananmen massacre. What infuriated him, though, was that party officials tried to keep a host of other stories out of the news, too, almost always for selfish, personal reasons. They wanted to pr
otect their own reputations, not the party’s, and they were more worried about advancing their careers than about the injustices the paper exposed. “You can oppose the party,” Cheng sometimes joked, “but you can’t oppose party officials.”
Once, after the Daily received a string of reprimands over several critical articles published in a short period of time, a provincial propaganda chief, Zhang Yangsheng, summoned Cheng and his senior editors to his office to berate them. Cheng had little respect for old-school bureaucrats like Zhang, but he held his tongue through the three-hour session. After the meeting, though, he vented to his colleagues over lunch, unleashing a stream of vitriol about Zhang and his mother. Then, in the afternoon, one of Zhang’s deputies called and took him to task for cursing the propaganda chief. Cheng realized that one of his newspaper colleagues had reported his lunchtime tirade. He could have lost his job, but he didn’t. Cheng assumed that the deputy never shared his off-color remarks with the propaganda chief. But the episode drove home to him the risks of running a newspaper in a one-party state. In his own words, he was “walking a high wire.”
Yet when he had the chance to break the news blackout about SARS, he didn’t hesitate. The government had forced him to demean his newspaper by publishing a story he knew wasn’t true—a violation of the old editor’s adage about refusing to lie even if telling the truth wasn’t possible—and he wanted to get even. The Southern Metropolis Daily was established now, and he didn’t think party officials would shut it down over the SARS report. He figured the worst they could do was fire him, and he decided the risk was worth it. He felt the SARS epidemic was exactly the kind of story that a good newspaper should pursue. He felt the same way about the story that editors put on his desk a few weeks later.
THE INITIAL TIP came in a message posted on an Internet bulletin board. Chen Feng, the reporter who received it, was a newcomer to the Southern Metropolis Daily but also, at age thirty-one, one of the most experienced journalists on the staff. A pudgy, good-humored fellow with close-cropped hair and round glasses, he had been a reporter at Caijing, the nation’s premier business magazine, and a top editor at a newspaper he helped start in Henan. The Daily had recruited him to join its in-depth reporting team, a group of about a dozen veteran journalists responsible for producing longer, investigative articles. A few days after he started work, a college student he had met online left him a note—she had a story for him. She said a friend of a friend had died in Guangzhou after being detained in a shourong station, a facility used for holding vagrants and others lacking proper residency permits. The details were sketchy, but she knew the victim was a recent college graduate named Sun Zhigang.
Chen saw the potential of the story immediately. The shourong, or “custody and repatriation,” system was notorious, a shadowy network of detention centers that the authorities used to enforce an internal passport policy and keep undesirables, usually peasants, out of the nation’s cities. Almost everybody knew someone who had had an unpleasant run-in with the shourong process, which let police stop people on the street, demand to see their papers and take them away if anything was amiss. There were few safeguards against abuses, and officers often hauled people in without any real legal justification. Those detained were supposed to be sent back to their hometowns, but the shourong facilities usually demanded exorbitant fees before releasing anyone. If detainees didn’t have the money, and no one came to bail them out, they were forced to work in prison farms or factories to earn their freedom.
Depending on the circumstances, Chen realized, the death of a university graduate in a shourong station could be an explosive story, but it was also a politically sensitive one. He wasn’t sure the Daily could publish anything on the subject. He knew from experience that most publications steered clear of any critical reporting on the criminal justice system. The police, the courts, the prisons—they were all considered off-limits. But when Chen told his editor about Sun’s death, she gave him permission to investigate without even hesitating. He was impressed. This was why he had moved to Guangzhou—to work for a newspaper with the courage and clout to do journalism that mattered.
It didn’t take long for Chen to track down Sun’s family. Two weeks after Sun’s death, his father was still in Guangzhou, trying to get answers. He was a peasant from rural Hubei Province, about five hundred miles to the north, and officials had treated him dismissively. They told him only that his son had died suddenly from a heart condition. But Sun had been in good health, the father insisted, and he was only twenty-seven. What happened to him in the shourong station? Why were the police holding him there anyway? Sun had just moved to Guangzhou and taken a job as a graphic designer, and his papers were in order, his father said. Chen advised him to find a lawyer and to hire a medical examiner who could perform an autopsy and provide a legal opinion.
Later, Chen asked a colleague to help him with the reporting. Wang Lei was his physical opposite, tall and thin, with long hair and a goatee, but he shared Chen’s passion for chasing a good story. Both reporters agreed there was little they could write without determining the cause of Sun’s death. When Sun’s father called and said none of the lawyers in Guangzhou were willing to take the case, they encouraged him to keep trying and emphasized the importance of the autopsy. Without it, they said, the newspaper wouldn’t be able to help him. In the meantime, they began gathering evidence—police records, hospital records, everything the authorities would let Sun’s father copy, none of it very helpful. Then, in mid-April, about three weeks after he first began working on the story, Chen got a call from Wang. Sun’s former classmates had raised the money for an autopsy, and the family had given him a copy of the medical examiner’s report. The young graphic designer had been beaten to death.
Chen rushed back to the newsroom, and huddled over the report with Wang. It took some time to work through the medical terminology, but the conclusion was clear. Sun had suffered blunt trauma over large areas of his body, including his arms, legs, ribs, and back. The trauma was so severe it had sent him into shock, causing organ failure and death. The two reporters went to one of the paper’s top editors, Yang Bin, with what they had learned. He immediately told them to keep working on the story, and issued specific instructions. First, he told them to take extra care to get every detail right. There was no room for even a small error in a story this sensitive. Second, he told them to finish their investigation quickly, before propaganda officials learned about the incident and barred reporting on it. The Daily could get away with publishing as much as it did because the party didn’t have an army of censors who read every story before publication. Instead it relied on journalists to censor themselves and issued regular directives banning coverage of specific subjects. It would be risky to defy such a directive, but if the newspaper acted before the authorities imposed a ban, it could claim it hadn’t intentionally broken any rules.
Yang never discussed with the two reporters the possibility their story might be too sensitive to publish. But later that day, he met with Cheng Yizhong over lunch and briefed him on what they had uncovered. He was concerned because the newspaper had already made enemies of the police and other law enforcement agencies in Guangzhou. These were dangerous and powerful institutions, and so far they had retaliated only through proper channels, by applying pressure through propaganda officials. But a hard-hitting article about the shourong system could put them over the edge and prompt a more forceful response. The timing of the piece could also be problematic. Cheng and the newspaper were already on thin ice with the authorities for violating the SARS blackout. Technically, he wasn’t even the editor in chief. But Cheng thought the story was too important to ignore, and he told Yang to get it into the paper.
The reporters moved quickly, splitting up the remaining interviews. Chen Feng met with the medical examiner, who nervously explained that Sun must have been brutally beaten to have the injuries he discovered and estimated that the assault occurred within seventy-two hours of death. Wang pretended to be o
ne of Sun’s relatives and went to the shourong station’s hospital ward, where he questioned the staff and recorded their evasions. The reporters interviewed Sun’s family and friends, his roommate and his employer, and they pieced together a timeline of the last days of his life. He had arrived in Guangzhou less than a month earlier, and he was working for a clothing company and living with a friend. At about 11 P.M. on the night he was detained, he called his roommate and told him he had been stopped by two police officers while walking to an Internet cafe. Because he couldn’t produce any identification, they had taken him to the local precinct station. The roommate rushed over with Sun’s ID and money to bail him out, but the officers refused to let him go, even as they released others who had been detained. One of the officers declared that they had the right to decide whom to hold and whom to release. Later the roommate spotted Sun in the station and quietly asked him if he had done anything to upset the police. Sun said he had exchanged a few words with the officers but nothing serious. The next day another friend received a phone call from Sun, who sounded scared now and said he had been taken to a shourong station. The friend called Sun’s boss, who went to the station to vouch for him and try to get him out, but he was turned away, too. On the third day, Sun’s friends learned that he had been transferred to the shourong station’s hospital ward, and they tried to visit him. The doctors refused, and told them only Sun’s family could bail him out. When Sun’s friends called the hospital on the fourth day of his detention, they were told he was dead.
Chen and Wang saved the interviews with the police for last. They visited the precinct house, the shourong station, and the hospital ward, as well as police headquarters, but no one would talk to them. The only government official who spoke to them was a bureaucrat in the city agency responsible for managing the shourong system. Chen showed up at his office without making an appointment and found him playing solitaire on his computer. He agreed to interrupt his game for an interview, but he said only that he was “ninety-nine percent certain” Sun had not been attacked in the shourong station. There were video cameras installed both at the station and its hospital ward, he said, and supervisors would have spotted and stopped any assault. When Chen asked to see the videotapes, though, the official said that would be impossible.
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