On May 12, 2008, an 8.0-magnitude earthquake hit Sichuan Province in southwest China, claiming at least 69,000 lives. In the ensuing weeks, Chinese reporters roamed the ruins of the devastated towns to interview traumatized parents, villagers, and rescue workers, sending the public gripping images and stories of destruction, death, and heroism. For a few short weeks, the Chinese Communist Party eased its controls on the media, allowing journalists, both Chinese and foreign, to do the kind of fact-finding and reporting the tragedy demanded. For the first time in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the destructive power of...

When China Youth Daily reporter Lu Yuegang saw Wu Fang for the first time, she was bathing beside the Yellow River. She removed a wig of straight black hair, and he saw that her scalp was covered with scabs and scars. The area from her nose down to her shoulders had been severely burned. The skin across her chest was scabbed and raw. He understood that it had been eight years since her attack, but it looked as though her wounds had been inflicted yesterday. “When I first saw Wu Fang, I thought nothing of such things as justice or...

In January 2000, almost a full year before Western readers learned of the AIDS epidemic in Henan, an inland Chinese province south of Beijing, a detailed exposé from an unknown reporter in Henan, undertaken at great personal risk, might have blown the whole story wide open had it sufficiently captured the popular imagination or attracted the government interest it warranted.

The facts in Zhang Jicheng’s report suggested HIV infection in the rural villages of Henan had reached epidemic proportions, and that infection was linked to blood collection centers, which had pooled blood by-products and re-injected them into donors.¹ However, too...

In the 1990s, as charitable giving grew more common among China’s burgeoning middle class, Project Hope, an education assistance program set up through the China Youth Development Foundation (CYDF), became a popular choice. The program offered a ray of hope for poor rural children whose families could not afford basic school fees.

The basic mission of the program, founded in October 1989, was sponsorship. Chinese individuals, companies, and even officials, including Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, sponsored children directly. The project established an account for each child, and transferred donations, which would cover tuition and other basic costs, directly from...

Close to midnight on March 13, 2002, a telephone call from his editor, Fang Hongning, jarred Yangcheng Evening News reporter Zhao Shilong awake. Fang said a woman had just called the newspaper’s hotline saying that she had been forced into prostitution at a government-run drug rehabilitation center in Guangzhou. She had escaped from her captors that very night. Her name was Ah Wen.

Given the seriousness of the charges, the story’s prospects were not good, Fang Hongning said outright. Even if he managed to report the story without any problems, it might never make it past the editorial board. Top...

On June 28, 2002, the staff of the weekly supplement of the China Economic Times, one of China’s leading business dailies, held their Friday editorial meeting. Wang Nan, the section’s editor, passed a pile of research materials over to veteran investigative reporter, Wang Keqin. They included a document from the newspaper’s parent organization, the Development Research Center (DRC), a policy think-tank of China’s State Council. Wang Keqin could have no idea at the time that this would mark the start of six long months of investigation, writing, and editorial wrangling.

Guo Lihong, who managed the center’s economics division, had sent...

At ten a.m. on June 25, 2002, a caller, clearly distressed, rang the editor’s desk at China Youth Daily. He said his close friend had died three days earlier in an explosion at a gold mine in Shahe, a remote town in northwestern China’s Shanxi Province. According to the caller, more than fifty miners had died in the explosion. “I contacted you because I trust you guys at China Youth Daily,” he said. “I hope you can send someone out here to Shanxi.”

“Shouldn’t a story like this have made the front pages?” asked a puzzled Fan Yongsheng, the newspaper’s...

When the name Li Zhen appeared in a routine official news release from Xinhua News Agency on December 17, 2001, few members of the public knew who this official was. A relatively low-level cadre from Hebei Province who had been “expelled from the party and relieved of his position” following investigation by “top supervisory bodies,” he had been “placed under arrest in accordance with the law” for accepting bribes and unlawfully possessing various public and private property, said the release.

The Xinhua news release covered Li Zhen and the crimes of which he was accused only in scant detail:

Li...

Around mid-November, 2002, a patient was treated for a severe form of pneumonia in the city of Foshan, southwest of Guangzhou.¹ In the weeks that followed, rumors proliferated about a new and dangerous disease. In the absence of reliable information, panic spread. On January 2, 2003, residents rushed to local pharmacies, reportedly exhausting the antibiotics stocks in Heyuan, a city about 160 kilometers northeast of Guangzhou, in a single afternoon. On January 17, customers picked stores and pharmacies in and around Guangzhou clean of antibiotics as well as other popular home health remedies.

On January 21, unbeknownst to the general...

China’s media consumers are increasingly able to access news stories exposing government corruption and examining the social costs of the nation’s market-based economic reforms. Some China observers laud this development as a sign of growing press freedom in China. Others dismiss these developments, arguing that China’s new watchdog journalism functions at most as a watchdog on a government leash, a newer and more sophisticated tool for legitimizing and maintaining Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control. In fact, China’s version of watchdog reporting is a complex phenomenon that resists simplistic analysis based on the dichotomy of “freedom versus control.”

China’s watchdog journalism...