Investigative Journalism in China: Eight Cases in Chinese Watchdog Journalism

Investigative Journalism in China: Eight Cases in Chinese Watchdog Journalism, edited by David Bandurski and Martin Hala. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010. vi + 184 pp. HK$350.00/US$45.00 (hardcover), HK$175.00/ US$25.00 (paperback).

Since at least the publication of John Milton's Areopagitica in 1644, journalism has been the primary domain of struggles over freedom of expression. In the contemporary world of "social media", where information overload, instant celebrity and narcissism reign, public freedoms and rights to privacy have become so ambivalent that they seem emptied of value. Standard narratives of Western liberal democracy are prone to exaggerate the political importance of the march of free journalism. In comparison, this collection demonstrates that, even though life and limb is seldom at stake, as it has been in Russia, "watchdog journalism" remains a high-stakes game in China.

"Watchdog journalism" is something of a misnomer, in that the phrase echoes Edmund Burke's "fourth estate" role of keeping a check on the power of the other "estates" of government, whereas journalism in China today occupies a vulnerable, overlapping space between the Party-state and the media market. This typically means that reporting on the powerful in the reform era has seen "remarkable progress and opportunities, as well as setbacks and draconian control" (p. 5). The latitude given to investigative journalism has ebbed and flowed with the tides of economic and less frequent political reforms of the late 1980s, the late 1990s to 2003 (covered by this collection) and the brief period following the May 2008 earthquake. This is partly explained by the official jargon of "supervision by public opinion" (yulun jiandu) that held uneven sway as a guide to journalism 1987-2003. This allowed the Party-state both to switch on "public opinion" to deal with corruption and abuses of power, particularly at the local level, and to switch it off when it risked engulfing senior leaders or key state policies. Of the eight case studies examined here, including one of corrupt journalism at the Xinhua news agency, few were "successful" in achieving just settlement and significant reform. Some journalists and media organizations had the arbitrary powers of the state turned against them, facing prosecution or closure. At the same time, as the editors note, setting this cat-and-mouse game within a broadly liberal frame of "state power-repressed journalists" is both over-simple and inappropriate to China's political system. Some of the most adventurous and innovative reporting has come from Party media and journalists, while new markets and the Internet have created virtual networks that transcend regional and national boundaries. Most of the cases here confirm recent studies of contention and protest in China that suggest the Party-state's chief concern is to ensure that such networks do not go "viral" in scale and reach.

The case studies themselves follow a fairly consistent pattern. An individual or group of people suffer exploitation or abuse at the hands mainly of local officials who then attempt to quash or cover up news of their misdeeds, sometimes through bribing the investigating journalists. There have been some prominent cases of senior Party figures prosecuted or even executed for corruption, but those eventually exposed and punished are mostly local officials and business people. This pattern does not necessarily damage those in higher or more central positions of power who, although also inclined to cover up bad news, can point to their awareness of real problems and demonstrate their concern to eliminate them. The desire for more efficient administration or "upright" governance can sometimes stimulate state policies in support of more open and rapid reporting of damaging problems. This has occurred in the wake of such crises as the spread of HIV/ AIDS, the SARS virus and the 2008 earthquake, only to be retracted in episodic crackdowns, at times literally "pulling the plug" on communication of the most contentious issues: protest in Tibet and Xinjiang, human rights demonstrations during the Beijing Olympics, and the recent "jasmine revolution" in response to political change in North Africa and the Middle East. While the Party-state appears to retain overall control of the myriad problems and challenges that it faces, China's growing regional and global influence is more likely to provoke, rather than mitigate, international pressure on human rights issues. However tactical or strategic such pressure may be, its various effects on the vast range of media and "journalism" in China will be more difficult to control and less predictable. Whether this encourages investigative journalism and a "free" media or a degenerate public sphere remains to be seen.

The editors of this collection deserve praise for bringing these significant stories to light in an accessible way that may reach beyond an academic readership. The composition of the book nonetheless distances the reader from the potentially more vivid primary sources of reporting. This is due not only to the unavoidable translation from the Chinese, but also to the editors' re-telling of the stories related to them by the journalists involved. The time frame does capture some of the "best" journalism of the period (1997-2003), at least indirectly, but it unfortunately misses significant stories and developments of recent years. Confining the scope of investigative stories primarily to print outlets also misses what may prove to be more influential developments through the Internet. These limitations make the book less useful to China specialists, but its sophisticated understanding of Chinese journalism provides a valuable introduction to the topic.

[Author Affiliation]

Terry Narramore

University of Tasmania