Jottings from the Granite Studio

Seems like somebody was out sick the day the Kool-Aid was passed around at the Annual China Daily staff picnic and KTV party:

China Daily columnist (h/t CDT) You Nuo writes:

The lack of investigative reporting also has to do with the fact that, despite the award ceremonies that appear in the press almost daily, there has never been an award for investigative journalism. In a society where saving face is traditionally more valued than telling the truth, sometimes people have to wait for a problem to reach shocking proportions before they can react to it.

As for the lack of legal enforcement, as quoted by China Youth Daily, Fu said the biggest difficulty he encountered was “the cold-heartedness of law-enforcement authorities”.
Government departments in Shanxi “showed little concern and were only passive about taking any action” against local brick kiln owners’ offenses. Some, he said, “attempted in many ways” to block efforts to rescue the child slaves. Fu even told of a labor inspector’s direct exploitation of child workers.

The shock goes beyond the report of the extent of the Shanxi slavery. It reveals that the cause of such rampant challenges to modern law is not only the private kiln owners’ greed or the market economy. Things have gotten this bad because of the collaboration between some local officials and the mafia that runs the brick trade.

Amen, brother.

ESWN translated an interview with Fu Zhenzhong, the journalist who broke the story and who is the subject of You Nuo’s column. It’s quite a story.

It’s never easy to be a journalist in this country. YJ brings home all kinds of crazy tales of missed connections, paranoid interviews, and dodgy sources. The line she hears most often is, “We are under instruction not to discuss this problem with the foreign media so as to protect China’s image.”

Little wonder. Last week, the central government issued the following directive regarding coverage of the Shanxi situation:

All External Communication Offices, Central and Local Main News Websites:

Regarding the Shanxi “illegal brick kilns” event, all websites should reinforce positive propaganda, put more emphasis on the forceful measures that the central and local governments have already taken, and close the comment function in the related news reports. The management of the interactive communication tools, such as online forums, blogs, and instant messages, should also be strengthened. Harmful information that uses this event to attack the party and the government should be deleted as soon as possible. All local external communication offices should enhance their instruction, supervision and inspection, and concretely implement the related management measures.

The Internet Bureau, CPC Central Office of External Communication
June 15, 2007

So there you have it. Investigative journalists can only investigate so long as the information reinforces positive propaganda? What happens if journalists, to reference All The President’s Men for no particular reason, follow the money and the trail leads to places the party doesn’t want it to go? Do they then go to jail for revealing state secrets like Zhao Yan?

There are times when I think the CCP is dumb like a fox: turn the journalists loose on those elements they can’t control (local officials, greedy business interests) while trying to insulate the party itself from the fallout. The question is, how long can it continue to do so and how far will the CCP go to protect its legitimacy in the face of endemic corruption, the kind that leads to tragedies like what occured in Shanxi?