Last week, China Central Television and other Chinese media reported on a scandal at the state-run oil company Sinopec that involved the expenditure of more than a million yuan for the purchase of high-end Chinese liquor that sources say was used privately by company executives.
Shortly after the story broke, stemming originally from the posting online of a number of receipts from Sinopec detailing the purchases, Sinopec’s Guangdong branch reportedly held three meetings around basically two agendas. The first was an order to clean house, meaning that a thorough internal investigation would be carried out to find out exactly who had aired out the company’s dirty laundry. The basic assumption was that the wrongdoer was someone inside the organization, an “inside ghost” (内鬼), and they would be dealt with severely once the company had gotten to the bottom of it.
The second matter up for discussion, involving of course the company’s external relations people, was how to deal with the media. The result was a strict prohibition against any company employee speaking to the media without express approval from Sinopec.
Given all of this fishing about, one has to be concerned about what exactly might happen to this whistle blower if they are found out. And experience tells us that informants are generally subjected to all sorts of reprisals once they have been exposed.
We may all remember the case of Li Changhe (李长河), the former politics and law committee secretary of the Henan city of Pingdingshan, who hired muscle to kill the wife of a township official, Lu Jing (吕净), after Lu blew the whistle on his corrupt activities. Lu Jing’s wife was brutally murdered, and Lu was severely injured in the attack. Then there was Zhang Zhi’an (张治安), the former top district leader in the city of Fuyang, Anhui province — known as the “White House secretary” — who ordered police, prosecutors and discipline inspectors under his thumb to jail Li Guofu (李国福), a real-estate company executive, after Li spoke out about Zhang’s problems. Li Guofu eventually died an “unnatural death” in the custody of local authorities.
As corruption cases involving officials and the bosses of state-run enterprises (like former Sinopec chairman Chen Tonghai) continue to happen, calls for the control of corruption have grown steadily louder, and discipline inspection organs and society in general have grown to have much greater respect for the contributions of whistle blowers.
For the media, these inside informants are key sources of information, and without their help it is almost impossible to imagine breaking open many cases of corruption. The most famous inside informant, of course, was that source known in the United States as “Deep Throat” (深喉), who helped the Washington Post unravel the Watergate scandal in 1972. Deep Throat was identified only a few years ago as a former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In a clear mark of progress, China’s National People’s Congress in 2005 ratified the United Nation’s 2003 Convention Against Corruption. In this international law, now in effect in China, Article 33 concerns the protection of informants. It reads: “Each State Party shall consider incorporating into its domestic legal system appropriate measures to provide protection against any unjustified treatment for any person who reports in good faith and on reasonable grounds to the competent authorities any facts concerning offences established in accordance with this Convention.”
While China does not yet have a law protecting the act of whistle-blowing on unlawful activities, both Article 41 of our constitution and the United Nations Convention Against Corruption are sufficient to establish that whistle-blowing is a lawful activity. Well then, why is it that even today these courageous people are routinely branded with the label “inside ghost”, as though their acts were somehow shameful? This tells us that the institutions and individuals vested with special powers and privileges not only remain unchecked by the law, but they uphold the spirit of lawlessness in their actions and values.
[As a state-run enterprise with powerful backing], a large-scale enterprise like Sinopec is in a rather privileged position. If there are collusive acts of corruption within the organization, with the benefits shared out among those involved, shining light on these problems could be extremely difficult. This tells us just how important it is that informants, whose information we depend on in such cases, receive protection from anti-corruption officials and the public. They are in difficult positions indeed.
This editorial originally appeared in Chinese in Southern Metropolis Daily.

In a post made to his Chinese-language weblog on April 15, Ezzat Shahrour, chief correspondent for al-Jazeera Arabic in Beijing, voiced his frustration with Chinese state media reporting on the upheaval in the Arab world this year. Shahrour, an accomplished writer of Chinese who studied at China Medical University in Shenyang, has commented frequently on both Chinese and Western media during the past several years, and Chinese media have often sought his views, such as in this 2004 interview with Southern Weekend and this 2008 interview with People’s Daily Online.
Shahrour’s latest post received more than 100,000 visits by Monday morning, and drew over 1,300 comments (themselves well worth a read).
This post is a fascinating read particularly in light of China’s policy of “going out” in recent years, in which the government has reportedly invested heavily on state media to beef up its media presence globally and strengthen its impact on “global public opinion.” In a December 2008 speech, Li Changchun (李长春), China’s top media control official as the politburo standing, committee member in charge of ideology, said Chinese media needed “to accelerate the pace of ‘going out.’” We must, he said, have a comprehensive strategy to “take CCTV and other key central media and make them into first-rate international media with a global influence.”
Al-Jazeera has often been cited as the network whose success China must emulate as it seeks to expand its “cultural soft power.”
On the crucial issue of media credibility, and on the world’s biggest story this year, Shahrour’s perspective comes not from the so-called “Western media” that Party leaders and the official press so frequently set up in opposition to an ostensibly “Chinese voice” — one controlled and mediated by the CCP. It comes from a journalist with al-Jazeera, the very network China has so often cited as the best example of how credible non-Western voices can compete for global public opinion.

“The Arab People Have 100,000 Questions for Chinese Media”
By Ezzat Shahrour (伊扎特)
Every time I see Chinese media reports on the Arab revolution I feel like my blood pressure is starting to rise. My adrenalin starts to race. My colleagues advise me to cut back on my reading of Chinese newspapers, saying, “Look, reading those all the time does your health no good.” But all joking aside, I can’t change my habits. Reading the Chinese newspapers has already become a daily must for me. And while I know it’s harmful, I can’t help myself. It’s the same as with cigarettes and coffee, another of my “bad habits.” Of course, when I talk about “harm” done, I’m not talking about the Chinese media themselves, but rather about their position on issues in the Arab world, and their intentional misreading of the popular will.
I just don’t see what the point is of media spending so much money to prepare their journalists to go to a dangerous place like Libya when all these reporters do is simultaneous interpretation in China of Ghaddafi’s own television station. Can’t this sort of news coverage be done just as well from Beijing? Isn’t it a complete waste of money? In their live reports, the Chinese reporters constantly emphasize that the majority of Libyans support Ghaddafi, so I suppose those opposition members who are gathering daily on the streets and in public squares must be from some fairy wonderland (or the Chinese media believe, like Ghaddafi, that these demonstrators are just “rats”)? The Chinese media tell us how Ghaddafi’s forces are gaining ground on the opposition forces, but they don’t tell us that there are tens of thousands of foreign mercenaries killing Libyan people at Ghaddafi’s behest. They tell us that the people of Libya all enjoy free medical insurance, but they don’t tell us how many hospitals Ghaddafi has built in Libya during his 42-year rule. They tell us how the people of Tripoli are all so grateful to Colonel Ghaddafi, but they don’t tell us that in this country that exports 1.6 million barrels of oil a day, six million people live on daily rations of porridge. The so-called Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya is nothing more than a bad check.
The vast majority of Arabs accept the air campaign in Libya by coalition forces, even though this is a choice made of necessity only, with the hope that the intervention of the multinational coalition will extend a lifeline to the opposition forces that represent the true will of the Libyan people. But China’s media have misrepresented this. After the bombing began, these Chinese media, who originally paid no attention at all to the Arab revolution, sprang into action, assuming the air of stalwart fighters against hegemonism. They took UN Resolution 1973 out of context, applied a double-standard to the breaking of the ceasefire agreement, kept a tacit silence on the issue of [Ghaddafi’s] foreign mercenaries, intentionally misread the reasons for the air campaign. For those Chinese viewers who managed to gather the truth from various other sources, this only brought into sharp relief the line and position being promoted in China’s media — emphasize only the humanitarian disasters caused by Western air bombardments, and reporting sparingly if at all on the violent suppression and massacre of the people by Ghaddafi.
I noticed one Chinese journalist compared Ghaddafi to Saddam. My personal view is that there are no comparisons to be drawn at all between these two men. Saddam fell more than 10 years ago, his top officials and advisors have all been either killed or thrown into jail, and rarely do people ever mention criticism of him. As for Ghaddafi’s officials, it seems we haven’t seen a single one. Those who haven’t fled or switched sides have been detained by Ghaddafi. Anyone who could sneak away has. Ghaddafi’s most trusted foreign minister, Moussa Koussa, fled to Tunisia and surrendered to the Americans. Chinese media seem blind to the fact that their deliberate misinformation has already been found out by internet users. Not long after China Central Television quoted Libyan state television saying that Libya’s former interior minister, Abdul Fatah Younis, had not in fact defected (Libyan TV used old footage of Younis and Ghaddafi together to make a fake report), Younis appeared on Aljazeera personally to refute these rumors, saying that he had already joined the opposition camp. But the latter bit of news never made it onto mainstream television in China. The examples like this are too numerous to recount.
Chinese academics and media often exaggerate the importance of so-called revolutionary leaders, and Ghaddafi now has the honor of having becoming one of the “beneficiaries” of such treatment. Some have even compared Ghaddafi’s Green Book to China’s little red book [of Mao Zedong]. But if you really understood the Arab world, you would come to the complete opposite conclusion. The Green Book has long been a joke in Libya and even in the rest of the Arab world. The words in Ghaddafi’s book are not only at odds with his actual style of rule, but they often bewilder with their internal contradictions. No one has any idea how much Ghadaffi spent to have this book translated into different languages of the world — including languages many of us have never even heard of. Chinese versions of the book came out in China in the 1980s and 90s. I won’t say any more about this. Everyone can go and find it for themselves. You can note especially his words on the differences between men and women, which will provide you greater amusement than the latest pop hit.
As I see it, media have responsibility and an obligation to report events comprehensively. Media should report it how they see it and how they know it, no matter whether the facts suit their own value judgements. Libyan state television can be used as one source of information. Through it you can understand the situation with Tripoli and Ghadaffi’s faction. But this is definitely not the only source of information. The rebels in Benghazi are people too, and they are an important side of this conflict. What I actually see, though, is that Chinese journalists are active every day in the hotels and on the streets of Tripoli, accompanying Ghadaffi loyalists to streets, hospitals and schools that have been prearranged for the convenience of their reporting. Their [media] logos frequently appear in videos in which Ghaddafi is shouting out slogans, but it’s hard to find them at important press conferences given by the opposition party.
Information is the glue that links media and viewers together. For this reason, the reliability of information becomes the standard for judging a media’s credibility. Media are not about proselytizing, they are an industry, an industry whose responsibility is to transmit information. And yet, during each successive sudden-breaking story, the effect Chinese media have as a fourth estate falls far behind that of the internet and personal media. Those who know how to obtain richer information and reassemble it will turn to the internet to understand the situation in Libya. A number of people who dare to challenge the authority of the state media have already begun to act. The information they provide make it easier for Chinese to open their eyes and see the world. Take, for example, the Old Banyan Blog (老榕). Based on what I know, as change has gripped the Arab world about 170,000 Chinese web users have turned to the Banyan News Service for timely online broadcasts. Many Chinese are no longer satisfied with getting their information form a single source, and as a direct result of this is that the positions of Chinese on the war in Libya are no longer so unified as they were on the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. One aspect of this can be attributed to the development of the web, but another aspect is the steady loss of credibility by Chinese media.

FRONTPAGE PHOTO: Ezzat Shahrour takes part in a 2009 dialogue on Tibet held by the Permanent Mission of the PRC to the United Nations.

The latest issue of Finance Week (理财一周), a magazine published by Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post, has run the recent open letter by Chinese legal scholar He Weifang (贺卫方) expressing concern over steps backward on rule of law in Chongqing. In the open letter, posted to his blog earlier this week with an explicit invitation to Chinese media to re-publish without seeking further permission, He wrote with clear references to the abuses of the Cultural Revolution that rule of law in Chongqing has become over the past year a “furious unfolding of movement-style law enforcement and administration of justice.”
Chongqing has also gotten a lot of attention in China in recent months for changes in the media and propaganda sphere, particularly the promotion of so-called “red culture” (红色文化) and the roll out of more “red programming” on the local Chongqing Satellite TV. In his open letter, He referred briefly to these developments, but kept his attention focused on what he saw as clear threats to the independence of Chongqing’s law courts.
While He Weifang’s letter still seems to be readily available on various blogs in China, the choice to print it could be risky for mainstream media and major internet news portals. It is also accompanied by a rather strong lead editorial under the title, “A Market Economy Cannot Be Without Mavericks” (市场经济不能没有特立独行者).
Writing on Twitter today, journalist Peng Xiaoyun (彭晓芸), who was dismissed as opinion editor from Guangzhou’s Time Weekly earlier this year, praised Finance Week for its courage. “I salute this publication and the editors who put out this series of essays!” she wrote. And then, in an apparent reference to Guangdong media, which have been under consistent pressure lately: “This is why I say that there is no such thing [in China] as an eternally good newspaper, and no sacred organization that needs protecting. The space [for journalism] is on the move, always under pressure from those who censor themselves, and always being stretched by those journalists who are brave enough to push ahead.”
Frontpage Image: “On Line” by K.L. Macke posted to Flickr.com under Creative Commons license.

I apologize once again to those readers, web users and close friends for the mess that ensued as I suddenly lost contact with the outside world! Trust me, Old Yang isn’t finished yet, and some year, some month and some day I will have an opportunity to thank you face to face, thanking you for the way that you offered your sympathy, support and attention, and extended a warm hand in the midst of my sickness.
Once I reconnected with the world, a flood of information and letters came. And there were so many friends online I recognized and didn’t recognize who were trying to find me. Some friends couldn’t sleep at night, waiting for me to come back, and for that I am truly moved.
The predominating feeling in choosing to engage in writing like this and follow pursuits like this in China is one of loneliness. Your views make you somewhat alien. Your aspirations set you apart from the fold. Your family and friends start to view you as unusual. For many years, that feeling of loneliness buries not only one individual ideal after another, but ultimately destroys that dreams for which the Chinese people have struggled for for a century and still not grasped. We Chinese have grown accustomed to using cold indifference and isolation to destroy hopes and dreams. We’ve all at one time or another been accomplices.
And yet there, during the two loneliest days of my life, I received so much friendship and care. Thank you all. All of you have helped me to recognize what is right and what is wrong. All of you have helped me to recognize that my choices have not been wrong . . .
I’d also like to take this opportunity to express my feelings of thanks to people overseas, and particularly to overseas media and to the government of Australia. This thanks is mingled with a strong sense of guilt and shame. For years now, I’ve enjoyed the convenience and benefits of national treatment from Australia, and yet I have dedicated everything I have to China. I hope that some day they are able to understand me. A harmonious and stable China, strong and prosperous, and which respects human rights, conforms to the interests of the whole world.
At the same time, I wish to say to my readers, there are very special reasons why you have heard me say in various introductions that I am Chinese and that I hold Chinese nationality, and this is emphatically not a deception. Could anyone commit such a low-order mistake, least of all me, who has his Australian passport in hand when he travels in the West? Some day in the future you will hear me explain. But not now.
I want to reaffirm that wish to take full responsibility for my neglect, and ask that everyone please forgive me. But I don’t wish to expend too much time trying to explain. I must devote more time to continuing with my work and mission, which has already become my life.
Of course, this does not prevent us from observing the world around us through the window that this whole affair has opened. When I lost contact with the outside world because my mobile was off, perhaps everyone immediately guessed what the “facts” were, and they all knew the “truth.” Thereupon, my family began the rescue mission, web users searching, friends started rushing out with appeals, many overseas media moved on the story, the Australian prime minister and foreign minister started pulling strings, and China’s foreign ministry spokesperson leapt to a routine denial of rumor — and for its part, the Chinese media maintained collective silence, and a few website editors even discussed whether or not my essays should be taken down.
Perhaps everyone knew that this day would come, and the day did come on that day. In the aftermath, there are a couple of points we should think about: Who is it that made everyone believe that a patriotic writer, calm and moderate, who writes stories and reasons things out would eventually come to such a day? Why is it that no one actually supposed that I might have been “kidnapped” by criminals who wanted to hold me for ransom, sold out by traitorous “friends,” possibly suffered a fallout with a business partner, or even maybe even a jealous lover? In a country in which they say a socialist system of rule of law has been fully built, how is it that the rational line of thought for the Chinese media leads them directly to the government in a “kidnapping” case so that they maintain a shameless and numb distance?
Think about the Qian Yunhui case (钱运会), think about the recent hoarding of salt, think about my “kidnapping” case. How is it that they all come to the same point? What I want to say is that the role I have played all along, and will continue to play, is the role of the calm intermediary, connecting the past and the future, connecting domestic [China] to the outside world. Calmly, and progressing step by step, I want to build our nation into a harmonious and stable one, strong and prosperous, a modernized nation that is free and democratic.
The goal isn’t asking too much. And on some level every citizen should take responsibility for realizing this goal. But I don’t want to shoulder that cold and serious joke I hear at every meeting: How is it that you haven’t been arrested yet?
Having been through this experience, I have added another dream. I dream that when I silently take my leave of you all, you will sigh and exclaim, “He’s tired, let him rest. We don’t need him anymore.” I hope when word comes that I’ve been “kidnapped,” our [foreign ministry] spokesperson and government will say, “We can’t lose a single citizen!” I dream that disappearances and missing persons in this country of ours happen because someone is ill, or because their mobile phone ran out of juice. I dream . . .
This essay was originally posted on April 6 at Yang Hengjun’s Blog.

In this country of ours, the words “extreme”(偏激), “drastic” (过激) and “radical” (激进) are readily linked together with ideas and thoughts, and they all basically imply the same thing. If an individual is seen as someone with extreme ideas or as radical in some way, the general feeling is that something is wrong with this person. At the very least they are asocial, with ideas different from those of the rest of us. However, this idea itself is something that appeared only rather recently in our history.
In ancient times in China, people might say instead that this or that person was “impetuous” (狂狷), “eccentric” (怪癖), or “dissenting and strange to the extreme” (非常异议可怪). And if they reached such a point that they “denied all law and custom” (非圣无法), they could basically be given over into the hands of officials and killed.
What are “extreme ideas”? This is something that has never been clearly defined. In the closing years of the Qing Dynasty, as the very notion of “ideas” was just coming into vogue, one could be seen as harboring “extreme ideas” for cutting off one’s queue or reading banned books. In our ancient schools, of course, failing to respect one’s teacher, or having opinions about the meals served at school could be construed as having “extreme ideas.” For either of these extremes, one could be dismissed from the school entirely. Of course, in those days, if everyone got up in arms and opposed the school’s handling of its extreme students, school authorities were likely to soften under pressure, withdrawing their action and pretending nothing happened.
Things changed in the Beiyang Period (1912-1928) of the Republic Era. At that time, the label “extreme” tended to fall on the heads of girls and young women. If women cut their hair short, they risked not only stares on the street but possible expulsion from school. For men, the boundaries of “extreme ideas” had already widened somewhat. In the countryside, sure, carrying around a copy of the radical magazine New Youth might have been regarded as “extreme,” but the big city schools would look the other way so long as you weren’t advocating the overthrow of the government or calling for Chinese-style anarchism. So long as one stuck to words, and stopped short of taking action, even if the government placed a youngster under arrest schools could generally intervene and influence the outcome.
During the rule of the Kuomintang (KMT) in China (after 1928 to 1949), owing to strict KMT rule, there was an upsurge in students with “extreme ideas” in China’s schools. The vast majority of students dismissed from schools for extreme conduct were guilty of this extreme. Perhaps all of the progressive students and revolutionaries of that period had been expelled from their schools for harboring “extreme ideas.” Some transferred to other schools and continued their studies. Others leapt right into the work of revolution. But of course, the Republic Era was different from the Late Qing in the sense that the reading of this or that book, or this or that magazine, or criticizing the food at school, was all basically safe territory and wouldn’t lead one to be branded an “extremist.” When so-called extremists were turned out, it was usually for really big stuff — such as calling for class boycotts or public demonstrations, that kind of thing.
“Extreme” or “radical” ideas are actually things you can’t put your finger on. First of all, there is no set standard for deciding what is “extreme.” And secondly, no one can agree on exactly who gets to set that standard.
Having extreme or radical ideas is not a crime under the law. And if there is an insistence on assigning guilt on this account, other excuses must be found. In any age, a student branded as extreme or radical might suffer some form of punishment. But this punishment has no basis in the law, and can only arise when those offices wielding power become the law, using regulations as a pretext to settle scores and persecute others. This is the kind of thing we can readily see in the recollections of those who lived through the student movements of the Kuomintang era. In those years, many such evils were perpetrated by student spies and the dean’s offices of our schools.
Actually, when we talk about someone being extreme or radical, we are just talking about someone being a little different from everyone else, and letting this difference show. Let’s imagine, for example, that we have a rotten apple. And perhaps most people think it just needs to be trimmed a bit, cutting out the rotten parts. But along come these people who believe the only thing to be done is to throw the apple away, and the farther away the better. The latter become the extremes. For young people, disallowing extremes amounts to confinement. For a society, it means sclerosis. The extreme and the radical don’t necessarily equate to creativity, but many things that are rich with creative potential test the limits. For generations the creativity of youth has been strangled by the process of socialization. If to that process of socialization we add the pressures of ideology, the violence done to students’ ideas is all the greater.
The comedy and the tragedy of history lies in its tendency to repeat itself. Just as sad and comical is the way we have always gone to extremes in dealing with the extreme and the radical. Only when we as a nation emerge from this morass will we truly find hope. Otherwise, we will only cower in fear, generation after generation, spinning in place.
This article was originally published in Chinese at Southern Metropolis Daily.