By David Bandurski — Last week CMP reported on the troubles facing veteran journalist Zhai Minglei and the ill-fated Minjian magazine. Yesterday, Zhai posted an urgent message on his blogpaper, Yi Bao (壹报) saying police had raided his home, confiscating his last remaining copies of Minjian and taking away Zhai’s hard drive [coverage by John Kennedy at Global Voices here].
According to Zhai Minglei’s post, police should be proceeding with their investigation against him today.

[ABOVE: Zhai Minglei on a visit to Hong Kong as a China Media Project fellow in 2004.]

As we wait for further news from Zhai, one of our earliest research fellows, CMP would like to share more information with readers about the important work of this dedicated investigative reporter and civil society advocate.
One of Zhai Minglei’s earliest successes as a professional journalist was his investigation into Project Hope, the Chinese government-run charity, as a reporter for Southern Weekend. What follows is a case study on that investigation prepared by Zhai Minglei, David Bandurski and Martin Hala.
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“Unmasking the Demons of Charity”
Through the 1990s, Project Hope, an education assistance program set up through the China Youth Development Foundation (CYDF), was the sentimental darling of the Chinese public. Chinese prize education above nearly all other pursuits, and this program offered a ray of hope to many impoverished rural children for whom school remained an impossible dream.
The basic model of the program, founded in October 1989, was sponsorship. Chinese individuals, companies, and officials of every stripe – including Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin – could sponsor as many children as they wished. Account numbers were established for each child, and donations were transferred directly from the foundation to the child’s local school, specifically earmarked to cover the tuition and other institutional costs. In exchange, sponsors received heart-warming photographs of the children and letters thanking them for their priceless gift. They could even chart a child’s progress through reports on their grades and schoolwork.
The system was transparent, transforming, and heart-warmingly personal. And the joy of watching as a child prospered! Who could put a price tag on that?
By the late 1990s, however, there were whispers pointing to serious problems at Project Hope. No one could substantiate the claims. But eventually Hong Kong’s Next weekly made bold to print the accusations, saying there were problems in the foundation’s accounts. The decision brought the magazine to its knees, as CYDF launched a libel action against it in the Hong Kong courts. On June 21, 2000, judge Andrew Chung ordered the magazine to pay 3.5 million Hong Kong dollars, or 500,000 U.S. dollars, in damages to the foundation.
“THIS IS ALL A MISUNDERSTANDING”
During National Day celebrations in early October 2001, a letter arrived at the headquarters of Southern Weekend, a newspaper that for years had earned a reputation as China’s foremost muckraking publication. At the time, the paper was struggling to preserve its reputation for hard reporting and outspokenness in the face of intense pressure from the highest levels of Chinese leadership. The paper’s envelope-pushing former top editors, Jiang Yiping and Qian Gang, had been forced by authorities to leave their posts in January 2000 and June 2001 respectively.
The letter’s return address was for a private enterprise in Shanghai called Keyon. As Wu Xiaofang, the editor of the news desk, poured over the contents of the letter, his eyes lit up. The company alleged Project Hope had deceived it about the allocation of funds it had given for sponsorship of 24 children in Sichuan’s Xuanhan County.
Keyon said in the letter it had sponsored 24 schoolchildren through Project Hope as part of a corporate community initiative. In return for its contribution the company had received 17 letters, ostensibly from the students, thanking the company for its generosity.
Keyon’s chief executive had decided to pay a surprise visit to Xuanhan over the National Day holiday. He wanted to see for himself the fruits of their initiative. To his extreme consternation, he that found only three of the children under his company’s sponsorship had received Project Hope money. The chief executive then looked more closely at the letters they had received. He found the handwriting on many of the letters was identical. Most of the children under the company’s sponsorship denied ever writing thank-you letters.
Wu Xiaofeng, editor of Southern Weekend’s news desk, assigned two reporters to the story. The first was Xu Liuwen, a veteran Southern Weekend reporter and a native of Sichuan province. Xu set straight off for Sichuan to pick up the trail where the Keyon chief executive had left off. The second was Zhai Minglei, a young reporter who had worked for less than one year at Southern Weekend but had previously done a three-year stint at the Chinese language edition of German-invested Cash magazine. Zhai was given the comparatively mundane task of meeting up with Keyon officials in Shanghai and getting their side of the story.
After little more than a week in Sichuan, Xu Liuwen returned to the office empty-handed. He had spoken at length with the county secretary for the Chinese Communist Youth League (CCYL) and visited several local schools. Nothing at all seemed out of place, he said. Unfortunately, heavy rains had prevented his traveling into the mountains to visit more remote schools.
The county CCYL secretary, Li Xiaodong, presented Xu with bank receipts for the 24 students under Keyon’s sponsorship. All of these receipts bore signatures from parents as well as by teachers and local education officials. Project Hope’s account books were rock solid, said Li. Under Project Hope policy, all donations were transferred directly from the foundation to county and district committees of the CCYL. From there they were disbursed to local education offices, where officials responsible for administering Project Hope could draw funds only with invoices from the local CCYL committee. No one along this chain could draw cash, so the misdirecting of funds was not possible, he said.
More surprising and convincing was the fact Xu Liuwen had managed to track down the mastermind behind the fake thank-you letters, who insisted there was nothing amiss. The man was Tang Chunxu, who was in charge of political and ideological education in Fengcheng District, and was also responsible for disbursement of Project Hope funds to local schools.
“I engineered the writing of the fake letters,” Tang said matter-of-factly. “During the first half of the year one of the donors came from Shanghai to see how the money was being applied. There were, of course, no problems whatsoever with the money. No cash passes through anyone’s hands, and we delivered the funds one time in three separate payments. In most cases, it was the teacher in charge of the class who directly withdrew the Project Hope funds, so the students and parents don’t have a very clear sense about where the money comes from. When you ask the kids to write letters, they’re not too keen. The eight cent postage is also a big expense for them.”
“So I had the head teacher write letters and pass them on to me. I bought the envelopes, addressed them, sealed and stamped them and sent them out myself. Of course, some of the children had no idea we were writing letters on their behalf, but we meant well. It’s not what you think. Just deception with the best of intentions,” he said.
When Xu Liuwen asked Tang why the office claimed some students were in school when in fact they weren’t, the official said this was done so as not to discourage donors. While Project Hope donations helped pay a portion of school fees, they didn’t cover everything. Inevitably, some hard-luck cases couldn’t keep up with their schooling. When this happened, the office continued to report that the child was in school, and sometimes even provided records of their grades, so as not to make donors feel they had contributed in vain.
Did he regret his actions, Xu had asked. “Not at all!” said Tang. “I only regret not doing a more delicate job of things. Not sending letters wasn’t an option, of course. That would have been inconsiderate.”
The ruddy-faced Tang had a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything. He faced the facts straight on, and Xu Liuwen admired his way of handling things. Was there any reason to doubt an official so candid? “I’m telling you, this is all a misunderstanding,” Xu told his editors. “The real reason [for the Project Hope kids not going to school] is regional poverty.”
The story might have stopped right there. But Zhai Minglei was not convinced. He told editor Wu Xiaofeng there were still things that couldn’t be explained. Why, for example, were some of these children totally unaware they had been sponsored? Even more to the point, where had the money earmarked for these children gone?
If the Shanghai company was giving a truthful account, there had to be some merit to the rumors about mismanagement at Project Hope. Zhai Minglei made a careful list of each point that didn’t tally. ”We should go out there and take another look,” he said to Wu.
Unfortunately, the story was still in Xu Liuwen’s hands, and Xu needed to take care of some family matters first. The trip was postponed again and again. After nearly two weeks had passed, Zhai Minglei grew anxious. “Why don’t I just go out to Sichuan myself?” he suggested again to Wu.
This time the editor relented. He wasn’t ready to drop a story about possible corruption at one of China’s most sacred institutions.
The next day Zhai Minglei was on the road.
When he arrived in Sichuan, Zhai made no attempt to speak with Xuanhan County officials. Instead, he met up with Zhou Haolan, a local Sichuan reporter who had expressed interest in working for Southern Weekend, the assignment with Zhai being a kind of informal job interview. The two of them hired motorcycle drivers and traveled straight into the mountains. They blended in with the locals by wearing drab trousers and shirts, and donning faded blue revolutionary-era caps.
It wasn’t long, however, before Zhai Minglei began to feel he had set an impossible task for himself. They were on the road sometimes more than 12 hours at a time, and this went on day after day. The journey was often four or five hours between schools, the monotony of the landscape unyielding. Peaks rose constantly ahead of them, and at the top of each agonizing climb another row of peaks emerged. The rain fell everyday. The roads became mires. There seemed to be landslides waiting around every turn.
By the end of the first day, Zhao Haolan’s ass was so badly bruised he couldn’t lie on his back or sit up in bed. Zhai had lost some of the feeling in his legs. They slept in roadside shops or whatever else they could find. In one place they paid five yuan for their beds and the proprietor tugged a sleeping villager from his mattress saying, “There’s your bed.”
It was obvious that in the two weeks since Xu Liuwen’s return, local education officials had launched a campaign of damage control. In village after muddy village, schoolmasters and teachers yielded nothing. Four full days into their trip they were still empty-handed.
As trying as the physical hardships were, they were nothing against the hopelessness the reporters felt in their hearts. “There’s not a shred of real evidence, and suddenly it dawns on you that perhaps you are wrong,” Zhai Minglei later reflected. “You think to yourself, ‘You doubted a veteran journalist who came up with nothing. But maybe he was right and you’re wrong. These people greet you with calm eyes and innocent smiles. Where are the lies you’ve come looking for? It’s you who are wrong.’”
Zhai Minglei started to obsess over the thought that perhaps his own bearings, his own judgments, were horribly askew. His mood reached its apogee in a mountain village so remote the local people called it Outer Mongolia. It was pitch black there, so black the stars were pinpoints right above their heads. That day they had traveled eight agonizing hours.
For the first time in his career, Zhai Minglei resigned himself to defeat. He phoned his editor, Wu Xiaofeng. “Damnit, Wu Xiaofeng! You’re going to put me through the grinder for this. But we’re at the ends of our ropes and we haven’t come up with anything.”
“You have to find something, no matter how long it takes,” was Wu’s unsatisfying answer. “Every Weekend reporter has an impossible assignment at least once a year. It comes with the territory.”
Zhai Minglei’s journal entry that night was a picture of despair hardening into resolve: “When someone has arrived at the absolute threshold of psychic and physical endurance, can they go on? When all hope is gone, can they still go forward? A friend once shared a passage of T.S. Eliot with me. It went:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
“These words perfectly express the feelings I now have in taking on this assignment. I won’t throw up my hands, even though I have passed my own limits. I’ll come out of this a new person, a reporter always expanding his boundaries.
“Your heart settles. You accept that the hopeless is real, and suddenly your heart grows calm. You burst through your own bounds. Perhaps in such situations, when everything is hopeless, we have no choice but to press on. Your heart settles, and the truth emerges spontaneously, like water flowing from a spring.”
Zhai Minglei had found an existential and journalistic second wind.
A BAD PASTING JOB
At dusk several days later, Zhai Minglei and Zhao Haolan came to the home of Project Hope recipient Zhang Qiang. They had crossed four mountain passes that day to reach the small village of Nanping.
As the reporters spoke with his mother, Xiong Shengbi, Zhang Qiang looked on quietly. His big toes poked out where the soles of his shoes were completely worn down. Xiong insisted they had not received money from Project Hope until just days before, on October 31, when the schoolmaster gave them 150 yuan.
The schoolmaster in Nanping, Yuan Shuhong, insisted that what he had told the executive from Keyon the month before – that he had never received 50 yuan from Project Hope – was a misunderstanding. In fact, he said, the money had been disbursed on time.
“Well then, where did this 150 yuan payment in October come from?” Zhai Minglei asked.
The schoolmaster changed tack. “At the time, I knew Zhang Qiang’s money had gone through. So we advanced the family 150 yuan, 50 yuan for each of three school terms. According to regulations, the Project Hope money and the school waivers are lumped together in one payment,” he said. This was in fact untrue.
“If that’s the case, why did you give the 150 yuan to Zhang Qiang’s mother and not to the school?” Zhai Minglei asked.
“We realized Zhang’s family needed help, and we didn’t need the money right then. So we offered the money to give them a leg up,” said the schoolmaster.
“You’re a school, not a charity organization. Why would you offer assistance to families?”
The schoolmaster paused for a moment and then said, “The 150 yuan payment came from above,” by which he seemed to be referring to the education office.
There was a long silence. The reporters waited.
“It was given to the school,” the schoolmaster elaborated.
The reporters glanced across to one another. This was the first bite on the line. The schoolmaster’s story didn’t add up. They asked to see the school’s account ledgers.
It was perhaps 40 minutes before the schoolmaster emerged from the schoolhouse across the way with the bookkeeper, carrying a stack of account books. Sure enough, there was an entry for a Project Hope disbursement back in January, close to a year earlier. “Zhang Qiang, 100 yuan,” it said in tiny print. On another entry, dated June 10, Zhang Qiang’s mother had signed for 50 yuan. This was curious indeed. Had she lied to the reporters, and to the Keyon executive, about not receiving Project Hope money?
A short time later, Xiong Shengbi herself came by, apparently suspecting something was wrong. She had come over to tell the reporters, right in front of the schoolmaster, that she hadn’t received any money until October 31. She and the schoolmaster stepped outside to talk things through.
It was then Zhai Minglei noticed the June 10 entry in the account ledger had just been pasted onto the page. The glue had not yet dried, in fact. A bolt of clarity shot through his mind. He turned to the bookkeeper: “This entry has just now been pasted in! Why would you do a thing like that?” he asked. Flustered, the bookkeeper could only blurt out, “The schoolmaster told me to do it!”
The game was up. They confronted the schoolmaster and he finally relented: “When the executive came from Shanghai we were totally mystified,” he said. “We had no idea the company had made a contribution to the district office [of the Communist Youth League] the September before. We had paid Zhang Qiang’s reductions out of our own pockets for three school terms. Soon after the executive’s visit, Tang Chunxu, (the ruddy-faced district official who seemed so convincing to Xu Liuwen on the first Southern Weekend mission), came from the education office with 150 yuan for me to give to Zhang Qiang’s mother. He also knew she couldn’t read or write, so he wanted me to make up fake account slips for all three school terms and have her sign these when she collected the 150. This way, we could paste the entries in and they would bear her signature.”
As for the rest of the accounts, the schoolmaster said, Tang had asked them to lump Project Hope funds together with the school’s own tuition and fee subsidies. This way, if anyone grew suspicious, they could just say the funds were all rolled into one, and it would be virtually impossible to conduct an audit.
By these means, the district official responsible for disbursing Project Hope funds had been able to obfuscate the money’s track and eventually to divert it indefinitely. Many schools were left with no means of assisting children sponsored under Project Hope, but parents and schoolmasters were led to assume that the funds had simply not yet been disbursed to the county.
After the year 2000, the district education office, at Tang’s bidding, had ended the practice of listing the names of Project Hope recipients when settling accounts. Instead, they simply entered the total number of children. This way, they could shift funds around as they pleased and schoolmasters had no way of knowing which of their students were slotted for aid. In order to further impede efforts at auditing and oversight, Tang abolished the practice of disbursing funds for each of the three school terms. Instead, he disbursed them in one lump sum, drawing off a portion to pay funds owed the district education office. If, for example, a school owed the education office money for the purchase of new desks that year, Tang would slash the school’s Project Hope disbursement, ostensibly to settle these debts.
Given the extraordinary debt owed by many of these poor country schools, this practice effectively cancelled out Project Hope altogether. “Typically, schools owe thousands or tens of thousands of yuan each year. When accounts are handled in this way, some schools have no hope of seeing money from the foundation,” said Yuan, the schoolmaster. The payment of cash to Zhang Qiang’s mother in October was also strange, he said. According to his understanding, Tang should not have been able to draw cash. How had he managed to do this? And where had the money been going all along?
That night the sweetness of their breakthrough was mixed at first with fear. The education official, Tang Chunxu, had succeeded in drawing schoolmasters and teachers throughout the county into this deception. How could they be sure they would sleep safely that night? They considered traveling straight through, but eventually settled into their beds and slept more soundly than they had for days.
The confession of Nanping’s schoolmaster proved the key they needed to throw the case wide open. They worked solidly for the next 11 days, traveling a total of more than 2,000 kilometers, mostly by motorbike, and interviewing more than 60 people. They rested for just one of those days.
Confronting the children, Zhai Minglei recalled, was a painful process. They had been coached and coerced into lying about letters they had written to Project Hope donors. Zhai watched as one child struggled to recall the lies she had committed to memory. Moments like this hardened his resolve to overthrow what he called, “The Kingdom of Lies”.
The teachers always began with the same story, about how the funds had come on time and as promised. When the journalists refuted these claims with contrary testimony, the teachers fished about desperately for other explanations. In every case, the parents told a different version from that of the teachers. The versions offered by school bookkeepers were at odds with those of the schoolmasters. It was a nest of lies and contradictions.
In some ways, this confusion was both an asset and a liability. The fact that it had taken Southern Weekend two full weeks to organize another trip after Xiu Liuwen had come up empty-handed gave local education officials time to orchestrate a broad cover up. But while Tang Chunxu had gotten many schools to doctor their account ledgers and carefully coached them, the cover up was incomplete. One reason, perhaps, was that Tang suspected Southern Weekend would not return. In any case, there was still much evidence to be found, and the cover up was powerful story in its own right.
Zhai Minglei was baffled by the determination of the teachers and schoolmasters to hold this fabric of lies together, but he knew the reasons for their determination. First of all, Tang Chunxu was familiar, however questionable his motives. The reporters were outsiders, nosing into their lives, so choosing sides was simple. The more important reason, though, was the concept of face, the need to preserve the local reputation. As ugly as it was, this business was their own. No good could come from airing it out before the world.
Once the reporters had broken through the lies, these fragile loyalties crumbled. Schoolmasters and teachers brought truer feelings to the surface and shared their real views on Project Hope’s operations in the area.
Having succeeded in building their story, Zhai Minglei and Zhao Haolan turned more attention to examining the conditions in which the local people lived. Although most of this material never made the Southern Weekend report, the reporters nevertheless felt it was important. Poverty in the area was simply astounding. People slept on blankets black with filth, on beds soiled with crumbs of earth. When it grew dark, there were no oil lamps, much less electricity. The schools were the nearest symbols of hope. But they were black and cavernous, full of crooked, unbalanced desks. In place of blackboards, there were rough-hewn planks.
DIGGING FOR THE DEEPER STORY
In his report about Project Hope, Zhai Minglei’s was careful not to scapegoat the local education official, Tang Chunxu, but rather show how gaping loopholes had resulted in systematic abuses at the foundation. The newspaper’s editorial committee took the story in another direction, however, by centering on Tang’s actions in Xuanhan County. Their decision was based on a calculation of political risk. It was dangerous to attack a prized national institution like Project Hope.
The portions removed from Zhai Minglei’s original version concerned the systemic failure to keep the Project accountable and transparent:
In interviews with Southern Weekend at least four schoolmasters and assistant schoolmasters pointed out that Project Hope had substantial loopholes.
Before 1996 every Project Hope child were assigned an account number. Only when approval came from the local Chinese Communist Youth League (CCYL) could teachers access the funds. After 1996 this system changed. Funds were transferred directly from the Communist Youth Development Foundation (CYDF) to district education offices, which then distributed money to the schools. This created endless opportunities for abuse. Xuanhan County is Sichuan Province’s model county for Project Hope, and has repeatedly been given a stamp of approval by the central government and by the provincial committee of the Communist Youth League. Over the last 10 years, the county has assisted 9,800 children with their school fees, more than any other county in Sichuan. Now problems like these came to light. But if it hadn’t been for the extraordinary efforts of Keyon and this newspaper in getting to the bottom of the issue, these problems would have been kept in the dark.
One assistant schoolmaster said poor management of the Project Hope funds potentially enabled schoolmasters to have head teachers withdraw the funds. When a child graduated, he said, the school could continue drawing money in the child’s name, applying it for the school’s general use, giving it to others, or pocketing it. The failure to separate Project Hope funds and general funds from the district education office put the basis for corruption firmly in place. The disbursing of Project Hope funds to schools from the education office in no way guaranteed they would be used for children. Schoolmasters could apply these in whatever way they wished.
Given the extreme remoteness of this region, misuse of funds by the education office, schoolmasters or head teachers was nearly impossible to detect. Parents have no way of knowing when they can expect Project Hope funds for their children. At least five parents in Xuanhan County had no idea their children were even on the list of Project Hope aid recipients until an executive from the donor company, Keyon, visited Sichuan to see the results of the program.
Three schoolmasters said the Communist Youth Development Foundation should establish accounts for Project Hope children and disburse the aid money directly, allowing access to the money only when the head teacher and the parent are present. After withdrawing the funds, parents could apply these directly to the child’s tuition and fees. This, they said, would remove the potential for misapplication of funds and ensure parents did not use the school fees for household expenses.
Despite the surgical hand of Southern Weekend’s editorial committee, Zhai Minglei received hundreds of letters praising the paper’s coverage of the issue. Soon after, CCTV’s “Eastern Horizon”, a news talk show, ran an interview with Xu Yongguang, the top official at Project Hope. Xu acknowledged there had been a few hiccups at the Project, but said the Communist Youth Development Foundation was looking at nationwide changes to the program. The news program had also interviewed Zhai Minglei, who spoke about endemic institutional problems at Project Hope. This part of the interview was removed before the segment aired, meeting the same fate as similar comments in Zhai’s article. China’s media minders were not interested in casting the story as anything more than an isolated case of corruption. The local official Tang Chunxu would remain the scapegoat.
When news came of Tang’s public admission of guilt shortly after the CCTV segment aired, no one was the least bit surprised. The Party committee in Xuanhan County pledged to deal harshly with Tang, and this seemed to quench the media’s thirst for blood. Eventually, Tang was condemned to a punishment befitting his crime, if otherwise a bit worrisome – he was packed off to a village school, where he was to teach classes in moral education.
The story, fortunately, did not end there. Two whistleblowers, former employees of the Project, came forward with accusations that challenged not only the charity’s system of administration in general, but implicated Xu Yongguang personally. They were Liu Yang, former deputy head of the accounting department at Project Hope, and another former Project Hope employee named Yi Xiao. Liu presented Southern Weekend in early 2002 with evidence of financial machinations that had defrauded the charity of some 12 million yuan. Based on this new information the paper’s deputy editor in chief, Fang Jinyu, wrote a report implicating Xu Yongguang.
In light of the report’s sensitivity, the editors agreed it would be difficult, potentially disastrous, to print an unexpurgated version in the paper. Instead they explored the option of running it in an “internal reference”, or neican, where it might draw the attention, and perhaps the action, of China’s political elite. According to his own account, Fang tried to offer the story to several internal references, including those of his former employer, Xinhua News Agency. The expose was too hot to handle, apparently, and Fang had no takers.
Fang’s sources, having risked their own hides, became anxious about the delays and resolved on leaking the materials to Hong Kong media. Fang helped arrange a meeting between Liu Yang and a mainland correspondent for Ming Pao newspaper.
According to some sources, the leading Hong Kong English-language daily South China Morning Post was also offered Liu Yang’s documentation on Project Hope, but declined to print the story because of fears of possible fallout on the Post’s Malaysian-Chinese owner Robert Kwok’s extensive business interests in China. If true, this would demonstrate even further the potential dangers of the story for Southern Weekend, which had so much more to lose than the Hong Kong-based Post.
Once Ming Pao had broken the story outside China, the South China Morning Post joined in. Encouraged by the overseas publicity, Liu Yang called a news conference in Guangzhou for domestic Chinese media. On March 20, 2002, the day of the news conference, Southern Weekend put Fang’s four-page expose on the front page and sent the issue off to the printers. But Xu Yongguang was charging into action too. He called the allegations circulating in the Hong Kong press “a terrorist attack on Project Hope” and pressed the Propaganda Department to issue a ban on the story. The ban was enforced through the local propaganda office in Guangdong and Southern Weekend’s entire print-run of some 300,000 copies was destroyed.
What Fang did next was a huge gamble – he decided to post the article on the Web in its entirety, under his own name rather than that of the newspaper. Within hours the story had made it around the globe and everyone knew the truth about years of mismanagement at Project Hope. One of the most damning revelations of Fang’s report was that the Communist Youth Development Foundation had changed disbursement procedures in 1996 to simplify the diversion of funds by high officials into other speculative ventures. Chinese readers were saddened and angered to learn that a sizeable portion of donations to Project Hope had never been used to assist poor rural children in their dream of going to school.
The Southern Weekend reports forced Project Hope down from its prized position as a model of Chinese social conscience. In the year after the report appeared, contributions to the fund dropped by more than 60 percent. Domestic Chinese media turned more earnestly to the question of how to ensure proper oversight of charity organizations. It had been a process of disillusionment for the entire country, which had glimpsed behind the faces of children in need the cynical manipulation and unbridled greed made possible by the general lack of transparency and accountability.
Postscript
Zhai Minglei called the hostile environment he faced in remote Sichuan Province a “kingdom of lies”, and the Project Hope case makes clear the immediate practical difficulties involved in doing investigative feature stories under such conditions in China, where infrastructure is underdeveloped and local leaders work to forestall the efforts of journalists. As difficult as these obstacles were, though, they paled against the political problems facing the story. Having uncovered the facts in Sichuan, Zhai Minglei and others at Southern Weekend faced a more daunting kingdom of lies, subject to the machinations of Xu Yongguang, the powerful and well-connected official a the top of Project Hope.
In the end, the unraveling of this more formidable network of lies required two acts of desperation on the part of Fang Jinyu, the Southern Weekend editor who undertook the second Project Hope report. The first was to hand the story, in lieu of domestic publication, over to media outside China, an agonizing choice for any professionally minded journalist. The second was the leaking of the full second Project Hope report on the Internet subsequent to international coverage. These “leaks” highlight two important forms of last resort for Chinese journalists.
How and whether the development of the Internet over the last decade is changing the practice of journalism in China is a terribly complicated question. It is already clear, though, that e-mail, blogs and personal Websites have helped Chinese reporters establish and maintain contacts with the outside that can prove an important means of getting stories out when the reins are tightened on the home front.
For an example, one need look no further than the explosive international controversy in February 2006 over the Propaganda Bureau’s closure of “Freezing Point”, a weekly section of China Youth Daily and for more than ten years one of China’s leading sources of investigative reporting and commentary. When Li Datong, the section’s editor, received notice from China Youth Daily’s editor in chief on January 24, 2006, that “Freezing Point” would be “suspended and put in order” he wrote an open letter protesting the decision and sent it by e-mail to friends and colleagues outside China. The letter bounced through cyberspace and quickly made the section’s closure international news. The “leak” upped the ante for Chinese leaders, who had hushed domestic media by banning coverage of the incident even before Li Datong had learned himself what happened, and brought international pressure to bear.
The Internet played a similar role in getting out the full Project Hope story. Zhai Minglei’s first report, with its unfortunate editorial changes, was in fact well received in official circles. The head of Project Hope, Xu Yongguang even sent a letter thanking the paper for exposing the corrupt education official in Sichuan and helping the Project correct this (minor) kink. He encouraged the newspaper’s work and even invited reporters in for a personal interview. His enthusiasm cooled as Southern Weekend’s Fang Jinyu unearthed even more damning information in the wake of the first story.
Of course, the best possible scenario for Fan Jinyu would have been printing his full report in Southern Weekend. As we have seen, the political obstacles made this impossible. Not just any charity, Project Hope was hailed as a model and yardstick of social progress in the official yearly “white books” on human rights through most of the 1990s. Government employees and party members were encouraged to contribute as part of their “ideological education”. In 1994, then Premier Li Peng made a point of emphasizing the Project’s achievements in his “Government Work Report” to the National People’s Congress.
Established just a few months after the crackdown on student demonstrators on Tiananmen Square in 1989, Project Hope boasted direct political support from China’s highest leadership. The project, created under the auspices of the Communist Youth League, typified the “GONGO”, or government-organized non-governmental organization. Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Li Peng, at the time China’s three most powerful men, all wrote ceremonial inscriptions for the Project in their personal calligraphy styles. The organization’s supervisory organs were staffed with retired high-ranking cadres from institutions like secretariat of the State Council, the Ministry of Education and the People’s Political Consultative Conference. It was, in short, politically armed to the teeth.
It’s not surprising then that editors at Southern Weekend were at first reluctant to directly confront this institution. Fang first tried finding a home for the story in an internal reference, where it stood a chance of catching the eye of influential Party officials. With no takers and his inside sources growing nervous, he made the agonizing choice of taking a back seat and relinquishing his scoop to media outside the mainland. It was a frustrating compromise: “Here I am, a Party news worker, meeting with a mainland correspondent [for a foreign publication] and sifting through the evidence against a corrupt mainland official; why must things turn out this way?” he wrote.
Immediately after the ban on the story on March 21, 2002, he put the article online under his own name. This was a risky step, but also the only way Fang could reach a wider audience. The story traveled fast on the Internet, both domestically and internationally. By March 24, an article on the exposé’s suppression at Southern Weekend appeared in The New York Times.
Once again, the Internet proved instrumental in breaking official censorship. The victory was a dubious one, though. Never officially published in mainland China, the allegations were easily dismissed by Xu Yongguang as “rumors”, and even an attempt at “news distortion” by disgruntled former employees. Xu eventually stepped down as the head of Project Hope; he remained, however, on its governing council, and proceeded towards another leading position in the non-profit sector, that of vice-secretary general of the China Charity Foundation.
Several official audits and investigations were launched at Project Hope, but their results were never made public. The fully story remains off limits to public scrutiny, and to this day it is hard to establish the facts in the forest of allegations and counter-allegations. According to one well-informed and non-partial observer, Liu Yang’s original assertions in Ming Pao and Southern Weekend were “substantially true”, but they may have resulted from “institutional mismanagement”, rather than personal corruption of the Project’s leadership.
Suppression of the second expose on the mainland made it impossible to refute or confirm the allegations convincingly. A cloud of doubt remains. But one thing at least is certain – Project Hope has not yet recovered its former standing in the eyes of the public.

[ABOVE: Zhai Minglei sits in front of Eliot Hall, The University of Hong Kong.]

The Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong, invites you to Redemption and Fact: The Chinese Journalist’s Sense of History, a public seminar by Mr. Lu Yuegang, former assistant editor of the Freezing Point supplement of China Youth Daily.

(Conducted in Putonghua)
Date: December 6, 2007
Time: 5:30pm to 7:00pm
Location: Foundation Chamber, Eliot Hall, The University of Hong Kong
About the Speaker:
When the Freezing Point supplement of China Youth Daily was shut down by propaganda authorities in January 2006, assistant editor Lu Yuegang was removed from his post and transferred to the newspaper’s research division. Lu is well known as an investigative reporter and writer of reportage in China. His book-length works include Da Guo Gua Min, Among the High Classes, and Among the Lower Classes.
Enquiries: Ms Rain Li (2219 4001/ [email protected])

By David Bandurski – Take China’s commercialized media landscape, add stringent controls on real news and information, and you’ve got a bull market for all things inane and extraneous. So perhaps it’s no surprise that a seemingly inconsequential blog post about Chinese tourists riding New York City’s Wall Street Bull has been inflated into headline news in China over the last week.
The controversy – now being called the “Wall Street Bull-Riding Affair” (华尔街骑牛事件) – began on November 15 as Wang Fang (王芳), a host for Beijing TV, posted several photos of Chinese tourists riding the Wall Street Bull she had taken while in New York. The accompanying blog post, “A Group of Chinese Tourists Actually ‘Ride’ the Wall Street Bull”, said “foreigners on the scene sighed and moaned as Chinese tourists made a show of riding the bull.”

[ABOVE: Screenshot of Xinhuanet.com coverage of Chinese tourists riding the Wall Street Bull.]

Wang’s post added: “Their behavior drew a crowd of tourists from various nations, and a cleaner came over to see what all the fuss was about. Talking with him I learned that in the two years he had worked there he had never seen anyone ride the bull.”
Wang Fang’s post spread like a wildfire through Chinese cyberspace, sparking discussion on many online forums. Early on, most of these postings attacked the Chinese bull-riders. Most everyone agreed this revealed the poor manners of many Chinese tourists and reflected badly on Chinese generally.
It wasn’t long before the story was hoisted into commercial newspapers across China, becoming a national incident. Even newspapers in Hong Kong and Taiwan picked up on the story, running it in one case with the headline, “Taking Photos Riding the Bronze Bull in Mockery: Mainland Tourists Show Their Ugly Side on Wall Street”.
Then came a moderating voice from Hong Kong’s Ming Pao: “What’s most disgusting is that [things like this] should always be elevated into a question of Chinese character.”
The next turn came as photos began appearing in Chinese chatrooms depicting foreign tourists of all stripes riding the Wall Street Bull. Web users then turned their anger on Wang Fang, whose blog had initiated the controversy. Riding the bull didn’t seem to be such a big deal after all. Had Wang exaggerated the response of onlookers?

[ABOVE: A special topics page at QQ.com gathers together the pro’s and con’s of the “Wall Street Bull-Riding Affair”.]

In an interview with Southern Metropolis Daily on November 24, Wang Fang said she was taken aback by the response. In her view, her blog was simply an online diary containing her personal reflections and viewpoints. “Most people who read my blog are mothers, and my goal in writing the blog is reaching these mothers and helping them educate their own kids,” Wang said. “I personally believe this was uncivilized behavior [to ride the Wall Street Bull].”
Views on the “affair” posted by Web users on QQ.com over the weekend expressed both support and criticism of Wang Fang:

59.40.30.*: With such a level as this she can still be a host for Beijing TV? She should be fired.
209.188.58.*: Wang Fang is right. Chinese people should learn from this, and its only because of her love of the country that they will bear it in mind.
125.91.80.*: Oh, so Chinese and dogs shouldn’t be allowed to ride the Wall Street Bull [apparently a reference to restrictions under colonial rule in treaty ports such as Shanghai barring admittance to certain areas to dogs and Chinese.]
222.81.98.*: And what does is say about Wang Fang’s character, to generate such clap-trap?
125.127.94.*: So foreigners ride the Wall Street Bull too. Clearly this is about making something out of nothing and poking fun at the Chinese people.

[Summary of story in Southern Metropolis Daily]

By David Bandurski — For two and half years veteran Chinese journalist and former CMP fellow Zhai Minglei (翟明磊) and others went quietly to work on Minjian (民间), China’s first magazine telling the stories of grassroots activists working for the betterment of Chinese society. They had no political or financial ambitions, but were driven only, says Zhai, by their belief in the principles of civil society. After cooperating with authorities since July in an effort to save Minjian amidst a government crackdown on “illegal publications”, including the China Development Brief, Zhai has decided to speak out in an open letter explaining the circumstances surrounding Minjian‘s “death.”
“Had it not been for Minjian’s closure, we would have worked forever in silence,” writes Zhai.
“Up to now no formal decision has been rendered concerning how to deal with Minjian, but we have already given up all fantasies [about its future], and as a public intellectual I must raise my own voice.”

[ABOVE: Cover image of March 2005 edition of Minjian.]

Zhai’s letter depicts an NGO sector under increasing pressure from Chinese authorities, facing what he calls, alluding to periodic law-enforcement crackdowns, an “intellectual strike hard campaign.”
Zhai Minglei spoke at the recent Chinese Blogger Con 2007 in Beijing as a panel member on grassroots media in China [Blogger Con in Chinese]. His letter, distributed to friends and colleagues by e-mail on November 12, shows the extraordinary pressures facing grassroots media in China, and the tangle of confusing laws and regulations that can be used unaccountably by authorities for political ends.
Minjian‘s demise exposes yet again China’s growing crisis of information. Even as China’s economy is growing rapidly and media commercialization is intensifying, even as there is a growing appetite for real information in a changing society, party officials continue to push back against public interest news coverage.
As Zhai says: “China’s hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games might demonstrate that Chinese people are physically stronger and sturdier, but the death of Minjian reminds us that the mental horizons of the Chinese people are limited to the child’s playground. While the market is glutted with mediocre, materialistic consumer fare, public affairs news materials are repeatedly pressured and bled out.”
Roughly half of Zhai Minglei’s 18-page letter follows:
—————

Minjian, she dies with a smile
Zhai Minglei (翟明磊)
Lately, a number of readers have phoned me to ask why they haven’t yet seen the Summer and Autumn editions of Minjian. For this reason, I feel I must offer readers an explanation.
Minjian has been cut down, and though we have covered the wounds on her chest, the bloodstains creep silently across the sheets. Minjian has worked mildly and delicately to build a civil society, but we cannot hold back from this earnest account:
On the morning of July 6, 2007, just as the Summer edition of Minjian had been delivered to Sun Yatsen University’s Center for Citizens and Development (中山大学公民与发展中心), and just a volunteers were preparing packs and parcels [for circulation], three people from the Cultural Inspection Brigade of Guangzhou’s press and publications office [the local GAPP office] including Wu Peng (吴鹏) stormed into the center. They presented a document with the official seal of the Guangzhou Publication Appraisals Committee (广州市出版物鉴定委员会). It said that the Spring edition of Minjian was an illegal publication because it did not have a publishing unit or publishing license. They then proceeded to confiscate 5,036 copies of Minjian’s Summer edition. At the same time, they ordered us to cease publication of Minjian.
This action must have been planned in advance and the documents prepared. It so happened that it was during these two days that the China Development Brief, which had been operating for 13 years, was shut down.
Several days later, Zhu Jiangang (朱健刚), an associate professor at the Center for Civil Society (公民社会中心), was ordered to cooperate with an investigation. The enforcement official told him that they did not know exactly what was going on, but that they had received orders from above. They were under a lot of pressure, the official said, and had been told to refer the case to police because the number of printed copies had been substantial.
Enduring much humiliation and hardship, Professor Zhu tried to reason with the authorities and salvage Minjian’s hopes. Thirty days later there was still no word on our case. They said it didn’t need to be referred to the police so long as we agreed not to publish Minjian.
They said that according to Article 55 of the [1999] State Council Statute on Publishing Management anyone “daring to set up a publication without going through approvals …. will be banned …. and will be liable to a fine of between 10,000 and 50,000 yuan for illegal business activities.” [NOTE_Bandurski: This text actually appears in article 45 of the Statute]. Minjian was shut down and ordered to pay a fine of 30,000 yuan. Minjian’s lawyer felt this was entirely unreasonable. First of all, Minjian had received approval from an academic institution and was therefore an academic publication within the law. Secondly, Minjian was a publication working for the public good, and had no business or income whatsoever, so there was no call for a fine [under the State Council statute]. Thirdly, Minjian’s content was of a healthy nature, without so much as a hint of content the government might regard as indecent or reactionary.
The authorities did not listen to our appeals, and made no adjustments.
After we were prevented from publishing, the electronic version of Minjian started appearing online. At this point (August 20) the Web Police appeared at our office, demanding that we stop our production of the online version of Minjian. We replied that that the ban on publishing applied to published materials but did not prevent online dissemination, and besides our content was entirely legal. The police simply waved this aside. We were reminded at this time of the old idiom: “Controlling the common people is more important than controlling the bandits”. [NOTE_Bandurski: Here Zhai is making a play on words, as the idiom contains the first character, “min”, of the publication, which means “common people.”]
Simply because he introduced the contents of the summer edition of Minjian [on his site], Peng Weifeng (彭微风), manager of the Mumian Huakai (木棉花开) web forum, was taken in for questioning by Web police, who said he was “under suspicion of publicizing an illegal publication.” It was for this reason that the Mumian forum was closed down.
After this several blogs excerpting Minjian content were closed . . . The Minjian website [hosted overseas] was blocked.
A screening at the Pudong Shimin Center (浦东市民中心) in Shanghai of our film “Country Teacher”, done according to a Minjian report, was notified a day in advance that it was to be cancelled. After this, two alternate venues, citing strange reasons, refused screening.
I’ve truly never heard of such methods being used to target a small publication.
As it stands, we’ve exhausted all possibilities for ensuring Minjian’s survival in whatever form. We’ve received great support from many friends. We’ve worked so hard for the survival of the magazine not out of resistance but because of our belief in the principle of civil society. A civil society abides by the law, but it cannot take orders. We abide by national laws, but only when we need not obey such “orders” as these will we truly have an independent civil society.
Up to now no formal decision has been rendered concerning how to deal with Minjian, but we have already given up all fantasies [about its future], and as a public intellectual I must raise my own voice.
We have kept entirely silent over these past two months for two reasons. First, because as law-abiding citizens we felt confident that we were clean, and we wanted to give the authorities confidence that we were cooperating before there was a clear result. Secondly, even as foreign news media turned their attention to our case we had no desire, as people doing real work [rather than causing trouble or seeking publicity], to exploit the opportunity. Now that the ripples have subsided, I feel empowered to write as I wish.
[Birth and Beginning]
[Scholar] Li Shenzhi (李慎之) once said that if he had another life he would spend it as a citizen teacher (公民教员). My colleagues at Sun Yatsen University’s Center for Civil Society wanted to achieve Old Li’s ideal in their own lifetimes. Minjian’s core phrase was: “Acting to transform existence” (行动改变生存). The stories we told were about people in China working together for the public good.
Launching Minjian was a simple idea. One teacher involved in the launch talked about how when they were in America on a fellowship they discovered that their old landlord was a member of scores of civic organizations — reading clubs, choral groups, etc. Teacher Liang said that whenever China could reach such a developed civil society that would be great. She paid special attention to the capacity of Chinese to organize themselves. My own involvement stemmed from interviews I had done with more than 300 evictees. I became weary with the way these people placed their hopes in the government and benevolent leaders. One phrase during the launch spoke to my deepest convictions: “All of these years we’ve looked to the heavens, and forgotten to look to one another.”
I could utter ten-thousand words, but the words “civic enlightenment [awakening]” probably best sums up [our impetus for launching Minjian].
And what do civic teachers use to teach? Our thought was to use the stories of the people themselves. Minjian’s style was direct and earnest. We told things how they were. It was a publication with a heartbeat and a body temperature. Reporters for Minjian endured many hardships over the last two years. They often returned from reporting stints covered with fleas and bites [Note_Bandurski: The reference to insect bites, or hongbao (红包), literally “red envelope”, is a play on words suggesting that Minjian reporters were dedicated to fighting the good fight, unlike many establishment journalists in China for whom it is routine to accept envelopes of cash in payment for positive publicity]. It was in this way that we came back with the most living stories of the people. Ordinary intellectuals, we are a bit bookish in our own way. The only think we knew was to foolishly pour our hearts into this little publication. One editor I respect very much grew farsighted laboring over the pages. One of our female reporters came back from the field with 28 flea bites. My own eyes have yet to recover from fatigue.
The first year we did the magazine from our homes. Eventually we had more than 200 volunteers working to get the magazine out to readers . . .
Minjian was China’s first public welfare publication telling the stories of grassroots activists. It was completely independent, telling stories from the vantage point of the common people. It covered such issues as environmental protection, rights defense, relief for the poor, and rural development.
[Reasons]
One reason Minjian did not have a publishing license is because under China’s current publishing environment, publishing licenses are held and controlled by publishing organs designated by the state. Individuals cannot obtain publishing licenses, and even academic bodies like the Center for Civil Society do not have the right hold publishing licenses. For this reason, publishing licenses that should be obtained freely have become a kind of resource, and licenses for monthly publications can be sold on the open market for over 200,000 yuan. As a resource for the public good promoting action on public welfare, Minjian had no aims to profit in the marketplace, nor did we want to bear this unjust cost. Even more important was the sponsoring institution and press censorship that would come with the publishing license. [Note_Bandurski: In China all licenses for publishing are held by sponsoring institutions, or zhuguan danwei (主管单位), that are responsible for ensuring party propaganda discipline at publications under their watch.] Minjian had no intention of tying its own hands and feet.
Therefore, Minjian decided to deliver the publication as an internal resource by post to the individuals and organizations that required it. As Minjian was directed toward publicizing the public welfare, any individual or group within the public welfare system interested in public welfare could become a Minjian reader. Minjian was offered free of charge. We undertook no profit-seeking activities, nor did we ever publicly distribute the magazine.
Minjian was therefore a not-for-profit public welfare publication for closed circulation. Moreover, Sun Yatsen University’s Center for Civil Society is a nationally approved secondary national research institute created in cooperation with the sociology department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and tasked with researching civil society and the management of public welfare work, and promoting civic education. It was founded before the Civil Society Center at Peking University [which has not been under pressure]. The formation of Minjian was approved by the Foreign Affairs Office of Sun Yatsen University, and received twenty-odd official stamps. For us all of the sudden to be branded “an illegal publication” is truly perplexing.
We did not apply for an internal printing permission certificate (内部准印证) because this unaccountable permission is an affront to publishing freedoms, its application process is complicated, and most internal newsletters now pay no attention to this kind of internal printing permission certificate.
There are now many rigorous academic materials of this kind within the university system. And among NGOs these kinds of materials now exist everywhere. This includes the recently shut down China Development Brief, which existed for 13 years.
China does not at present have a Press Law or Publishing Law.
The only relevant document is the State Council’s Publishing Management Ordinance of February 1, 2002, which includes a 1991 General Administration of Press and Publications provision on handling of closures of illegal publications. There are no stipulations or limitations concerning closed circulation publications like Minjian, and all articles are in regard to publications circulated publicly and for profit.
Minjian was an internal academic resource, not for profit, not circulated publicly and only delivered by post to persons within the public welfare sector.
In the materials we’ve reviewed and the document authorities have presented to us, on a single phrase, in a notice from Guangdong’s press and publications office concerning illegal publications, about “printing and reproduction of books, periodicals, audiovisual materials, etc, for internal use without prior approval from administrative offices dealing with publishing.” But it is unclear where the legal basis is [in the action taken against us].
If indeed it is this clause [from the Guangdong notice’] then all of the internal organizational publications and materials of NGOs in China are illegal publications. Without approval from all the various levels [of the government] NGOs have no way of printing materials and publicizing their own concepts and public welfare work.
And so it is with all of those small booklets we circulate among friends and acquaintances in China as a form of interaction or to seek the appreciation of friends, or those various poetry collections we call people’s publications (民刊), all reading materials shared among colleagues. All they need is to be printed and they are illegal publications.
And what about those internal materials printed by enterprises, their marketing materials, introductions to their products appearing in booklet form? And what of collected lectures teachers print on their own? Are all of these illegal publications too?
[According to the above clause] internal use is not permitted, and so external use is even less acceptable. According to this logic any and all printed materials in China must be approved by administrative organs dealing with publishing. This is not only a violation of the constitutional guarantees of freedom of publishing and expression — it’s also plainly ridiculous.
[Here Zhai quotes from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Original quote not found].
Therefore I believe that there is no freedom whatsoever to speak of unless there is true freedom to publish.
We believe there should be a clear-cut Press Law and Publishing Law. Otherwise, local governments and lower-level government departments can use various regulations to suppress freedom of speech and freedom to publish as suits them. When they deal loosely, licenses can be bought and sold, when they deal harshly, even strict internal academic publications in the public welfare, such as Minjian, are targeted. Pushing this to the limit, any printed materials that have not received direct approval from authorities can be deemed illegal printed materials . . .
What Minjian has faced is a sort of “intellectual strike hard” [literally “spiritual” or “mental”] campaign without any legal basis whatever.
This strike hard campaign has already developed beyond pornographic and opposition publications to hit serious investigative internal materials like the China Development Brief and Minjian. What does it matter [in their view] that these have real academic institutions or NGOs behind them? They are now dealing with the cultural field as they might with [unauthorized] vegetable markets, treating professors and doctoral students as roughly as they [commercial police, deputized security officers, etc.] might treat peddlers, interfering with academic freedoms.
Without freedom of expression it’s not only citizen teachers like us [that are at risk], but all of those buds of thought differing from the [party’s] main line that might bring about social progress stand to be trampled and destroyed . . .
Here I would just like to extend my personal sympathies to the China Development Brief. What nonsense it is that social research without approval should become a crime! For 13 years the China Development Brief presented to the world objective and even-handed research on China’s healthy growth. In the end for it to be cut down in such a way is, even from the perspective of the censors, an “unintelligent” move – I’ll refrain from using the word “stupid”. What a pity to lose such an excellent force of unity.
Any liberal government will welcome NGO and volunteer organizations to assist the weaker segments of society and mitigate social contradictions. But lately more conservative elements in our government have been on guard against NGOs . . . Is there really any need to prevent NGOs and citizens from speaking?
Lest readers think exaggerating, let me share a story that happened to me personally. I’m an acting director of Green Roots [a Shanghai-based NGO]. Our organization is involved in the building of NGO capacity, support and training. Last year the Center for Civil Society held a workshop and posted a pre-announcement online. After the announcement appeared, the abovementioned Web authorities maintained that a reactionary organization called “Workshop” had recently been formed, supported by Americans. Only after a lot of explaining from a number of sides did the authorities admit they had been seriously misinformed by this grave notice of enemy threats. Not long after, the authorities (abovementioned) said my brother-in-law was orchestrating popular movements with financial support from America. I explained that I was an only child. The younger sister they were talking about was in fact a friend with the same surname whose mother was working as a maidservant in the States and sending money back to China for the family. But last year the office again stepped up and said that I had, in cahoots with lawyer Gao Zhisheng, organized rights defense figures across the nation to sign a letter of protest at a conference in Shanghai. They had all the specifics worked out, such as at which restaurant near the rear gate of Shanghai Jiaotong University we had rendezvoused. Once again, I explained that no such thing had happened, that I didn’t personally know Mr. Gao, and that the address they had was a place where we held performances of folk dramas. Is this really possible! This office clearly wishes to make an example of Green Roots, and they have no qualms about resorting to rumor, saying for example that Minjian was run by Green Roots [rather than a research institute within Sun Yatsen University], or that all the articles were instigated, checked and approved by Oxfam. Their lack of understanding of NGOs approaches sheer ignorance. So the shut down of Minjian became a key task, a consolation for their vain pursuit of Green Roots over these last few years. What more can be said about this paranoia? If this government body persists with such misinformation, how many more NGOs will fall unjustly under the axe! Having lost any semblance of a normal working environment, we have lately been forced into disbanding Green Roots.
As a citizen I must protest this abuse of taxpayers’ money to fund campaigns of misinformation. Who has any idea how many American-supported “reactionary groups” these people will dream up!
But the most critical thing is that we have no idea how to appeal to this mysterious government office, and perhaps the only thing to do is appeal to the newly-appointed head of the Ministry of State Security, particularly as you, sir, are an expert on American affairs. First, your policies on management of NGOs are wrong. All of the NGOs Minjian reported on, the one-hundred or so with which I’ve personally had contact, consist entirely of well-meaning and law-abiding citizens. They have no political designs, and certainly are not the hatchet men of anti-Chinese powers overseas. As for Oxfam, this is a fund with broad support from residents in Hong Kong, and all the people I know involved in Oxfam projects are working on poverty assistance in the countryside. Second, keep your subordinates in check so they do not carelessly pursue cases.
Government and society are separate domains. In the social domain, pure people’s organizations should be allowed to operate . . . Right now the government not only monopolizes the bulk of charitable funds but also treats NGOs with unbridled suspicion. The closing of the James Yen Reconstruction Institute is a clear example. Not only should the government refrain from taking on social duties, it should not interfere with the natural development of society, and China is at present in a stage of social reconstruction.
I’ve thought a great deal about why these misunderstandings have arisen. Aside from the low character of these government offices, there is the issue of Chinese psychology. In economics there is something called “conspiracy theory”. Why should these offices suppose NGOs are spearheading political movements? Because in their subconscious Chinese blindly worship power, and from ancient times to now, whether official themselves or the common people, all have placed their hopes for good governance in the government itself, gazing up to the highest levels of political power. For this reason, very few have ever worked to enlighten the public and rebuild society. This leads the government office to this train of thought: “What is all this for, this back-breaking research you guys carry out without a thought to fame or profit? It must be that you’re after political power.” Let me tell you, we’re after nothing more than the strength of character of the Chinese people. We’re laboring away in the mud. We do not blindly worship power . . . We are not doing political work, but awakening civic consciousness. [Without a properly functioning civil society] democratic politics will be malformed. We are willing to work our whole lives in obscurity as civic teachers. We want to accomplish the work of James Yen, the work of Liang Shu-ming. Had it not been for Minjian’s closure, we would have worked forever in silence.
What is the most difficult thing to do in China? The good deed. A publication reporting on public welfare is shut down . . . In his report to [the recent] 17th National Congress, President Hu Jintao said we must work hard on civic education, yet Minjian, the only publication to make civic education its duty, is closed down. Who then should we believe?
Drowsy Minjian, she dies with a smile. Because it is she who opted for this way of publishing, to get around press controls and stand for the common people. She consents to this use of death, a reminder to us all of just how far we have to go to reach freedom of speech and of the press. A reminder of how near the bullets are.
The sirens should be sounded. In every nation with freedom of the press across the world there are publishing licenses [or book numbers, etc.] for the sole purpose of record keeping, but only in China have these become a weapon of censorship and control, so that even internal printing requires a certificate with official approval, and so too with online publications and electronic materials, and so too with at-home and hotel satellite television programming . . . The government’s eye glares in every corner where information freedoms are concerned in China.
In the late Qing Dynasty any adult citizen who was not mentally ill or a convict could start their own publication. Today our dream of private media has still not been realized.
China’s hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games might demonstrate that Chinese people are physically stronger and sturdier, but the death of Minjian reminds us that the mental horizons of the Chinese people are limited to the child’s playground. While the market is glutted with mediocre, materialistic consumer fare, public affairs news materials are repeatedly pressured and bled out.
. . . I am willing to take full responsibility as the founder and leader of this publication.
I am acting chief editor of Minjian, and I am prepared to stand with my colleagues in taking full responsibility, including legal responsibility. But more than this, I am a free journalist. You could say I was angry when I was let go from my position as a reporter for Southern Weekend those years ago, annoyed at press controls. But today it is not anger I feel. If I feel anything it is pity. Pity for Minjian, and pity that the efforts of the people [“Minjian”] have been ruined. With a delicate and gracious heart, Minjian sought to build a civil society – but the government branded her “an enemy of the public and an illegal publication.”
I pity too those backstage murderers, so terrified that Minjian should put off a bit of light and heat, that the tiniest voice might bring “grave consequences.” This was a year of development for Minjian. We had readers across the country and received recognition from various quarters. One of our first issues to be shut down dealt with rights defense actions in the area of land use, and perhaps this is one reason our “old friends” [in the government] have been so afraid. During our second year authorities were clear about Minjian’s actions but never shut us down, so I thank them for their “tolerance” . . . Over these short two and a half years of Minjian’s existence, our colleagues at Minjian have enjoyed confidence and happiness and found joy in their work. They [the government] have put an end to our happiness. Nevertheless, we of Minjian still hope that they might find happiness [and freedom from fear and paranoia] – that they might cast off the psychological bent wrought of this long season of autocracy.

By Joseph Cheng (程金福) – In an uncharacteristic move, propaganda authorities apparently ordered the removal from the Web yesterday of an editorial from China’s official news agency. The editorial, posted on the Web on August 18, dealt with dirty land deals between local officials and development firms and was Xinhua’s own follow-up on an investigative report appearing in the November 15 edition of Guangdong’s Southern Weekend.
The Southern Weekend report detailed how officials at Guangzhou’s Country Garden (碧桂园), a major development firm some have called “China’s biggest landlord”, had been able to systematically purchase village land at no cost thanks to behind-the-scenes dealings with local leaders across China.

[ABOVE: Screenshot of Xinhua editorial at QQ.com]

The Xinhua editorial, deleted from the agency’s own site and many other portals but still available through QQ.com and Hexun, likened China’s real estate sector to a “stampede of wild horses, negating macroeconomic controls and hopes for home ownership among ordinary people.”
Yesterday, readers clicking the link for the Xinhua editorial at the agency’s official site, or from the Google search page, received the following message: “We’re sorry, but you’ve selected an item that has expired or has already been removed.”

[ABOVE: Message at Xinhuanet saying the Xinhua editorial on land deals has been removed.]

RELATED LINKS:
“Watchdog journalism vs. shady land deals“, Joel Martinsen, Danwei.org

By David Bandurski — If I had a jiao for every time someone’s told me the Chinese don’t care about politics or democracy, I’d have enough chunk change to fund an American presidential campaign. “The new middle class is young, rich and happy. Just don’t mention politics,” Time reported not long ago. And we are elsewhere informed that “new-generation Chinese”, who exist in a “parallel universe,” “do not want democracy.”
Isn’t there an alternative? Between the Oz of the “China Fantasy” (that a rising Chinese middle class must usher in democracy as we know it), and the nationalistic notion of Chinese cultural subjectivity, the cop-out “parallel universe” of Chinese values in which “our white is their black and their black our white” and democracy could never take root? [Click here for historian Yuan Weishi’s critique of so-called Chinese “cultural subjectivity”].

[ABOVE: Screen capture of Tom Doctoroff’s blog at Huffington Post arguing Chinese exist in a “parallel universe” of values.]

The answer, the oft-neglected missing piece, is expression. These assumptions about the Chinese and their shallowest convictions fail to account for the salient fact that real dialogue about politics or civic life is now and has historically been suppressed in China. Speech, the basic condition of public participation in political affairs, is something the Communist Party has historically monopolized.
So while it’s basically true that politics and democracy are not readily discernible topics in China, it’s more to the point to say that China is a one-party state that does not tolerate political debate.
Just as the factor of speech is missing from these calculations about the political insouciance of the Chinese people, speech may also be the key to reading China’s political future.
Last week, CMP co-director Qian Gang (钱钢) wrote in Hong Kong’s Yazhou Zhoukan that liberalization in the area of expression in China is a critical precursor to political reforms. Continuing his analysis of Hu Jintao’s recent political report to the 17th National Congress, Qian Gang suggested top leaders might be thinking in this direction too:

Those keeping track of political reform in China noticed the phrase “protecting the people’s right to know, participate, express and supervise” (保障人民的知情权、参与权、表达权、监督权) in Hu Jintao’s political report to the recent 17th National Congress.
This phrase is in fact a slight revision from Jiang Zemin’s political report back in 2002. In Jiang’s report the fifth section, “Political Development and Political Reform” (政治建设和政治体制改革), said: In the matter of cadre selection and appointment, Party members and ordinary people should have more right to know, participate, choose and supervise” (扩大党员和群众对干部选拔任用的知情权、参与权、选择权和监督权).
In Hu’s rendition the term “right to select”, or xuanze quan (选择权), is replaced with the “right to expression”, or biaoda quan (表达权) . . .

While in Jiang’s report the above “four rights” phrase appears in reference to cadre selection, it is used more generally in Hu’s report to talk about democracy. And as Qian Gang points out, “expression” replaces “selection” in Hu’s rendering.
A reader asked us recently on the CMP site whether anything positive had appeared in the report to the 17th National Congress. This could, knock on wood, be read as a positive sign.
Calling the inclusion of “right to expression” in Hu’s report the “product of careful consideration,” Qian relates it to a phrase used by political activist Wang Juntao and others during the political reform movement of the 1980s. That phrase, “checking and balancing [power] with diverse expression by intellectual elites” (多元表达，精英制衡), meant essentially that democracy should begin taking shape in China through expansion of rights to expression. From there it should progress gradually toward direct public participation through electoral politics.
The term “right to expression” has in fact gained some traction in China’s media over the last 10 years, and is often linked directly with other basic rights like the right to subsistence (生存权).
Qian Gang’s point is not unlike that of Chinese political activist Chen Ziming (陈子明), who wrote (again in Yazhou Zhoukan) earlier this year that “social opening” (社会开放) in China, including tolerance for voices of opposition to the party and non-party media, would precede “political opening” （政治开放）.
In that article, Chen said — perhaps with a surplus of optimism — that “social opening,” including action on press freedom, should be a core task of the Hu-Wen leadership over the next five years:

Of course I hope that major political reforms can be pushed ahead in the age of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. But if in the next five years they can resolve the task of ‘social opening’ that would be adequate.

What Qian Gang and Chen Ziming are suggesting is that we can expect (and/or hope for) progress on the right to expression to precede political reform. For this to happen, as Chen justifiably argues, China would have to allow the formation of independent social organizations (社会组织) and independent media, laying down the foundations for civil society.
If this happened Chinese could begin the conversation about China’s political future that so many China watchers have found conspicuously absent. That conversation, says Qian Gang, is itself part of the democratization process, and we should not focus narrowly on participation through democratic election as the immediate goal of political reform:

We cannot lash freedom and democracy together. If one morning, freedom of expression and democracy were liberated from their bonds, this would not necessarily be a great blessing for the people. Democracy must proceed gradually. It requires that the people march ahead in their daily lives, and that march is freedom of expression. Freedom of expression cannot dawdle along. The most reliable path of political development in China would be a succession of openings – opening of expression (言论开放), then social opening (社会开放), then political opening (政治开放).

The process of expression has only just begun in China. But we are fortunately at a point now where we can begin listening to Chinese voices on issues of critical importance to the Chinese.
However the party might try to “guide” public opinion, these voices are growing daily more diverse. And what they are saying is far more complex than a simple, dismissive “No.”
There are enough voices already to belie the narrow chauvinism — the cultural, political and intellectual Great Wall — of Chinese “cultural subjectivity”. There are voices clamoring for universal values even as they seek China’s own path.
Nor should we forget that China’s “Me generation” is also its most expressive ever. We can of course glimpse this in Chinese weblogs and online discussion forums. But it’s in evidence in China’s traditional media too, where commentary sections are cautiously expanding to include a greater variety of voices on issues that include basic civil rights.
“We have so much bigger a desire for everything than [our parents],” Time quoted 27 year-old Maria Zhang as saying. “And the more we eat, the more we taste and see, the more we want.”
And the more, no doubt, they will have to say.

By David Bandurski — We don’t know whether Li Liangyu (李连玉), the top leader in the city of Pizhou, Jiangsu Province, anticipated the well-planned orgy of enthusiasm that awaited him on his return from the 17th National Congress. It’s safe to assume, however, that he never expected the national furor that has followed in the wake of his homecoming. Li’s story, which began as a series of photos posted in an online chatroom, is now national news, and a simmering indictment of a party selfishly out of touch.
As web users branded Li Lianyu a “local emperor” (土皇帝) and invoked the triumphal returns (衣锦还乡) of China’s imperial history, leaders in Pizhou threw oil on the fire by clamping down on postings to a local Internet forum, where users were overwhelmingly critical of Li [See Global Voice on web user comments].
Coverage has now appeared in media across China, from People’s Daily to Southern Metropolis Daily.

[ABOVE: Screen capture of notice on a Pizhou chatroom against further postings concerning the Li Lianyu Affair]

Today’s editorial in Southern Metropolis Daily read the Li Lianyu affair in terms of fear and love. The editorial expressed apprehension for the web user who made the original post, wondering whether police in Pizhou would hunt the person down and “sue them for harming an official by rumor mongering.”
The editorial also questioned Li Lianyu’s priorities:

Liu Xiaofeng (刘小枫) has written a book called Fear and Love in this Generation. I’d really like to know: When Secretary Li and company were planning this huge ceremony, where were they placing their love? And when they deleted those postings, what were they afraid of? This question of love and fear offers a faithful portrait of officialdom in local areas.

Others have been less reticent in their criticism, and the debate over Li Lianyu’s triumphal return has already touched on the deeper question of how China’s communist leaders see their own role.

[ABOVE: Screenshot of Li Lianyu story covered at China Digital Times]

In an editorial appearing on Wednesday at China Elections and Governance (CEG), CEG editor Ye Zi said Li Lianyu’s homecoming could not be stomached by China’s public because it was painfully at odds with a new set of emerging values in China. The people, she said, were owed an apology.
Leaders like Li Lianyu, said Ye, were forgetting their place. They were forgetting their obligations to the people, and that power was vested in them by the people.
“We find the scenes [at Pizhou] jarring,” said Ye, “because there’s no need anymore to beat our gongs and our drums to herald anyone’s return in victory. What does that mean? It means that the Communist Party of China has already completed its mission as the party of revolution, and that it must find a position for itself as a party of leadership (执政党).”
The anger invoked by the Li Lianyu affair, in other words, sends the clear message that this is no longer an age of martyrs and heroes. Chinese owe their allegiance not to cadres and kings, but to a system of universal values.

—————-
What We’re Really Waiting for is an Earnest Apology
China Elections and Governance
By Ye Zi (叶子)
If the “Secretary of Pizhou” story were a listed stock it would be blazing hot judging by the number of hits it’s getting on the web. We could of course be talking about other things, like the affairs of the nation in the wake of the 17th National Congress. But I’m afraid nothing quite grabs the eyes like this story of a delegate’s return home.
In just the last two days I’ve received no less than five e-mails with pictures attached of this Pizhou party secretary returning home after serving as a delegate to the congress. One of these came from a middle-aged professor of Asian studies at a major university who has close links to the Brookings Institution and other think tanks. Two of them came from elderly veteran journalists who entered central party media back in the 1950s and 1960s. And two came from friends of mine born after 1980, one a journalist the other a masters student. I routinely get e-mails like this from friends and colleagues, but this is the first time I’ve been bombarded in this way.
So I’ve been thinking. What is it that’s made people care so much about something we should already have gotten so numbingly accustomed to?
We placed these photos in an inconspicuous place [on our website]. At the bottom-right corner of our site is the “Discussion and Analysis” column (疑义相析). Friends who are familiar with our site probably know that this column was originally called, “Perspectives Clash” (观点撞击). We eventually changed this to “Discussion and Analysis” because “clash” was too un-harmonious. The column is all about enjoying great articles together and discussing their significance.
The “contending of different viewpoints” is simply an objective fact in any society, and not something you can simply put an end to if you don’t approve [as government officials are wont to do, as the Pizhou chatroom notice telling Web users to cool it]. “The opening of a single flower doesn’t herald the arrival of spring” (一花独放不是春 百花齐放春满园). And there is another old saying, that “if the forest is big enough you can find any sort of bird there” (林子大了什么鸟儿都有). This works the other way round too. If there’s only one kind of bird, it means the forest isn’t big enough, that there is insufficient harmony, as it were, in the ecological environment. [Ye Zi is saying that discussion should be expected and allowed to flourish in a society, not be controlled by those in power].
I stumbled upon an essay recently that sheds some light on this group of pictures [of the Pizhou party secretary returning home] by asking about party congresses in America. The piece was written about delegates to the 17th National Congress: “As our 17th congress was being held with much clamor, a friend told me he had a friend who was serving as a delegate. This friend was someone of intelligence and character, but he had seen in news reports that he was meaninglessly repeating the language of national leaders at the congress. Do American political parties hold these kinds of meetings, he asked.”
Minor details and major changes. Li Lianyu (李连玉) basked personally in the scientific view of development and harmonious society [at the congress]. And after he had represented the broadest sections of the people in celebrating the policies of the party (代表了最广大的人民歌颂了党的政策) [NOTE: the language here purposely mimics the lofty speech of the party], delegate Li Lianyu returned home triumphantly.
Xiang Yu (ancient king of Chu) taught us: “To not return home when you have riches and honor is like parading through the darkness in a rich gown”. When Li Liangyu returned home triumphantly it was approaching nightfall and the lights were flickering on. Thousands of men and women, young and old, of all walks of life, turned out to express their heartfelt welcome.
Perhaps these people really turned out of their will. But I don’t know if Secretary Li is aware of yet another old saying that goes, “Oh, this is too much” (折煞我也) [This is a phrase used in Chinese when someone extends too much honor]. Had he an ounce of respect or reverence for the people, Secretary Li would not so flagrantly have accepted the honors extended to him.
Is Pizhou’s party secretary “confused”? Setting aside the malpractices of Pizhou City event organizers, Secretary Li’s gall is astonishing.
[Web user] Chenyi Yuanshi (陈毅元帅) pointed out that the victory of [the People’s Liberation Army] in the Huaihai Campaign was won by dint of the people’s efforts. The ashes of [PLA] General Su Yu (粟裕) are buried at Pizhou … Twelve days of vicious engagement, and do you think the battle could have been won without the support of the people?
. . .
How is it that a single Li Lianyu can garner so much attention and create such a big stink? Close to 8,000 hits for an article placed in an inconspicuous corner of our website. This is unexpected during an Autumn 2007 in which website traffic has been rather low.
. . .
We find the scenes [at Pizhou] jarring because there’s no need anymore to beat our gongs and our drums to herald anyone’s return in victory. What does that mean? It means that the Communist Party of China has already completed its mission as the party of revolution, and that it must find a position for itself as a party of leadership (执政党). What a party of leadership needs to do is let the people live and work in peace and contentment, and pass their days in richness, living life in ease without the feeling they need to thank anyone for it or feel indebted.
“Pizhou was the home of China’s youngest martyr [1941-1949], Song Zhenzhong (宋振中 ), the “Little Radish” of the novel Red Rock (红岩).” In the musical drama “Red Child” (红孩子), which recently played in Beijing, the character “Little Radish” says to Little Sky, the child of tomorrow: “You must all believe in our existence, just as we believe in yours.” Those were for me the most moving words of the performance. “You … all.” It was only because those martyrs past believed that we might live on this land without being mental and physical captives that they laid down their lives without looking back.
This is a major national trend [of our time].
As we find our national character we must embrace universal values. Chinese people should seek the interests of China on the basis of universal values. China is at the point where it needs to make a breakthrough. The 17th National Congress has established a value system for the medium to long term [Ye Zi means here that the congress set down values that are universal, such as freedom and fairness, mentioned in Hu Jintao’s report]. World history shows that the short term is about the interplay of interests and the long term is about the interplay of values. Values consistent with the times will win out in the medium to long term.
It’s precisely because the basic values set out at the 17th National Congress are shared by the people, including Web users, that we cannot stomach Li Lianyu’s image as a returning delegate.
It’s not that we’re not familiar with the “national characteristics” evinced in such characters as Su Qin (苏秦) [a key political strategist of the Warring States Period, 475-221 B.C.] . . . And we don’t imagine Liu Lianyu to be guilty of heinous crimes. We don’t need anyone to step out [in an official press conference] and explain to us what happened. All we are waiting for is a sincere apology. We don’t want yet again to see the Pizhou chat forum notice [warning Web users to stop their criticism]. What we want to see is a party of leadership reflecting earnestly on its actions from top to bottom.