Now Executive Director of the China Media Project, leading the project’s research and partnerships, David originally joined the project in Hong Kong in 2004. He is the author of Dragons in Diamond Village (Penguin), a book of reportage about urbanization and social activism in China, and co-editor of Investigative Journalism in China (HKU Press).
November 2004 — Pu Zhiqiang, currently executive partner at Beijing’s Huayi Law Firm, is a leading lawyer representing Chinese journalists and writers in some of the most important court cases in the People’s Republic of China. He recently won a landmark victory for China Reform magazine against libel charges filed by a state-owned real estate developer. The court ruled that journalists should enjoy legal immunity if the story is backed up by a reasonably believable source and is not based on rumors or fabrication. He is also one of the defense lawyers for the case involving the husband and wife authors of “An Investigation of China’s Peasants,” a best-selling expose on corruption and abuse of power by officials. Pu has a master of laws from China University of Political Science and Law.
November 2004 — Zhang is currently deputy editor in chief of China Economic Times, one of China’s leading business dailies. The newspaper, which has been recognized for its important investigative reporting of such stories as corrupt regulations in Beijing’s taxi industry (Wang Keqin), operates under the umbrella of the Development Research Center of the State Council. Zhang was formerly a visiting fellow of the U.S. State Department.
September 2004 — Li, a veteran Chinese journalist, is news editor at Lifeweek, a leading weekly newsmagazine. Lifeweek infuriated censors in 2003 by running a feature story about military physician Jiang Yanyong, who became a national hero by exposing the government’s attempt to cover-up the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. A former political reporter, Li worked 14 years at Wuhan’s Yangtze Daily before joining Lifeweek in 1999.
September 2004 — Kang joinedCaijing magazine as a cub reporter in 1999, the magazine’s second year of publication. Kang, who is now a senior reporter for Caijing, is a graduate of the journalism department at Renmin University. Prior to joining Caijing, she worked for Shanghai Securities Journal. Kang’s investigation of publicly-listed Dongfang Electric in 2001 set a new standard for reporting on the securities industry.
September 2004 — Li Yonggang, a well known professor of political science at Nanjing University in China’s coastal Jiangsu province, founded Sixiang de Jingjie, one of China’s most successful scholarly Websites, in the late 1990s. The government forced the Website to close up shop in October 2000.
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September 2004 — Liu is an investigative reporter for Guangzhou’s Southern Weekend, which is generally regarded as one of China’s most progressive newspapers. After a farmer from Anhui province attempted suicide on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 2003 to protest government corruption in his local township, Liu set out to investigate the root causes of the incident. Although he wrote the story twice, it was killed by editors at the paper.
September 2004 — Sun is the former editor of China Central Television’s “Focus” news programme, which has been one of China’s leading investigative reporting programmes since 1994. Sun is currently producer of CCTV’s “News Forum.”
Following an address to employees at China Youth Daily newspaper by the secretary of the Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Youth League, Zhao Yong, in which the official lectured the journalists on proper discipline, Lu posted the following letter on the paper’s internal server. It was subsequently leaked to the outside, become an international news story.
The translation of Lu Yuegang’s letter that follows is provided by Roland Soong at ESWN:
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An Open Letter to Zhao Yong, Secretary of the Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Youth League
To Zhao Yong:
We must have a honest discussion. On the afternoon of May 24th, 2004, you delivered a speech at the meeting with the middle-level cadres of the China Youth Daily, and you disappointed many colleagues including me extremely. As the representative of the current central secretariat, you created a bad image for the China Youth Daily. You looked like a petty official who “began to issue orders once you got a little power.” In your speech, you communicated many messages. But after eliminating the lies, the clichés and the dishonesties, there are three main points: (1) anyone who does not obey can get out of the door immediately, even though your original words were: “Anyone who doesn’t want to work can turn in the resignation letter and it will approved on the same day”; (2) the China Youth Daily is the newspaper of the League, and not an “abstract large newspaper”; (3) the newspaper cannot be operated on the basis of “idealism.” Your speech was full of hectoring, intimidations and ignorance.
On the first point, all the China Youth Daily colleagues who listened to your lecture realized that you were not making a tough threat. You were simply recounting the events that had already taken place. The treatment of Assistant Editor-in-Chief Fan Yung-sun, “Youth Ideas” editor Liang Ping and reporter Zhen Qiyan were obviously instances of “killing the chickens to show the monkey” to clean house, and this has created a great deal of confusion among the staff.
[Click HERE for full translation]
May to August 2004 — Yan is an editor at Southern Weekend and a regular columnist for sohu.com, a popular Chinese web portal. Yan, who is widely recognized as China’s pre-eminent current affairs critic, has a degree in Chinese Studies from Beijing Normal University.He has also published 15 volumes of Chinese zawen, or free-form short essays, on various topics.
From 1987 to 1989, Zhong served as editor in chief of the editorial department at Xinhua News Agency. He became the features editor for Hot Issues in the Chinese Economy in 1997, before moving on to the executive editorship of China News magazine in 1999. In 2000, Zhong founded the editorial department at China News and became associate editor in chief. Currently, Zhong is an editorial committee member for Xinhua News Agency.
