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Could it be a revenge on journalists?

By Chen Weihua (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-16 07:55

Those who embarrass authorities here will have to pay the price. It's crystal clear.

Fu Hua, a former reporter for China Business News, facing charges of bribery, is just another case.

Fu has been accused of accepting 30,000 yuan in 2005 from two employees of Changchun Longjiapu Airport in northeast China's Jilin province. They had tipped off Fu about the third-rate quality of work in progress at the airport, under construction at that time.

Fu's stories, published days later, no doubt infuriated some high-ranking Jilin officials.

They used their influence and guanxi (connections) to get those stories pulled out of major websites.

A letter from Jilin provincial authorities to China Business News claims the "negative reporting, if circulated widely in the news media and society, would seriously hurt Jilin's image".

Determined to keep truth afloat, Fu buttered up people working at those websites and managed to put his stories back up on the web.

He probably had never imagined a scenario he was to be part of two years later. Plainclothes cops from Jilin appeared outside his Beijing office to arrest him in June 2007.

Fu's sources at the airport, one of who was the deputy head of Jilin airport construction, have also been detained by the cops on several counts, ranging from corruption to damaging public property.

Though some journalists in China accept freebies, perks, junkets and hongbao (gift money), Fu has no excuse whatsoever to accept 15,000 yuan - the amount he told a China Daily reporter in an interview (Page 3, May 14) - for writing those stories.

And he shouldn't have complaints about being fired from China Business News.

It's up for debates whether Fu violated the ethics of journalism or even the criminal law. But take this: Jilin authorities have never challenged the facts in Fu's stories, and Fu swears by the authenticity of his stories, which spoke of inferior quality material and excessive cost, and the ridiculous idea of constructing a chimney at the airport's flying zone.

Yet, the problems, which Fu unveiled, have never been addressed publicly.

It is possible that the authorities were left red-faced, they wanted revenge, and took it.

Maybe it would have been hard to digest had Fu's been an isolated case of victimized whistle-blowers.

In the last few years, many investigative journalists have found themselves on the wrong side of power.

The first case that comes to mind is the arrest of several senior journalists of the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolitan News on charges of graft and other economic crimes in 2004.

Circumstantial evidence, if I may use the term, indicates the government had retaliated to the newspaper's stories on the death of Sun Zhigang, a college student, beaten dead at the Guangzhou detention center, which embarrassed the authorities.

Sun's death, which enraged the nation, eventually brought an end to the country's decades-long detention system.

Fu's trial will open in a court in Beijing soon. We want a fair trial. We, the people, want to be convinced that the charges levied against Fu and his two sources are not an act of revenge. We're watching.

For, avenging journalists pursuing the truth would be a direct challenge thrown at the general public's right to know.

And while on the subject, could we also please know if the problems at the Changchun airport, which Fu mentioned in his stories, were addressed or not?

E-mail: chenweihua@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/16/2009 page4)