Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (37 page)

Later, Chen asked a colleague to help him with the reporting. Wang Lei was his physical opposite, tall and thin, with long hair and a goatee, but he shared Chen’s passion for chasing a good story. Both reporters agreed there was little they could write without determining the cause of Sun’s death. When Sun’s father called and said none of the lawyers in Guangzhou were willing to take the case, they encouraged him to keep trying and emphasized the importance of the autopsy. Without it, they said, the newspaper wouldn’t be able to help him. In the meantime, they began gathering evidence—police records, hospital records, everything the authorities would let Sun’s father copy, none of it very helpful. Then, in mid-April, about three weeks after he first began working on the story, Chen got a call from Wang. Sun’s former classmates had raised the money for an autopsy, and the family had given him a copy of the medical examiner’s report. The young graphic designer had been beaten to death.

Chen rushed back to the newsroom, and huddled over the report with Wang. It took some time to work through the medical terminology, but the conclusion was clear. Sun had suffered blunt trauma over large areas of his body, including his arms, legs, ribs, and back. The trauma was so severe it had sent him into shock, causing organ failure and death. The two reporters went to one of the paper’s top editors, Yang Bin, with what they had learned. He immediately told them to keep working on the story, and issued specific instructions. First, he told them to take extra care to get every detail right. There was no room for even a small error in a story this sensitive. Second, he told them to finish their investigation quickly, before propaganda officials learned about the incident and barred reporting on it. The
Daily
could get away with publishing as much as it did because the party didn’t have an army of censors who read every story before publication. Instead it relied on journalists to censor themselves and issued regular directives banning coverage of specific subjects. It would be risky to defy such a directive, but if the newspaper acted before the authorities imposed a ban, it could claim it hadn’t intentionally broken any rules.

Yang never discussed with the two reporters the possibility their story might be too sensitive to publish. But later that day, he met with Cheng Yizhong over lunch and briefed him on what they had uncovered. He was concerned because the newspaper had already made enemies of the police and other law enforcement agencies in Guangzhou. These were dangerous and powerful institutions, and so far they had retaliated only through proper channels, by applying pressure through propaganda officials. But a hard-hitting article about the
shourong
system could put them over the edge and prompt a more forceful response. The timing of the piece could also be problematic. Cheng and the newspaper were already on thin ice with the authorities for violating the SARS blackout. Technically, he wasn’t even the editor in chief. But Cheng thought the story was too important to ignore, and he told Yang to get it into the paper.

The reporters moved quickly, splitting up the remaining interviews. Chen Feng met with the medical examiner, who nervously explained that Sun must have been brutally beaten to have the injuries he discovered and estimated that the assault occurred within seventy-two hours of death. Wang pretended to be one of Sun’s relatives and went to the
shourong
station’s hospital ward, where he questioned the staff and recorded their evasions. The reporters interviewed Sun’s family and friends, his roommate and his employer, and they pieced together a timeline of the last days of his life. He had arrived in Guangzhou less than a month earlier, and he was working for a clothing company and living with a friend. At about 11
P.M.
on the night he was detained, he called his roommate and told him he had been stopped by two police officers while walking to an Internet cafe. Because he couldn’t produce any identification, they had taken him to the local precinct station. The roommate rushed over with Sun’s ID and money to bail him out, but the officers refused to let him go, even as they released others who had been detained. One of the officers declared that they had the right to decide whom to hold and whom to release. Later the roommate spotted Sun in the station and quietly asked him if he had done anything to upset the police. Sun said he had exchanged a few words with the officers but nothing serious. The next day another friend received a phone call from Sun, who sounded scared now and said he had been taken to a
shourong
station. The friend called Sun’s boss, who went to the station to vouch for him and try to get him out, but he was turned away, too. On the third day, Sun’s friends learned that he had been transferred to the
shourong
station’s hospital ward, and they tried to visit him. The doctors refused, and told them only Sun’s family could bail him out. When Sun’s friends called the hospital on the fourth day of his detention, they were told he was dead.

Chen and Wang saved the interviews with the police for last. They visited the precinct house, the
shourong
station, and the hospital ward, as well as police headquarters, but no one would talk to them. The only government official who spoke to them was a bureaucrat in the city agency responsible for managing the
shourong
system. Chen showed up at his office without making an appointment and found him playing solitaire on his computer. He agreed to interrupt his game for an interview, but he said only that he was “ninety-nine percent certain” Sun had not been attacked in the
shourong
station. There were video cameras installed both at the station and its hospital ward, he said, and supervisors would have spotted and stopped any assault. When Chen asked to see the videotapes, though, the official said that would be impossible.

It was past 5
P.M.
by the time Chen and Wang returned to the office, and they were planning to write their story the next day. By coincidence, though, they ran into Yang Bin, the senior editor, and when he asked how the reporting was going, they mentioned that they had tried to interview the police that morning. The editor’s face dropped, and he got worked up. He told the reporters they should have waited until the last minute to contact the police, in case officials called the propaganda authorities and tried to squash the story. Then he told them to sit down and start writing immediately. He wanted to publish the story that night.

Chen and Wang skipped dinner, wrote quickly, and finished the article by 9:30
P.M.
They recounted the efforts of Sun’s friends to bail him out. They catalogued in clinical detail the injuries that caused his death. And they raised the question of whether it was right for police to hold him in the
shourong
station. Only the homeless, the unemployed, and those without a national identification card were subject to
shourong,
they pointed out, but Sun’s friends had provided the police with his ID card and demonstrated that he had both an apartment and a job. It was an impressive piece of journalism, at once dramatic and restrained. Only at the very end of their story did Chen and Wang quote friends and family describing what kind of person Sun was—artistic, hardworking, stubborn. They closed with an image of Sun’s family traveling to Guangzhou from their little village in Hubei, and showing reporters copies of the awards he had won as a young student. “He was the first person to go to university from our hometown,” they quoted Sun’s father saying. But if he had not studied so hard, the father continued, maybe he wouldn’t have been so stubborn, and maybe he wouldn’t have been killed.

Yang splashed the article across two pages inside the tabloid, and put a large headline near the bottom of the front page: “The Death of
Shourong
Detainee Sun Zhigang.” A smaller one beneath it added “University Graduate, 27, Dies Three Days After Being Detained on Guangzhou Street, Autopsy Shows Violent Beating Before Death.”

The presses were scheduled to begin publishing the next day’s paper in a few hours. When the night editor read the Sun Zhigang story, though, he hesitated to send it on. Yang told him that Cheng had read the piece and approved it, but the night editor wanted to give the editor in chief one last chance to reconsider. There was still time to pull the story if he changed his mind. When the night editor reached him at home, though, Cheng gave the order to publish.

C
HENG KNEW THE
story was a blockbuster, and he slept restlessly in anticipation of its publication. He was certain people across the country would be talking about it. Before leaving the office, he had reminded his staff to send a copy to the editors of the nation’s top Web sites, Sina and Sohu. The two portals attracted more readers than any newspaper or magazine in China, and because private firms ran them, they had a little more room to maneuver against the censors. Though they were barred from producing news stories themselves, the Web sites could link to the best articles in publications across the country. Their huge national readership allowed them to draw attention to stories, influence opinions, and set the public agenda in a way no party media outlet could. The rise of papers like the
Daily
had already transformed the nation’s media landscape, but the Internet was accelerating the process. Cheng recognized the potential of the Web early on and cultivated a partnership with Sina and Sohu, making it standard practice to send the
Daily
’s best pieces to their editors at about 2
A.M.
every morning. When they highlighted the
Daily
’s stories on their home pages, the number of people who saw them jumped exponentially. The Web sites magnified the paper’s influence and impact, and by distributing its stories, they made it more difficult for the propaganda officials to censor them. When the report on Sun Zhigang’s death appeared on the Web, Cheng knew, it would no longer be just a local story that local officials could hush up. It would be a national story, with a national audience and national implications. And he was looking forward to it.

The
Southern Metropolis Daily
had published other big stories, but the response to the Sun Zhigang report was unlike anything Cheng had ever seen. The story spread across the Internet in e-mails and instant messages, and copies proliferated in the nation’s most popular Web forums. The newspaper was overwhelmed with phone calls and faxes from readers who wanted to express their outrage or share their own stories of abuse in the
shourong
system. Tens of thousands of people posted messages on Sina and Sohu. Sitting in his office, watching the message count on the two sites climb, Cheng realized something remarkable was happening, and his newspaper was in the middle of it. It had tapped into a deep well of public resentment against the
shourong
system, and people were acting on their frustration and speaking out. The newsroom was buzzing as reporters began following up on the phone calls and faxes. Chen Feng and Wang Lei wrote a follow-up story based on an interview with Sun’s father. But late in the afternoon, an official from the provincial propaganda department called and ordered the paper not to publish anything else about the case.

Cheng wasn’t surprised by the call. He had been waiting all day for a response from the authorities, and their silence had been making him nervous. He had worried it might mean they were preparing to take severe action against him or the paper. Now he knew where he and the paper stood. He called his editors and reporters into a meeting, and he told Chen and Wang to keep following the Sun story, even if the paper couldn’t publish their articles. He said the propaganda department’s ban was a temporary setback, and he vowed to find a way around it. If the party prohibited the
Daily
from writing about the Sun case, then they would write about other
shourong
cases. If it blocked the paper from reporting on other cases, they would write about the
shourong
system itself. The paper should continue to question and challenge the
shourong
system, he said, because a good newspaper should promote progress in society. If the
Daily
did its job,
shourong
could be abolished. That, he argued, was the paper’s ultimate goal.

Chen and Wang looked at each other. The idea of the government abandoning
shourong
was so far-fetched, they thought their editor in chief had lost his mind.

But as the weeks passed, it began to seem possible. The party’s new leaders had just ended the SARS cover-up, and hopes for political reform were running high. All the talk of honesty and openness in government had knocked the censors off their game. The propaganda officials in Guangdong had blocked reporting on the Sun case, but their counterparts in Beijing had not done the same, and newspapers there picked up the coverage where the
Daily
left off. Even the first follow-up story that Chen and Wang wrote, and that the censors prevented the
Daily
from publishing, appeared in a Beijing newspaper. Chen had sent it to a friend who was an editor there, and she had published it under a pseudonym.

Reporters across the country began digging into the
shourong
system, and editors reassigned stories on the subject that they had buried in the past. The picture that emerged was not flattering. Laws the party said were intended to help runaways and vagrants in the cities return to their rural villages were being used by police to “clean up” neighborhoods and generate income. Officers were arresting as many as two million people every year, holding them in a network of seven hundred detention camps, and demanding cash in exchange for their freedom. The newspapers—and the Internet—were full of stories of abuse, of men and women who were picked up for no good reason and not only shaken down but also roughed up. There was a middle school student who was taken to a
shourong
station after getting lost in the city of Nanning; he returned home in a daze four days later, bruised, stripped of his belongings, and babbling incoherently. There were the two thirteen-year-old girls who were forced into prostitution in Beijing after a pimp “purchased” them at a
shourong
station in Jiangsu Province. There was the young woman who presented her residency permit to a police officer only to watch him tear it up and detain her anyway; in the
shourong
station, she was raped.