Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (38 page)

Cheng tried to keep the
Southern Metropolis Daily
on top of the story. The government announced a high-profile investigation into Sun’s death, and he put reporters up in the hotel where Sun’s family was staying so they could monitor developments more closely. He assigned others to interview legal scholars about regulations limiting the use of
shourong,
then ran an article pointing out that a senior city official had arbitrarily expanded the categories of people who could be detained. The
Daily
also published a series of hard-hitting editorials. In effect, the newspaper was on a crusade. This was no time for objectivity, Cheng felt. Too much was at stake. The institutions that supported
shourong
were too strong and the forces fighting for justice were too weak for the newspaper to hold back and not take sides.

Cheng’s sources in the party apparatus told him the provincial party committee had convened an emergency meeting to discuss the Sun case. During the meeting, party officials watched the video of Sun’s beating that had been captured by closed-circuit cameras in the
shourong
station’s hospital ward. It was brutal footage. A gang of men covered Sun with a blanket and beat and kicked him for several minutes. The party officials were also told that the ward had been open for less than a year, and in that time, nearly one thousand people had been admitted and close to one hundred of them had ended up dead. Cheng pressed Chen Feng and Wang Lei to find out what happened to the others who died in the ward. If they could get a copy of the video, that would be even better.

The two reporters tried their best, but had no luck. None of the officials in Guangzhou wanted to talk to the
Southern Metropolis Daily
anymore. But Chen did write another remarkable investigative report detailing the operations of a
shourong
station in Hunan Province that paid police in Guangdong a bounty of about thirteen dollars for each prisoner they transferred there. The station wasn’t collecting enough money from the people that local police brought them and had resorted to “buying” prisoners from other areas. It would then charge the prisoners a higher fee to be released. Those who couldn’t raise the money were forced to work on the prison farm, hired out as slave laborers, or “sold” to still other
shourong
stations. Over the course of five years, Chen wrote, the station made a profit of nearly half a million dollars.

It wasn’t just the press that was campaigning against the
shourong
system. Three young legal scholars in Beijing caused a sensation by petitioning the National People’s Congress to review the constitutionality of the
shourong
regulations and strike them down. They had discovered an obscure law that gave citizens the right to make such requests and were apparently the first to ever take advantage of it. A week later, five well-known law professors endorsed their interpretation of the law and submitted their own request for a constitutional review. Meanwhile, public outrage continued to build on the Internet, where Sun’s friends and classmates set up a site to memorialize him. There was even talk of organizing a protest vigil in Guangzhou.

Throughout it all, the party’s new leaders maintained a public silence on the subject. If they acted on the calls to abolish the
shourong
system, they would be following their reversal of the SARS cover-up with another bold reform and further distancing themselves from their predecessors and the party’s old ways. They appeared to be giving the decision serious consideration, but no one knew for sure and no one expected them to act quickly. Even the
Southern Metropolis Daily
dared not speculate about the leadership’s secret deliberations. Then one evening at about 9
P.M.
, less than two months after the
Daily
published its report on Sun’s death, the official Xinhua news agency moved an item: the new premier, Wen Jiabao, had convened a meeting of his cabinet and abolished the
shourong
regulations, effective immediately. The system’s seven hundred detention centers were going to be shut down. In the newsroom of the
Daily,
someone rushed a copy of the Xinhua article to Cheng Yizhong. He was stunned. He turned to one of his colleagues and expressed wonder at how the leadership had acted so quickly. Never before had any newspaper in China influenced national policy in such a dramatic fashion. The front page for the next day’s paper was already set, but Cheng ordered his staff to add one more headline. He assigned a writer to compose a quick editorial. And then he went out to celebrate.

M
ANY INSIDE THE
party celebrated the newspaper’s victory, too. They saw the
Daily
’s reporting on the Sun Zhigang case as a textbook example of how a more assertive press could help the party fight corruption and improve governance. But it was clear early on that not everyone was happy with the newspaper, and that some believed losing control of the media would be hazardous to their hold on power. Just days after the original article was published, the party chief of Guangzhou, a tough operator named Lin Shusen, pulled aside one of the
Daily
’s reporters at a news conference and threatened to take the paper to court if he found any inaccuracies in the report. Later, an old college classmate of Cheng’s passed on a private message from another senior city official warning him to back off. The provincial government made a show of launching a special investigation into Sun’s death, but it was obvious it wanted to put the case behind it as quickly as possible. A month later, it announced the arrest and conviction of eighteen people, including eight prisoners accused of beating Sun and five security guards who encouraged or condoned the assault. The police officer who first detained Sun was also jailed. Tough sentences were handed down, including the death penalty for one of the prisoners implicated in the beating. But their trials were closed to the public, and the government never provided a full accounting of the events that led to Sun’s death. Only a few reporters were permitted in the courtroom, and they were barred from taking notes and told to publish only an official press release. When the sentences in the case were announced, the censors ordered Web sites to restrict public commentary.

Cheng understood from the start that the
Daily
’s crusade would make enemies of powerful people and institutions. The end of the
shourong
system deprived police across the country of both a convenient tool and a lucrative source of income, and the Sun Zhigang case had embarrassed party leaders in Guangzhou and damaged the careers of a host of officials. Publicly, more than twenty officials were formally disciplined, including the city’s deputy police chief, but Cheng’s contacts told him that members of the Politburo had also rebuked the city leadership through internal channels, an action that could derail promotions for many other cadres. Later, word filtered back to Cheng that party officials in the city were determined to exact revenge on the
Southern Metropolis Daily.
If the propaganda authorities could not act, then they would find another way.

The first sign of trouble came just weeks after the decision to abolish the
shourong
system. Cheng and the paper’s general manager, Yu Huafeng, were in Shanghai on business when Cheng received a phone call from an executive with Kodak, one of the tabloid’s top advertisers. She told him that police in Guangzhou had visited her office and questioned her about her interaction with the
Daily
’s top senior officials. In particular, she said, they wanted to know about any potentially improper exchanges of gifts or cash. Later, Cheng received a similar call from the president of one of the province’s largest advertising firms. By mid-July, almost all the major companies that advertised in the
Daily
had been questioned. The Guangzhou party boss, Lin Shusen, had apparently ordered a criminal probe into the
Daily
’s finances in an attempt to find evidence of corruption at the newspaper. Cheng wasn’t worried at first. He knew he and his colleagues ran a clean business. He also felt confident the
Daily
enjoyed more support in the party than its enemies. When police detained Yu for questioning in late July, they were forced to release him a day later after the Southern Newspaper Group persuaded a senior provincial official to intervene.

Except for the corruption investigation, the
Daily
was riding high in the aftermath of its victory in the Sun Zhigang case. Cheng continued to push the boundaries of permissible journalism, running a number of tough articles on police scandals in Guangdong, and the paper won several of the nation’s top journalism honors. Circulation climbed past 1.4 million readers for the first time, and profits for the year approached twenty million dollars. Cheng and Yu envisioned further growth and made plans to expand into other cities. In a major breakthrough, the party’s central propaganda department approved a proposal in October for the
Daily
to establish a partnership with a state newspaper in Beijing and launch a new tabloid in the capital. It would be called the
Beijing News
and adopt the
Daily
’s feisty brand of journalism. The party appointed Cheng the editor in chief, a job he would hold while continuing to run the
Daily,
and Yu was named the general manager.

Back in Guangzhou, though, the police continued to step up the pressure on the
Southern Metropolis Daily.
Advertisers were warned to stop buying ads from the paper, and some reported being threatened with prosecution if they did not provide evidence against the men who ran the
Daily.
Investigators seized several boxes of documents from the newspaper and scoured expense reports and insurance claims, searching for any irregularity. Then, in December, police showed up at the newsroom and detained Yu again. This time, even after the Southern Newspaper Group appealed to provincial leaders, the police didn’t release him. Cheng was upset but he believed his friend’s detention would be temporary. He worked to mobilize support within the party for Yu, drafting letters to senior officials and reaching out to influential party elders. He was nervous, but told himself the
Daily
would again prevail against its enemies.

Ten days after Yu’s arrest, one of the
Daily
’s reporters returned to the newsroom with a terrific scoop. Provincial health authorities had diagnosed a suspected case of SARS in a Guangzhou hospital. It was the first case of the disease in China in several months, raising fears the virus could be making a comeback. Cheng was in Beijing at the time, running the new tabloid, but one of his deputies called and asked if the
Daily
should publish the information. Yu was still in prison, his fate uncertain, and the story was sure to anger the authorities. But Cheng was focused on the next day’s front page—there were no other strong stories lined up for it. So he gave the go-ahead.

Years later, when I asked him about the decision, Cheng told me it had not been difficult. Yes, he acknowledged, it would have been “logical” to exercise caution after Yu’s arrest. “We considered it,” he said, “but we didn’t think there was enough reason for us to sacrifice freedom of the press or compromise our values.” The
Daily
had been complicit in the provincial government’s first cover-up of SARS, and he didn’t want to put the paper in that position again. In addition, he said, it wasn’t clear at the time how much trouble Yu was in or whether softening the
Daily
’s coverage would help him. Even if the paper published eight pages of stories complimenting the police and the party bosses, Cheng argued, it might not have made a difference. Men like that, he believed, had already made up their minds about the paper.

But printing the SARS article certainly didn’t help, either. The next day, Zhang Dejiang, the provincial party chief, convened an emergency meeting to share the news of the SARS case with the province’s top officials. He was embarrassed to discover that everyone in the room had already seen the news in the morning paper, which he alone apparently had not read. He was furious, and those determined to punish the
Southern Metropolis Daily
now had an important new ally—the most powerful man in Guangdong, the same man the
Daily
angered a year earlier by reporting on SARS during the National People’s Congress. The corruption probe immediately intensified. During the first two weeks of January, prosecutors interrogated more than twenty editors and advertising executives at the newspaper. Cheng was escorted out of the newsroom by police and questioned for nearly seven hours. Then police arrested the Southern Newspaper Group official responsible for overseeing the
Daily,
Li Mingyi.

It was during this time that Cheng was contacted by a man who introduced himself as one of the officers assigned to guard Yu. They met at a local restaurant because Cheng was worried his office might be bugged. In the busy dining room, over a lunch of spicy cuisine from Hubei Province, the guard told Cheng that Yu was being held in a hotel outside the province that the police used as a secret detention facility. There, the guard said, police had beaten him so badly that he had tried to kill himself by slamming his head against a wall. Suddenly, Cheng felt sick. He and Yu had built the
Daily
together, and he considered him one of his closest friends. Now his friend was being tortured because of stories that he had decided to publish. Yu was a businessman, not a journalist, and though Cheng knew his friend shared his editorial vision for the paper and had always been willing to take risks for it, he still felt guilty that it was Yu suffering and not him. What made it worse was that he was free, a star editor running two of the nation’s best newspapers, yet apparently powerless to help his friend. “I felt I was responsible for his suffering,” Cheng told me. “The pain was like a knife twisting in my heart. It was guilt and outrage at the same time. And it intensified my hatred of the system.”