Reporter earns spurs as one of China’s top journalists

Press, 14 January 1987, Page 16

Reporter earns spurs as one of China’s top journalists

MARK O’NEILL

Reuters (through NZPA) Peking Yu Li has earned his spurs as one of China’s top young reporters in 1986 — after surviving a four-month investigation for bribery and a beatingup by street vendors that put him off work for three months. . Yu, aged 30, an investigative reporter for the "China Commercial Daily,” has blossomed as a result of an unprecedented boom in the Staterun newspaper industry and an expansion of the limited freedom under which it runs. “There is no freedom of the press in China,” Yu told Reuters. “The press is the tongue and the throat of the Communist Party.” But we reporters now have freedoms undreamt of a decade ago. The party has undergone a historical transformation since 1976 and we have greater freedom because of it" China has nearly 2200 official newspapers, three times as many as five

years ago. The range of topics they cover has increased dramatically, but their line on key political and social issues remains sternly uniform. Yu, a short and stocky man who lived for more than 20 years in Heilongjiang, China’s coldest province on the Soviet border, has been catapulted to national prominence by two events in 1986 and one in 1985. In June, 1985, his paper published his report that a top-selling hair lotion produced by a factory in the central city of Suzhou contained too much lead and was a health hazard. The report caused a sharp drop in sales. Unsigned letters were sent to top investigative bodies in ‘ Peking, accusing Yu of taking bribes worth 30,000 yuan ($15,000), 40 years wages for an average worker, from a rival factory.

Investigations were launched by three separate departments and Yu was questioned more than 10 times before his name was cleared in April, 1986. The factory has stopped

making the lotion. “It was nerve-wracking for me. My credibility as a reporter was under question. Such poisdn-pen letters are too common in China,” Yu said.’ Then, in June, as he was cycling home one evening he saw a group of street vendors charging two people 10 times too much for a soft drink. When Yu demanded that the vendors charge the proper price they beat him up so badly before a crowd of onlookers that he was forced to stay off work for three months. He was later given a gold pen by his newspaper and praised by the Mayor of Peking and the police, who cracked down on illegal vendors in the city after the incident Investigative reporting has become a regular feature of the party press in recent years, but it rarely extends beyond exposes of consumer frauds and low-level petty corruption. The relative freedom enjoyed by Yu and other reporters is due to the enormous change in the

political climate over the last few years. His own life bears testimony to the change. In 1972, his father died, a local Communist Party cadre who was tortured by fanatic Maoist Red Guards. He was also accused of being a “capi-talist-reader.” In 1974, Yu left school at the age of 18 and moved to a huge State farm in his native Heilongjiang, where he' broadcast propaganda over the loudspeaker network to peasants. “At that time, being revolutionary was more important than production. We broadcast articles reviling (China’s current leader) Deng Xiaoping as a capitalist We did not realise what we were doing,” he said. After four years studying at a business college in the provincial capital Harbin, Yu was sent in 1981 to the Ministry of Commerce in Peking, which publishes £is newspaper. “The investigative reporting I and others do now would have put me in

prison 10 years ago,” he said.' “All we do is in support of the historical mission of reforming China, to make industry more efficient and serve consumers better.” The subjects which Chinese newspapers may not question are clear — the leadership of the Communist Party, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the supremacy of Socialism, and Marxism, Leninism and Mao Tse Tung thought “If you advocate capitalism, opposition to the Communist Party or support the Nationalists (on Taiwan), you will not get very far,” he said with a smile. So, in spite of the proliferation of newspapers and the diversity of subjects, the line on big issues is always the same. “Chinese readers are different to those in the West,” Yu said. “If they saw different viewpoints on these key issues every day, they would become confused.”