Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (35 page)

Cheng Yizhong

The health official erred by wandering off message, but it was the newspaper the party blamed. As far as the propaganda czars were concerned, the editors should have known better than to practice real journalism and print what the minister said. They should have known to stick to the script of the Congress and keep SARS out of the news. Zhang Dejiang, the party chief of Guangdong, in particular, was furious. A thick-faced politician with a degree from a university in North Korea, he lost his temper at a meeting in Beijing with journalists from his province. He shouted at the
Daily
’s reporter and complained that the press in Guangdong had grown too independent and needed to be reined in. The
Daily
had embarrassed him while he was in Beijing attending one of the most important party events of the year, and now he demanded that it be punished. The paper was ordered to bring home the reporters assigned to cover the Congress and prepare for a shake-up.

But this was not the first time that the
Southern Metropolis Daily
had angered its superiors in the party, and the editors knew what they needed to do to survive. They quickly submitted a report confessing to a grave mistake and outlining the steps they had taken to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. The reporter who wrote the SARS story had been fired, they said, and the editor who put it on the front page was suspended. Ultimate responsibility, they said, lay with the editor in chief, a rising star named Cheng Yizhong, and he had been demoted. The sternly worded report appeared to satisfy the party bosses. None of them seemed to notice that the fired reporter continued writing for the newspaper under a different byline, or that the suspended editor continued to show up for work, only on a different shift, or that Cheng was still running the newspaper, even if he no longer held the chief editor’s title. Then, a few weeks later, when the SARS cover-up finally unraveled, it was as if the
Southern Metropolis Daily
had been right all along. The new president, Hu Jintao, condemned the lies and promised greater government openness. The party’s censors never lifted their ban on coverage of SARS, but everyone in the media knew the political winds had shifted and the epidemic was fair game again. It was a huge story, and Cheng marshaled his staff to fill the paper with the articles he couldn’t publish earlier. Even as he put SARS back on the front page, though, Cheng was getting ready to publish an even bigger story, one that would make the paper’s earlier transgression look insignificant—and push the party’s relationship with its journalists to the breaking point.

H
E WAS A
slim, compact man, with piercing eyes, handsome features, and the sly, confident smile of a smart aleck. He dressed casually at the office, usually in jeans and plain collar shirts, and he looked younger than he really was, which was young enough. At thirty-seven, Cheng Yizhong was probably the youngest editor running a major newspaper in China. And yet when strangers visited the newsroom of the
Southern Metropolis Daily,
they rarely mistook him for one of the reporters on his staff. Despite his slight frame and youthful appearance, there was an intensity and a natural air of authority about him that commanded respect even from older and more experienced journalists.

From the day he was hired out of college by the Southern Newspaper Group, the state media firm that later launched the
Daily,
Cheng stood out among his peers. In a room full of city folk, he was a son of peasants from Anhui. (He often pointed out that Chen Duxiu, one of the founders of the Communist Party, was born in the same rural county.) He was also the only new employee who admitted participating in the 1989 prodemocracy protests. Cheng had escaped the countryside to the Chinese literature department at Zhongshan University, the most prestigious college in Guangzhou, and in his senior year, students there and in cities across the country marched in support of the movement in Tiananmen Square. Unlike most of his classmates, who later denied taking part in the demonstrations, Cheng admitted his involvement when the Southern Newspaper Group vetted his job application. At the time, the men who ran the Group could boast to party superiors that none of the company’s employees had participated in the Tiananmen movement. The claim was true only on paper, but it gave them a bit of political protection in the crackdown that followed the massacre. If they hired Cheng, they would lose that deniability. After some deliberation, they hired him anyway.

It was not an entirely surprising decision. The Southern Newspaper Group was an oasis of open-minded thinking in the state’s hidebound media empire, and it was known for pushing the limits within the propaganda apparatus. Its most daring publication, a paper based in Guangzhou named the
Southern Weekend,
was winning readers and inspiring journalists across the country by showing how aggressive reporting and elegant writing could be possible despite censorship. On the Communist organization charts, the Group was part of the propaganda bureaucracy, but it also occupied a special place in the informal web of interest groups that made up the party. Ideologically, it was a camp for the party’s liberal wing. The editors of its newspapers were heirs to a tradition that began in 1957 during the Hundred Flowers Movement, when their predecessors launched a paper that gave voice to opinions that differed from the party line. One of the founders of that paper, the
Yangcheng Evening News,
argued that even if political conditions made it impossible for journalists to always write the truth, they should at least refuse to publish lies. Generation after generation, the editors of the Southern Newspaper Group tried to live up to that standard.

The Group was also an arm of the party apparatus in Guangdong, the vast manufacturing region on the nation’s southeast coast that used to be known as Canton. With one hundred million people, the province is China’s most populous, its wealthiest, and, other than the ethnic regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang, its most independent-minded. Ever since Mao, the central government has tried to keep a rein on the Cantonese, who often take their cues from neighboring Hong Kong instead of faraway Beijing. In part because of its long history of interaction with the outside world—foreign traders colonized its ports while waves of Cantonese immigrants settled across Asia and the West—party ideologues have viewed Guangdong with suspicion, and the leadership has made a point of naming outsiders to senior positions in the province. But the locals take pride in their distinct identity and remain a political force to be reckoned with. In the 1980s, Guangdong helped pioneer the market reforms, sometimes pushing ahead with policy changes before they had been approved in Beijing.

For a college student like Cheng, who spent his summers working the family rice fields in Anhui, the Southern Newspaper Group was a new world. Cheng was drawn to the Group because of its reputation, but also because he wanted to stay in Guangzhou, the vibrant boomtown on the Pearl River that was the provincial capital. He was assigned a job as an editor for a literary supplement to the
Southern Daily,
the staid party mouthpiece that was the Group’s flagship publication. His college sweetheart, whom he would later marry, landed a position in another section of the paper. After a year, the newspaper sent him to work as a reporter in Zhanjiang, a port city in the province that served as headquarters of the navy’s South China Sea fleet. He quickly built a reputation as one of the staff’s most prolific and aggressive writers. He filed reports on social problems such as conflicts between rural clans, as well as on public corruption, detailing the crimes of local officials caught taking bribes and building themselves lavish new homes. Occasionally, he wrote articles that his editors felt were too sensitive to publish. They would transmit these pieces for party officials to read in internal publications or kill them entirely. Cheng told himself that such disappointments came with the job. He was not yet the idealistic newsman he would become, and he took comfort in the fact that his newspaper was better than most, and that conditions for journalists seemed to be improving. After the assignment in Zhanjiang, the paper brought him back to headquarters and gave him a job editing one of its feature sections. He was ambitious and hardworking, and he joined the party and tried to make a good impression. He always got to the newsroom before anyone else, so he could put stories and thermoses of hot water on the desks of the senior editors before they arrived.

By the mid-1990s, the Southern Newspaper Group faced a business crisis. Market reforms had stalled after the Tiananmen massacre as hard-line conservatives gained power, but Deng Xiaoping rescued his capitalist economic program in 1992 with a tour of southern China that included several stops in Guangdong. State media companies such as the Southern Newspaper Group were told they could no longer rely on government subsidies and had to finance their own operations. The Group tried expanding into real estate and other ventures, but after a string of bad investments, the men in charge decided to focus on the business they knew best—newspapers.

Their main product, the
Southern Daily,
was a money-loser, and they knew it would be impossible to turn it around. The paper was the mouthpiece of the provincial party committee, and like all official party newspapers, it was constrained by a rigid set of traditions and customs. In the 1980s, the party chief Zhao Ziyang had urged these papers to begin publishing stories that used “the language of humans” instead of the “language of officials,” but when he was purged and placed under house arrest, the party all but abandoned that effort. Papers like the
Southern Daily
were still required to carry front-page stories on tedious party meetings and the empty pronouncements of party officials. They were still barred from leading with articles the censors considered too downbeat or critical. And they still had to measure the photos of party leaders before publishing them, to avoid giving offense or sending incorrect signals about each leader’s political standing. The editors of the Southern Newspaper Group tried to make the
Southern Daily
better, injecting more real journalism into the mix, but they could only tinker with the old formula, not rewrite it. If they wanted to turn a profit, they needed to start from scratch and launch a newspaper that could break free from the old rules. The state would still own the new paper, and the party would still control it, but it would not be a dedicated mouthpiece. Instead, it would be a newspaper people wanted to read. If it succeeded, the editors reasoned, advertisers and profits would follow, and the party would have a new, more effective vehicle for influencing public opinion.

Cheng was only twenty-nine, but the Group asked him to help start the experimental new paper. Management wanted someone young involved, and he was well regarded by the senior editors, who considered him not only talented but also, equally important, likeable. It was a big promotion—he was one of only three people appointed to the committee that would set up the paper—and Cheng hardly felt prepared, but he threw himself into the project, studying newspapers across the country and around the world. The Group decided early on that the new paper would be a tabloid named the
Southern Metropolis Daily,
and Cheng focused on the handful of market-oriented tabloids that had been established by party newspapers in other provinces. Then he wrote a ten-thousand word plan of action to make the
Southern Metropolis Daily
better than all of them. Cheng even designed the new paper’s red-and-yellow masthead. The traditional approach was to use the calligraphy of a party leader—the masthead of the
People’s Daily,
for example, was penned by Mao—but Cheng didn’t want the newspaper associated with any official or party faction. Instead, he chose calligraphy used on monuments during the fifth-century Northern Wei Dynasty. That was how he thought of the newspaper he was creating: as a monument, something that would endure through history and remind future generations of the past.

The paper hit the newsstands in January 1997, with Cheng as the deputy editor. Its first issue had only sixteen pages. There were fewer than a hundred reporters and editors on the staff then, and Cheng put in long hours, editing and laying out several pages himself every night. He found it exciting and rewarding work. He felt as if he was on the ground floor of something special, something that could further the ideals he had fought for as a student in the 1989 demonstrations and fulfill his traditional duty as an intellectual to serve the nation. He had seen a bootleg copy of the Watergate film
All the President’s Men,
and he imagined he was building an independent newspaper like the
Washington Post,
one that could serve as a watchdog against the abuses of the powerful. He lived nearby in an apartment provided by the Newspaper Group, but he often slept in the office. His wife complained that she would sometimes go days without seeing him. The couple had a baby boy, but it was the newspaper he doted on.

“I loved my job,” Cheng told me. “It was a good fit with my ideals and my values, and I felt I was doing something big and important.”

The
Southern Metropolis Daily
lost money in the beginning. In its first year, it ran a deficit of more than a million dollars, and some of the Group’s leaders expressed doubts about the project. But Cheng was confident, almost arrogantly so. In one meeting, he predicted the tabloid would emerge as the top-selling newspaper in Guangzhou, and officials laughed at what seemed at the time an outlandish claim. Their skepticism only seemed to fuel Cheng’s determination, though, and he kept pushing to improve the paper. The
Southern Metropolis Daily
broke one taboo after another, printing stories that never would have appeared in other papers, stories that people actually wanted to read. It put international news on the front page, which the traditional party newspapers never did. When Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris, other papers ran short articles but Cheng stunned the media establishment by filling a quarter of his tabloid’s pages with coverage. When the Starr Report on President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was released, the
Southern Metropolis Daily
published ten pages of excerpts. The censors expressed disapproval, calling the material “vulgar,” but Cheng wanted readers to draw a comparison at home, where party officials who did far worse went unpunished. At other times, though, the paper served the party’s propaganda purposes. When NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, it ran twelve pages of stories and photos on the attack and the anti-U.S. protests that erupted in cities across China.