Lan Chengzhang (
It was the first month of work with his newspaper, the China Trade News, and the 35-year-old reporter had taken on what anyone in the area knew could be a dangerous assignment: investigating the illegal coal mines that proliferate in the sooty hill country of Shanxi Province.
Within minutes, a band of men armed with lengths of pipe and other crude weapons set upon him, beating him so badly that within a few hours he succumbed to his injuries. Though severely beaten, his colleague from the China Trade News survived to tell the tale.
Attacks against journalists are not uncommon in China, even if deaths are rare. But in ways that few could have expected, the murder of this untested reporter for an obscure publication on Jan. 11 has become a watershed event, with reporters and editors around the country seeing in the murky contours of the case a cautionary tale for their booming but troubled profession.
That Lan's death has become a national event was helped in no small measure by Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), who in an unusual statement a few days afterward demanded that justice be done.
But it also highlighted the culture of corruption that many journalists acknowledge pervades the industry, particularly the practice among some reporters of demanding money from subjects to avoid damaging articles.
Hu, who has spoken often of the need for the government to strengthen its control over the news media, has been seen as anything but a friend of journalists. After several days of intense commentary about the killing in the international news media and on Chinese blogs and Web sites, Hu may have been moved to protect his country's image.
"Hu Jintao is very much concerned about China's international image," said Zhan Jiang (
Inside the Chinese news media, introspection over Lan's killing has been unusually forthright, mixing criticism of the government with harsh self-examination. Beijing is condemned for limiting the scope of honest, aggressive journalism and the journalists themselves are condemned, indeed by themselves, of giving in to corruption as a professional way of life.
"This kind of control and degeneration are inseparable," said Zhang Ping, a veteran reporter at Southern Metropolis magazine. "The control dims the hopes one has for a career in journalism, and many reporters, such as people at Xinhua [news agency], don't have any honorable feelings from being a journalist. They get no rewards the normal way and discover that in China only lie-telling can bring you income."
Huang Liangtian (
"China basically doesn't have any journalists in the real sense," he said, dismissing the hairsplitting that many have engaged in over whether Lan was properly credentialed or not. "Everybody is part of the machine, a propagandist for the party's policy."
In fact, the scope for reporting has expanded significantly in the last decade, worrying the government. But along with the explosion in the number of titles have come strong commercial pressures, bringing about what many describe as a compulsion to mix news-gathering and advertising.
Many reporters say they are given revenue quotas they must meet by selling news coverage to the subjects they write about.
The issue of this sort of corruption has emerged as a major subtext of the discussion of Lan's death, albeit with bitter disagreement over the facts.
In Datong, the city where he was killed, he was quickly labeled an impostor, the implication being that he had visited an illegal coal mine to shake down its owner, promising not to write about him in exchange for a payment.
The city quickly threatened to start a campaign against "fake journalists."
Lan's newspaper has added little clarity to the picture. While acknowledging that he was employed there, the paper denied that he had been assigned to write about illegal coal mines.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.