As Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) accelerated his sweeping campaign against government corruption, political enemies and Western influences in China, he deployed the Chinese Communist Party’s most powerful propaganda tool, the state television network, like a hammer.
News programs on the network, China Central Television (CCTV), showed confessions by prominent businessmen before they had even been put on trial. Foreign companies like Apple were smeared by so-called investigations programs. Heavily edited excerpts from the trial of a fallen party leader were broadcast in prime time to hundreds of millions of viewers.
However, now the wrath of the party has turned on the network itself. An inquiry into corruption at CCTV has shaken up the nation’s most influential news and propaganda organization, riveting the country with reports involving a seamy mix of celebrities, sex and bribery.
At least 15 senior network employees have disappeared into the maw of party and state detention, according to official news reports and people who have been tracking the investigations. The most famous, Rui Chenggang (芮成鋼), 37, a smooth-talking financial news anchor who wore Italian suits and drove a Jaguar, was noticeably absent last month from the annual conference of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, where he had been a fixture for years.
The network’s more than 10,000 employees are on edge. The practice of trading positive coverage for cash is so prevalent, many say, that everyone lives in fear that employees who have been detained would reveal details about their colleagues. Like others for this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the authorities for talking about the continuing investigations.
Managers hesitate to make big decisions. The move into the new landmark CCTV headquarters, which has been mostly empty since its facade was completed in 2008, has stalled, and some high-budget documentary projects have been frozen.
Executives and producers, afraid of making themselves conspicuous targets, are leaving their luxury cars in their garages. Among the top ranks, figuring out how to stop journalists from taking bribes from the people they interview has become a priority, CCTV employees said.
The turmoil at the network comes at a time when it has become both the spearhead of China’s propaganda efforts in foreign countries and a more expansive global news conduit for an estimated 700 million Chinese viewers.
“A nation’s TV station is the face for the entire nation,” said Wang Qinglei (王青雷), a former producer who worked at CCTV from 2003 until he was fired in 2013 for publicly denouncing propaganda on the network. “Now this face is dirty and full of mud. There should be a cleansing process to wash it, so the entire nation can be proud again.”
The party’s investigations of the network follow two main strands that overlap. One is corrupt business practices, particularly at CCTV 2, the financial news channel where Rui worked. The other involves the relationships, sometimes intimate, that some party leaders had with anchors and executives at the network, many of whom are also at CCTV 2.
The widespread gossip about sex between network employees and government officials could not be independently confirmed, but some personal ties are well known. Rui, for example, hosted events for Gu Liping (谷麗萍), who is now detained on suspicion of corruption and illicit financial dealings and is the wife of Ling Jihua (令計劃), an aide to former Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤). The couple has been placed under investigation.
At least one current and one former female CCTV anchor who have been detained are being scrutinized for close ties to Zhou Yongkang (周永康), the former security chief and the most senior party official to be arrested in decades for corruption, according to executives and journalists working for CCTV and other news institutions. Zhou’s second wife, who is a former CCTV journalist and is 28 years his junior, has also been detained.
Li Dongsheng (李東生), a close associate of Zhou and a 22-year employee of CCTV, is suspected by investigators of having introduced young women at the network to Zhou and other officials for sexual encounters in violation of party rules, the journalists and executives said. When Zhou was expelled from the party in December last year, Xinhua, the state news agency, said he had “committed adultery with a number of women and traded his power for money and sex.”
Li, who rose to become deputy director of the propaganda department and then vice minister of public security, has been detained since December 2013.
The investigations are casting a long shadow over a vast propaganda apparatus with global ambitions. CCTV began a big international push around 2008 and now has 70 news bureaus overseas, including a flagship in Washington. CCTV channels broadcast programming around the world in Arabic, English, French, Russian and Spanish.
Wang said he did not think Xi’s anti-corruption campaigns would cure the ills of the network or China’s one-party system.
“This anti-corruption campaign is very much a tool of political struggle,” he said. “All it will do is strike down one faction, but the system is not changed in any way.”
Indeed, the party has taken the corruption investigation as an opportunity to reinforce the network’s propaganda role, ordering up more old-school stories about common Chinese and their daily struggles. Reporters have been told to emphasize “moral values and social virtues.”
“We are now directed to place more emphasis on the common man, farmers and migrant workers,” one journalist said.
The corruption that permeated the network had been an open secret for years. At its simplest level, reporters and producers take modest bribes in exchange for positive coverage. Journalists typically receive up to US$160, known as “red envelopes” or “taxi fare,” as a token of thanks from sources. Network employees say much larger fees are sometimes negotiated, according to the type of coverage.
Several people said one central investigation, involving the anchors and executives of CCTV 2, was focused on large-scale bribe-taking, as well as ties to corrupt party leaders. Rui was the channel’s most famous anchor and had boasted of friendships with former US secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, and former Yale University president Richard Levin.
Corruption takes place in other ways at CCTV. Budget padding is common, several employees said; people who draw up or approve budgets for productions sometimes request more money than is needed so that they can pocket some of the cash.
One senior journalist said he believed the authorities intended for the investigations to be cautionary lessons for other organizations in the news media and beyond.
“The crackdown at CCTV was designed to create shock waves in society,” he said.
At the moment, the tumult is greatest at the center.
“Recently I spoke to another director of programming at CCTV, who is leaving,” Wang said. “This person told me, ‘Each day I spend at CCTV is another day I’m spending in shame.’”
Indonesia was to sign an agreement to repatriate two British nationals, including a grandmother languishing on death row for drug-related crimes, an Indonesian government source said yesterday. “The practical arrangement will be signed today. The transfer will be done immediately after the technical side of the transfer is agreed,” the source said, identifying Lindsay Sandiford and 35-year-old Shahab Shahabadi as the people being transferred. Sandiford, a grandmother, was sentenced to death on the island of Bali in 2013 after she was convicted of trafficking drugs. Customs officers found cocaine worth an estimated US$2.14 million hidden in a false bottom in Sandiford’s suitcase when
CAUSE UNKNOWN: Weather and runway conditions were suitable for flight operations at the time of the accident, and no distress signal was sent, authorities said A cargo aircraft skidded off the runway into the sea at Hong Kong International Airport early yesterday, killing two ground crew in a patrol car, in one of the worst accidents in the airport’s 27-year history. The incident occurred at about 3:50am, when the plane is suspected to have lost control upon landing, veering off the runway and crashing through a fence, the Airport Authority Hong Kong said. The jet hit a security patrol car on the perimeter road outside the runway zone, which then fell into the water, it said in a statement. The four crew members on the plane, which
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its junior partner yesterday signed a coalition deal, paving the way for Sanae Takaichi to become the nation’s first female prime minister. The 11th-hour agreement with the Japan Innovation Party (JIP) came just a day before the lower house was due to vote on Takaichi’s appointment as the fifth prime minister in as many years. If she wins, she will take office the same day. “I’m very much looking forward to working with you on efforts to make Japan’s economy stronger, and to reshape Japan as a country that can be responsible for future generations,”
SEVEN-MINUTE HEIST: The masked thieves stole nine pieces of 19th-century jewelry, including a crown, which they dropped and damaged as they made their escape The hunt was on yesterday for the band of thieves who stole eight priceless royal pieces of jewelry from the Louvre Museum in the heart of Paris in broad daylight. Officials said a team of 60 investigators was working on the theory that the raid was planned and executed by an organized crime group. The heist reignited a row over a lack of security in France’s museums, with French Minister of Justice yesterday admitting to security flaws in protecting the Louvre. “What is certain is that we have failed, since people were able to park a furniture hoist in the middle of
RSS