Venturing Into Unreported China

The job of a journalist is to discover new people and locales, reporting stories of conflict and cooperation in accurate and unbiased ways. But local officials in China fear media exposure and discourage both domestic and foreign reporters from setting out to find “scoops” – the stories not yet told by other journalists. Dan Griffiths discovered the limits to practicing journalism in rural China by attempting to visit Shengyou, a village south of Beijing and the scene of a gang invasion in 2005, after villagers refused to vacate their land for a power company. “The [central] government has admitted that there were tens of thousands of rural protests last year,” he wrote for BBC News, and the nation's leaders remain concerned about local corruption. A film of the Shengyou clash quickly circulated on the internet, and villagers won temporary reprieve. Arriving by foot in Shengyou, Griffiths found a heavy police presence and local authorities who do not respect a new national policy that gives foreign journalists greater freedom to roam the nation in advance of the 2008 Olympics. Conflict and censorship only fuel journalists’ curiosity about the stories that Chinese leaders want to hide from the world. – YaleGlobal