MCLC: muckraker

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: muckracker
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (2/5/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/world/asia/chinese-blogger-thrives-in-rol
e-of-muckraker.html

Chinese Blogger Thrives as Muckraker
By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — With his five cellphones constantly ringing, it is not easy
these days to get the undivided attention of Zhu Ruifeng, a professed
citizen journalist whose freelance campaign against graft has earned him
pop-star acclaim and sent a chill through Chinese officialdom.

“Shush, I’ve got the BBC on the phone,” he said one afternoon last week,
silencing the crowd of acolytes and journalists who had flocked to the
bookstore where he holds court most days.

A former migrant worker with a high school education, Mr. Zhu has become
an overnight celebrity in China in the two months since he posted online
secretly recorded video of an 18-year-old woman having sex with a
memorably unattractive 57-year-old official from the southwestern
municipality of Chongqing. The official lost his job. Mr. Zhu gained a
million or so new microblog followers.

The takedown was just the opening act, Mr. Zhu says. He promises to
release six more sex videos that he predicts will make a number of other
men run for cover. “I’m fighting a war,” he said with characteristic
bombast, his voice a near-shriek. “Even if they beat me to death, I won’t
give up my sources or the videos.”

Not surprisingly, Mr. Zhu, 43, has made a few enemies within the
government. Late last month, five men showed up at his apartment with
state security ID cards. As they thundered from the other side of his
locked front door, Mr. Zhu dialed foreign journalists, texted his lawyers
and sent out an electronic S O S to the multitudes. The agents left only
after he promised to appear for questioning the following morning.

The next day, he emerged from the station house like a triumphant
prizefighter, telling waiting supporters how he had verbally outflanked
interrogators during seven hours of questioning. “I dared them to throw me
in jail and then watch how many human rights and journalism awards I win,”
he crowed. “In the end, they turned white with fear.”

It is impossible, of course, to verify Mr. Zhu’s claim. But his cocky
behavior and bristling indignation have come to personify the popular fury
over official malfeasance that has flourished alongside China’s torrid
economic growth. He has also become a litmus test of how committed China’s
new leaders are in their battle against corruption — and whether they can
tolerate a populist crusader like Mr. Zhu.

Because he has no state-issued journalist’s credentials, Mr. Zhu occupies
a tenuous gray zone, which partly explains his penchant for surrounding
himself with reporters and supporters — people he hopes might decrease the
likelihood of his disappearing into the black hole of the state’s security
apparatus.

“Here on Chinese soil, it’s almost impossible for citizen journalists like
him to survive long term,” said Zhan Jiang, a media scholar at Beijing
Foreign Studies University.

On the face of it, Mr. Zhu’s goals dovetail nicely with those of Xi
Jinping, the new Communist Party leader who is to become president next
month. Since his installation in November, Mr. Xi has been regularly
assailing systemic graft, warning that officials large and small — both
“tigers” and “flies,” as he put it — should be brought to justice.

So far the actual results have been minimal. But whether intentional or
not, Mr. Xi’s jeremiads have inspired freelance scandal-chasers like Mr.
Zhu to seize the moment and pick off misbehaving officials
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/world/asia/corrupt-chinese-officials-dra
w-unusual-publicity.html?pagewanted=all> with the help of the Internet.
The takedowns often begin with a tip from a jilted mistress or
back-stabbing associate and end with an online exposé that forces the
authorities to act, and the state-run media to take notice.

The daily smorgasbord of official greed and licentiousness has become so
unwieldy that newspapers have begun providing readers with charts to keep
track of the implicated and their loot. One particularly rapacious former
bank official from Shaanxi Province, Gong Aiai, has become known as “House
Sister” for having parlayed bribes and kickbacks into a real estate
portfolio of 41 apartments in Beijing.

So far the most senior official to be exposed is Liu Tienan, the nation’s
top energy regulator, who is under investigation for accusations of lying
about his academic credentials, colluding with a businessman to pocket
fraudulently acquired bank loans and threatening to kill a former mistress.

Mr. Zhu, who began his Web site in 2006, relies largely on whistle-blowers
to funnel damning evidence to him. Through the years, he said, he has
exposed 100 officials, bringing down more than a third of them. He has
been threatened and beaten; more than once, he says, he has been offered
huge sums of money to delete an incriminating post from his site
<http://jdwsy.com/>, which is called People’s Supervision.

Patrick Zuo contributed research.