Guangdong: newspaper publishes front-page appeal calling for the release of one of its reporters
Guangzhou (AsiaNews) - Three Chinese characters saying 'Please release him' cover almost a third of Wednesday's front-page of the New Express, a popular newspaper in Guangdong province, in what amounts to an unprecedented call for the release of one of its staffers detained after he investigated a large company.
Appeals of this kind are very rare in China. Although various papers have slammed abuses of power, the matter has been usually discussed behind closed doors in the police and government departments.
In this case, police in Hunan province (next to Guangdong) detained New Express reporter Chen Yongzhou last Friday on suspicion of "damaging the commercial reputation" of Zoomlion, China's second-largest maker of construction equipment.
Police confirmed yesterday on its Sina Weibo microblog that Chen had been placed under criminal detention three days earlier. It also searched his office in Guangzhou on Monday.
Chen's detention followed his fifteen-part investigative report exposing financial fraud in Zoomlion, one of Changsha's largest companies, which is partly owned by Hunan province. The company denied the allegations, but its Hong Kong-listed stock price dropped to a two-year-low in May.
Eventually, law enforcement filed criminal charges against him despite the factual accounts of his allegations.
Increasingly active on socially sensitive issues despite a new law that limits blogging, Internet users were quick to talk about the case, noting especially that Zoomlion's founder and president, Zhan Chunxin, was well connected in the province.
He is in fact the son of Hunan's former top judge, Zhan Chunzhu, and is married to the daughter of long-time provincial Communist Party Secretary Wan Li.
Chen is the second New Express journalist to be targeted by the authorities. Liu Hu, a Chongqing-based investigative reporter working for the paper, was detained on 23 August for using his Sina Weibo account to demand an investigation into Ma Zhengqi, deputy director of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce. Liu is still in prison.
"What if you are a journalist, you write some reports criticising a company. Then one day, an uncle from the police grabs you," the New Express wrote in an editorial article attached to the appeal. "We always thought, if we reported responsibly, nothing could happen," it continued. "We were too naïve."
Soon after its publication, Chinese microbloggers picked up the paper's editorial on Wednesday tens of thousands of times, turning it within hours into the most-shared post on the largest platform Sina Weibo by far.
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