BERKELEY, Calif.--When the knock came at the door, Zhao Ling knew what to do. She shoved her notes into an envelope and threw them out the window of her 12th floor hotel room. She shut off her cell phone. Then she held her breath.
Zhao was working undercover, reporting on Chinese farmers in the Sichuan Province city of Zigong who had been left homeless and jobless after the government took their land for development -- part of the rapid modernization process sweeping this traditionally agricultural society. Government officials tapped her phone and sent agents after her.
Zhao managed to escape out a side door and retrieve her notes, where they had landed in a parking lot. A sympathetic worker hailed a taxi for her. She fled the city, traveling on an abandoned highway in the middle of the night with a driver she didn't trust.
Zhao, who is spending the year in the United States as a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, says it was all a normal part of her job.
Deceptively soft-spoken and petite, Zhao, age 30, is one of the top reporters at Southern Weekend, a Chinese newspaper with a circulation of 1 million that is known for courageous and in-depth investigative reporting.
"I remembered all the danger I went through to report the article," she says, her eyes burning as she explained that despite her efforts, government censors pressured her paper into killing the initial publication of the piece. "But it's not important. You think about the farmers who lost their land and you think they will be disappointed. They hope maybe you can help them because you are a famous newspaper's journalist and it's their last hope. But you can do nothing. I was so sad."
A truncated version of Zhao's article later ran as part of a year-end issue centered on land use in China, but the critical edges were blunted. During her two-year tenure at Southern Weekend she has won 10 awards for her intrepid reporting.
Southern Weekend's international reporting editor, Shi Zhe, considers Zhao "the best reporter in China."
Born and raised in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province and a stop on the historic Silk Road, Zhao decided to be a journalist at the age of 7 when she saw a female war correspondent on television reporting through the smoke and debris of a mortar blast. "I asked my father," she recalls, "'What is that woman's job?'"
Zhao pursued her dream, graduating with a degree in journalism in 1998 from Lanzhou University. She then moved to Beijing, 1,500 miles from home, to begin work at a government-run newspaper, the Procuratorial Daily, covering a variety of legal issues.
She describes her first job as less that of a journalist than a government propagandist, but she nevertheless reported on corrupt government officials. During her tenure at the Procuratorial Daily, more of her articles were reprinted in the foreign press than by any other reporter in the paper's history.
The real feather in her cap, however, came when she won a coveted position at Southern Weekend in 2003, beating 600 applicants for the post.
"In China, more and more people don't trust the local government, they don't trust the courts," Zhao says, explaining the importance of Southern Weekend's role. "So who do they trust? No one. It's why so many people trust the media. For some people that's the only way for them to struggle for their rights. Especially in the 1990s, many Chinese people regarded our paper as a kind of civil court."
Zhao says the working environment for reporters in China in 2005 is becoming more restrictive, noting that the chief editor of her paper was recently replaced by the provincial head of the Party government propaganda bureau. Many of her co-workers consequently quit, and some have left journalism altogether, frustrated by recent limitations on press freedoms.
Restrictions on Chinese journalists critical of the government have been tightening. Last year, several high profile editors at the investigative newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily, which is operated by the same media group that owns Southern Weekend, were arrested and later sentenced on corruption charges. According to a report made by the Committee to Protect Journalists, the arrests were spurred by an article about the controversial death of a suspect in police custody. The paper also was the first to report on a new case of SARS in Guangzhou Province -- stories unflattering to the government.
Xiao Qiang, editor of the China Digital Times, says that the ongoing conflict between the government's propagandistic use of the media as a mouthpiece, and market forces pushing journalists andc onsumers to demand a more independent and professional press, cause the media climate in China to remain in a constant state of ebb and flow. Small gains made during periods of openness are inevitably followed by crackdowns like the one currently underway.
"The restrictions mean that the government has less control than before," says Xiao. "The line is moving toward greater freedom for the Chinese press."
Zhao hopes to use her time at Berkeley to rebuild her confidence in journalism before returning to work again in China. "Everybody on our newspaper staff, we're waiting for sunshine," she says, wistfully. "Nobody knows, when is our spring? Nobody knows."
PNS contributor Julie Caine is a graduate student at UC Berkeley School of Journalism.
