On May 12, 2008, Hu Shuli, the founding editor of thebiweekly magazine Caijing, was hosting a ceremony for scholarship recipients ata hotel in the mountains west of Beijing. When a text message informed her thata powerful earthquake had struck the province of Sichuan, she leaned over tothe man next to her, a veteran editor named Qian Gang, who had covered previousquakes, and asked him for a rough prediction of the damage. At least it hadn'tstruck while everyone was asleep, he figured. He soon realized, however, thatschool was in session and "the casualties among students would beenormous."
Hu set off for downtown Beijing, working the phone ande-mailing from the back seat of a car, directing her staff to rent a satellitephone and get a crew to Sichuan. Petite, voluble, and pugnacious--"afemale Godfather," one of her reporters thought upon first meeting her--Huwas determined to cover the story even though in China reporting on a disasterof this scale could be politically hazardous. When the country suffered itsprevious huge quake, in 1976, the government suppressed news of the death tollfor three years.
But Hu had made her name divining the boundaries of freeexpression in China. In the decade since she founded Caijing--the name means"finance and economics"--she had sharply defied the image of China'ssomnambulant press, and become, as David Ignatius, of the Washington Post, putit to me, the country's "avenging angel." Hu had endured as editorlong after other tenacious Chinese journalists had been imprisoned or silenced.She was often described in the Chinese and foreign press as "the mostdangerous woman in China," and she was still in business.
Within the hour, the first Caijing journalist was on aflight to Sichuan, followed by nine more. While Xinhua, the state-run newsservice, was emphasizing that the earthquake "tugged at the heartstringsof the Chinese Communist Party," Caijing was ferreting out estimates ofthe numbers of the dead and wounded and noting that "many disaster victimshave yet to receive any relief supplies."
Schools lay in heaps of concrete and rebar, and theCentral Propaganda Department, a government agency with the power to removeeditors and shut down publications, banned coverage of rescue efforts at theschools. Several Chinese newspapers questioned why so many schools hadcollapsed anyway, producing poignant stories of construction errors and thehuman toll. (At least fifty-three hundred schoolchildren are believed to havedied.) Hu had heard that local authorities were criticizing papers thatcontinued to report on the schools' collapse, but she believed that Caijingcould find a way to write about it. She thought that a story could be publishedif it carried the right tone and facts. "If it's not absolutelyforbidden," she said, "we do it."
On June 9th, Caijing published a twelve-page investigativereport that was cool and definitive. According to the report, heedless economicgrowth, squandered public funds, and rampant neglect of construction standardshad led to the disaster. The story detailed how local cadres cut corners, butit stopped short of assigning responsibility by name. When I asked Hu about thegovernment's reaction, she said, "They got angry. Very, very angry."But she and Caijing were never punished.
In the world of Chinese journalists, or "newsworkers," as they are known in Party-speak, Hu, who is fifty-six yearsold, has a singular profile. She is an incurable muckraker, and in 1989 wassuspended from a reporting job because of her sympathy for the Tiananmen Squaredemonstrations, yet she has gone on to cultivate first-name familiarity withsome of China's most powerful Party leaders.
Five feet two and slim, with a pixie haircut and awardrobe of color-coordinated outfits, she is usually heard before she is seen.In the newsroom of Caijing, a sleek and open gray brick space on the nineteenthfloor of the Prime Tower, in downtown Beijing, her arrival is heralded by theurgent click-clack of heels down the hallway. She sweeps through the newsroom,spouting decrees and ideas, and then heads out the door again--"as suddenand rash as a gust of wind," said Qian, who is now a researcher at theUniversity of Hong Kong.
More than one person I know likens the experience ofchatting with Hu to being on the receiving end of machine-gun fire. Some haveless appetite for her intensity. Wang Lang, an old friend of Hu's and an editorat Economic Daily, a state-run newspaper, has repeatedly declined her offers towork together, because, he said, "Keeping some distance is better for ourfriendship." Depending on the point of view, being with her is eitherthrilling or unnerving. Her boss, Wang Boming, the chairman of Caijing's parentcompany, the SEEC Media Group, told me, half jokingly, "I'm afraid ofher!"
Since 1998, when Hu established Caijing, with twocomputers and a borrowed conference room, she has guided the magazine withnear-perfect pitch for how much candor and provocation the regime willtolerate. That has meant deciding what to cover--rampant corporate fraud, thegovernment cover-up of the SARS virus, case after case of political corruption--butalso what not to cover (Falun Gong, the Tiananmen Square anniversary). At atime when the American print media is in decline, the Chinese press is growing,and Caijing is the first Chinese publication with the prospect of becoming aworld-class news organization. "It's different from everything you see inChina," Andy Xie, a former Morgan Stanley economist who writes a columnfor Caijing, said. "Its existence, in a way, is a miracle."
Caijing has the glossy feel and design of Fortune. It is heavywith advertising, for Cartier watches, Chinese credit cards, Mercedes S.U.V.s.The writing can be purposefully dense, and even elitist, but China's propagandaofficials are more likely to clamp down on television and mass-marketnewspapers, which have audiences in the millions, than they are on a magazinethat sells only two hundred thousand copies. But those copies go to many ofChina's most important offices in government, finance, and academia, giving themagazine extraordinary influence. In recent years, it has begun to expand thatreach, through a pair of Web sites, in Chinese and English, that are looselymodelled on nytimes.com. Together, the sites attract some 3.2 million uniquevisitors every month. Hu writes a widely quoted column for the print editionand the Web. She also oversees a conference series that attracts the economicleadership of the Communist Party. Caijing's newest project, yet to beunveiled, will take direct aim at the likes of Bloomberg and Dow Jones: anEnglish-language wire service, in partnership with the Hong Kong tycoon RichardLi Tzar-kai, that will distribute stories by Caijing reporters.
The first time that Sam Popkin, a political scientist atthe University of California at San Diego, who, along with his wife, the Chinascholar Susan Shirk, has known Hu for many years, watched Hu report a story, itreminded him of the portrait of the Times reporter R. W. Apple in "TheBoys on the Bus," when "Apple used to make something like a hundredcalls a day," Popkin said. "She is always figuring out who in thesystem really has the power to know what's going on." Popkin added,"She is a human USB drive. You fill her drive, and she goes on to someoneelse." Inevitably, her competitors' memories are the clearest. Nearly twodecades ago, Lin Libo, then a reporter for a leading business newspaper,struggled to match her coverage of a round of closed-door negotiations. Herecalled, "She even had the menu!"
In 1992, as the international editor at China BusinessTimes, one of the country's first national business papers, Hu began coveringthe work of a small number of Chinese who had trained in Western finance and,returning from overseas, were promoting the Chinese stock markets. Many of themwere her age and were the children of powerful Chinese leaders. The groupcalled itself the Stock Exchange Executive Council, and rented a cluster ofrooms at Beijing's Chongwenmen Hotel. The members pulled out the beds and setup an office. At one desk was Gao Xiqing, who had earned a law degree at Dukeand worked at Richard Nixon's law firm in New York before returning to China.At another was Wang Boming, the son of a former ambassador and vice-foreignminister; Wang had studied finance at Columbia and worked as an economist inthe research department of the New York Stock Exchange. They enlisted thesupport of rising stars in the Party, such as Wang Qishan, who was theson-in-law of a vice-premier, and Zhou Xiaochuan, a reform-minded politicalscion.
"I decided to interview all the top financiers inChina," Hu recalled. She called it her "homework," and JamesMcGregor, then a Wall Street Journal reporter in Beijing, began noticing Hu"working all these people, pumping them for information like a graduatestudent talking to esteemed professors." Hu ended up with a string ofscoops and, eventually, an incomparable Rolodex of names destined for China'shighest offices: today, Gao Xiqing is the head of China'stwo-hundred-billion-dollar sovereign-wealth fund; Wang Qishan is a vice-premierand a top economic policymaker; Zhou Xiaochuan runs China's central bank.
Many people in Beijing wonder how much those earlyconnections have protected Hu. But she insists that people overestimate herproximity to power. "I don't know their birthdays," she said, ofhigh-ranking officials. "I'm a journalist, and they treat me as ajournalist."
Hu's connections seem to serve a more subtle function. Bypositioning herself on the border between insider and outsider, betweenCommunist history and the capitalist present, between protecting China'sinterests and embracing the world, she has become an invaluable interpreter.When, in the weeks before the 2008 Olympics, the Chinese government was woundso tightly that it had begun to look thuggish, she used an editorial to condemnclashes between the police and reporters. She preached "self-confidence,open-mindedness, friendliness." "To use an English expression,"she added, referring to Chinese organizers, "they should take iteasy." It is a delicate role. Once, Hu had to choose the cover photographfor a high-profile year-end edition. Editors had narrowed the choices: a staidcollage of newsy images or an edgy shot of a woman shouldering into asandstorm, her face shrouded in a scarf. Hu favored the provocative picture,but at the last moment she hesitated. "Could it get us into trouble?"she asked, according to someone who was present. "Is it too negative aboutChina?" Others argued that it showed China's best side--itsdetermination--and Hu smiled. "I can explain that," she said.
The Chinese press is no longer cowed into completecompliance, but it is also not yet as free as other parts of a raucous economy.Caijing and its news values are a minority. Last September, Xinhua published astory on its Web site detailing how China's Shenzhou VII rocket made itsthirtieth orbit of the earth. The story had plenty of grippingdetail--"The dispatcher's firm voice broke the silence on the ship."Unfortunately, the rocket had yet to be launched. (The news service laterapologized for posting a "draft.") Of China's two thousand newspapersand eight thousand magazines, Caijing and several business newspapers are amongthe few publications with independent voices and private funding. (All Chinesemedia are required to have a government-affiliated sponsor, though the level ofinterference varies. The SEEC Media Group, which is traded on the Hong Kongstock exchange, is controlled by fifteen individual investors.)
The Chinese leadership has been especially wary of pressreform ever since Tiananmen Square. "Never again would China's newspapers,radio, and television be permitted to become a battle front for bourgeoisliberalism," President Jiang Zemin vowed, according to internal Partydocuments collected by Anne-Marie Brady, a specialist on Chinese media at theUniversity of Canterbury in New Zealand. Chinese journalists do not face thekind of gangland killings that beset reporters in Russia, but Reporters WithoutBorders, in its most recent global index of press freedom, ranks China ahundred and sixty-seventh out of a hundred and seventy-three countries--justbehind Iran and ahead of Vietnam. Article 35 of the Chinese constitutionguarantees freedom of speech and the press, but it is no match in court againsta web of laws on libel and on revealing state secrets. The Committee to ProtectJournalists 2008 report counted twenty-eight reporters in Chinese jails, morethan in any other country. (Earlier this month, Iran overtook China, for thefirst time in ten years.)
The Central Propaganda Department, as it's known inChinese, operates in semi-secrecy, with no sign on its headquarters and nolisted phone number. It issues directives to editors and publishers thatoutline the latest recommendations of dos and don'ts. Some boundaries arefixed; taboos include the military, religion, ethnic disputes, and the innerworkings of government. But others are flexible. In the fall of 2005, editorsenjoyed a free hand to report on a catastrophic chemical leak in the SonghuaRiver. Weeks later, news sites were ordered to stop reporting the case of asurgeon who had spoken on the phone during surgery and paralyzed a patient'sface. (Even revealing the contents of a directive can be dangerous for aChinese reporter. Shi Tao, a contributor to the Contemporary Business News, isserving a ten-year sentence for describing a directive from his localpropaganda authorities in an e-mail that he sent abroad.)
A publication's first offense usually draws a warning"yellow card," as in soccer. Three yellow cards in one year, journalistssay, and a paper or magazine is shut down. (In 2004, three hundred andthirty-eight publications were suspended for printing "internal"information, according to a report in the state press.) But it's up to editorsthemselves to guess how far they can go and compute the risk of exceeding anundefined limit--an approach to censorship that the China scholar Perry Link, aPrinceton emeritus professor, has likened to "a giant anaconda coiled inan overhead chandelier." "Normally, the great snake doesn't move,"he wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2002. "It doesn't have to. Itfeels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its silent constant messageis 'You yourself decide,' after which, more often than not, everyone in itsshadows makes his or her large and small adjustments--all quite 'naturally.'"
The first time that I took a cab to visit Hu at home, Iwas sure that I was lost. Unlike many of the reporters and editors on herstaff, she does not live in one of Beijing's new residential high-rises. Sheand her husband, Miao Di, a film professor at Beijing's CommunicationUniversity of China, share a three-bedroom apartment in a concrete housingblock with a view of an overgrown garden. In the nineteen-fifties, when thebuilding was a privileged residence for Party cadres, the government assignedspace in it to Hu's father. The neighborhood is China's old-media stronghold,home to the headquarters of the state radio and to China's film-and-televisioncensors.
Hu's drive to work takes twenty minutes, and whisks herfrom one century to another; by the time she reaches the Caijing offices, sheis next door to the Beijing bureau of the Wall Street Journal. Heading to workone recent afternoon, she was running late for an unusual appointment: Hu had decidedthat her top editors needed new clothes, and she had summoned a tailor. AsCaijing grows in prominence, her staff is spending more time in front of crowdsor overseas. "Foreigners always wear suits this way," she said,approvingly pulling her jacket tightly around her, as she hastened to her car.She had offered her editors a deal: Buy one new suit and the magazine would payfor another. The tailor carried an armful of suits into a conference room, andthe staff filed in for a fitting.
"Doesn't it look baggy here?" Hu said, tuggingat the underarm of an elegant gray pin-striped jacket being fitted to WangShuo, her thirty-seven-year-old managing editor. With his boss prodding at hismidsection, he wore an expression of bemused tolerance that I had seen severaltimes on a dog in a bathtub.
"It is rather tight already," Wang protested.
"He feels tight already," the tailor said.
"Hold on!" Hu said. "Think about the JamesBond suit in the movies. Make it like that!"
The change implied by Hu's flamboyant internationalismruns deeper than aesthetics. A well-meaning American professor once advisedher, "If you stay in China as a journalist, you will never really join theinternational mainstream." She seems determined to prove him wrong.
On her mother's side, Hu comes from a line of CommunistParty journalists and intellectuals. Her grandfather Hu Zhongchi was a famoustranslator and editor at Shen Bao, a Shanghai paper. His elder brother Yuzhifounded a publishing house that produced collections of Lu Xun, one of modernChina's leading writers and a family friend, as well as Chinese translations ofEdgar Snow and John Steinbeck.
Hu's mother, Hu Lingsheng, was a senior editor atWorkers' Daily in Beijing. Her father, Cao Qifeng, studied English at amissionary school before becoming an impassioned underground Communist andtaking a mid-level post in a trade union. They named their younger daughterShula, for a Soviet war martyr. In the nineteen-seventies, she changed her nameto Shuli, a more popular name for women.
Hu has an acute understanding of China's fickle regardfor intellectuals. Her great-uncle Yuzhi was a deputy minister of culturebefore the Cultural Revolution. "But we were told never to say that toothers," Hu told me. Her forthrightness at times worried her parents."I was not very disciplined. I always spoke about what I wasthinking." She attended Beijing's elite 101 Middle School, which had onceeducated many offspring of Party cadres. Students had privileged access to asmattering of banned foreign literature, including translated volumes ofKerouac, Salinger, and Solzhenitsyn, printed in limited batches for Partyelites. Hu would also take books from her family and hide them under her pillowuntil she could swap them with friends.
The Cultural Revolution engulfed China when Hu wasthirteen, and her classes were suspended. As a prominent editor, Hu's motherwas criticized at her newspaper and placed under house arrest. Her father wasshunted into a backroom job. Like others her age, Hu became a Red Guard andtravelled around the country. As the movement descended into violence, shesought refuge in books, trying to maintain a semblance of an education."It was a very confusing time, because we lost all values," she said.A month before her sixteenth birthday, she was sent to the countryside toexperience the rural revolution.
"It was ridiculous," she said of what shefound. Farmers had lost any incentive to work. "They just wanted to staylying in the field, sometimes for two hours. I said, 'Should we start work?'They said, 'How can you think that?' " She went on, "Ten years later,I realized everything was wrong." Hu's sister, Cao Zuyoa, who was in anearby village, later wrote a book, "Out of the Crucible," about howthe rustication campaign forever changed members of their generation. It"buried their Communist utopian dream," she wrote.
After two years, Hu joined the Army--which led, severalyears later, to membership in the Communist Party--and she was assigned to aremote hospital in a rural northern area of Jiangsu Province, where she spentthe next eight years. She worked in the dining room, fed pigs, helped on thewards, and ran a tiny broadcast booth that played music and announcements. Whencolleges resumed classes, in 1978, Hu secured a coveted seat at People'sUniversity in Beijing. The journalism department was not her first choice, butit was the best that the school offered. She was a conspicuous figure oncampus: the department's only freshman girl in a military uniform. "Therewas not a person in our class who didn't know who she was," Miao Di, ahistory major from a Beijing military family who met Hu in an English class,said. He, too, had been sent to the countryside, and they shared a sense ofdisaffection. They married in 1982.
After college, Hu joined Workers' Daily, and, in 1985,after some early investigative projects, she was assigned to a bureau in thesoutheastern coastal city of Xiamen. The area had been designated as alaboratory for the growth of a free market. There she developed her skill fornetworking, meeting everyone in city hall--including the mayor, with whom sheplayed bridge. Among those she interviewed was a promising young cadre who wasthe city's vice-mayor: Xi Jinping, the son of a Politburo member. Xi was a Partyloyalist with pro-market sensibilities, whose building of a successful themepark had earned him the nickname the God of Wealth. Today, Xi is China'sVice-President and is regarded as the heir apparent to the President.
In 1987, Hu won a fellowship from the Minnesota-basedWorld Press Institute to spend five months in America. The experience was arevelation. "I spent the whole night reading the St. Paul PioneerPress" and marvelling at the size of it, she said. (Workers' Daily, at thetime, was four pages.) She met investigative reporters at the PhiladelphiaInquirer and interned at USA Today. She returned to China, and in the spring of1989 the Tiananmen Square movement energized the Beijing press. For weeks,papers revelled in a holiday from censorship. Many journalists, including Hu,joined the demonstrations. As soldiers cracked down on the night of June 3rd,Hu recalls, "I went to the street, then went back to the office and said,'We should cover this.' " But the decision had already come down:"The newspaper decided we weren't going to publish a word about it."Her involvement was costly. Many reporters who had spoken out were fired orbanished to the provinces. Miao Di thought that Hu might get arrested, but, inthe end, she was suspended for eighteen months.
She used the time to write "Behind the Scenes atAmerican Newspapers," the first Chinese book to examine the relationshipbetween the American press and democracy, with descriptions of Watergate andthe Pentagon Papers. It was a must-read among Chinese news workers, and in itshe posed a challenge: Who among them "could take the initiative and dosomething akin to what American news organizations have done?"
In 1998, Hu received a phone call from Wang Boming, oneof the hotel-room founders of the Stock Exchange Executive Council; he wasstarting a magazine and he wanted her to run it. She had two conditions: Wangwould never interfere in her newsroom, and he would give her a budget of twomillion yuan--about a quarter of a million dollars--to pay for seriousreporting trips and salaries that were high enough to prevent reporters fromtaking bribes. Wang agreed. It was no charity: he and his reform-minded alliesin the government saw the magazine as an extension of their determination tomodernize the economy.
"You need the media to play its function to disclosethe facts to the public, and, in a sense, help the government detectevils," Wang told me recently, in his large, cluttered office downstairsfrom Caijing's headquarters. He is a classic type of the generation thatreceived an American education and returned to China--a chain-smoker with athick brush of gray-flecked black hair, Ferragamo eyeglasses, and a bilingualsense of humor. When he talks about Hu, a weary look crosses his face that suggestshe has got more than he bargained for. "We didn't know that this level ofrisk would come along with it," he said. But Wang also betrays a keensense of Hu's significance to China. "When I was studying in the States, Ineeded to make some money to pay my tuition, so I was working for a newspaperin Chinatown--the China Daily News," he said. As a cub reporter, herelished the chance to follow a trail wherever it led. He had felt like "aking without a crown."
Caijing established its tone right away. Its inauguralissue, in April, 1998, featured an explosive cover story detailing the case ofQiong Min Yuan, a real-estate company whose share price had quadrupled beforeit was charged with overstating profits. Caijing revealed that, while legionsof small-time investors lost millions, insiders had been tipped off in advanceand unloaded their shares. Regulators were incensed; they accused Caijing offlouting press restrictions, and Wang's executives had to troop to theregulators' office to make self-criticisms.
Each story refined Hu's calculation of how far she couldpush. In 2001, a twenty-five-year-old Caijing reporter, thumbing throughcustoms records, discovered that Yinguangxia Holdings, one of China's largestlisted companies, had posted online a falsified claim of eighty-seven milliondollars in profits. The political stakes were high, because a parade of topleaders had already visited the company to praise it. Wang Boming was soworried that Caijing would be shut down if it went with the story that he didsomething he said he has never done again: he called a high-ranking CommunistParty official for approval before publishing. "He said, 'Is that storyreally true or is there any doubt?' " Wang recalled. "I said, 'Thestory is definitely true, but there is political implication there.' He said,'If it's true, then go ahead.' " Hours after the story appeared, thecompany's stock was suspended from trading; eventually, its executives went tojail.
The defining moment in Caijing's emergence, however, cametwo years later, when the reporter Cao Haili, arriving in Hong Kong, noticedthat every person on the train platform seemed to be wearing a surgical mask.What the hell is that about? she thought, and alerted Hu. The Chinese press hadbeen running reports of a mysterious new virus, but health officials hadpromised the public that it was contained. Newspaper editors in GuangdongProvince had been privately instructed to publish reassuring stories about thevirus, and some were even told what typeface to use, one editor at the timerecalled. But these restrictions did not extend to editors outside Guangdong."I bought a lot of books about breathing diseases, infections, andviruses," Hu said, and her staff began to find errors in the government'sstatements. Meanwhile, Caijing editors tracked the Web site of the World HealthOrganization, which tallied a steadily growing number of SARS cases in China,even as the government continued to deny it. The tone of the coverge wasserious and questioning without actually accusing the government of lying.
Over the course of a month, Caijing produced a series ofweekly supplements on SARS in addition to its regular issues. In the end, themagazine brushed up against the limit. "Caijing was planning another issuethat was going to look back on the lessons of SARS," David Bandurski, aresearcher at the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project, said."And the government essentially sent the message 'No--this is not going tohappen. This stops now.' "
Hu has cultivated her sense for the precise moment when asensitive subject is safe to publicize. "You can feel her makingadjustments," Wang Feng, a former Caijing editor, told me. "Forexample, at Monday's editorial conference she might aim at something, and theeditors and reporters go ahead and do it. And by Wednesday's editorialconference she will say, 'You know what? I've got more information on this andwe should not say that. Maybe we should aim lower.' " Inpolitical-corruption cases--which are acutely sensitive--Caijing'sinvestigative reporters often collect information for weeks or months whilethey wait for an opening. In many cases, once Xinhua makes a brief announcementof an official being arrested, Caijing is ready to publish a full story. When,on June 8th, Xinhua issued a one-sentence report saying that the mayor ofShenzhen had been detained in a corruption probe, Caijing posted an in-depthpiece twentynine minutes later.
After SARS, Caijing never entirely retreated to theconfines of business journalism, though today it benefits from the perceptionthat it is simply policing the economy. As Caijing's scoops mounted, bankingregulators began calling reporters, looking for tips, instead of the other wayaround. Even more satisfying, Western media had no choice but to follow andcredit Caijing's leads. At a certain point, the magazine's success and bravadohad become self-reinforcing: it had gone so far already that conservativebranches of the government could no longer be sure which other officialssupported it.
And then Caijing had its first lesson in what happenswhen it goes too far. In January, 2007, its cover story "WhoseLuneng?" described how a group of investors had paid a pittance forcontrol of a giant conglomerate, with assets ranging from power plants to asports club. The conglomerate, Luneng, was valued at more than ten billiondollars, but a pair of little-known private companies had paid just under fivehundred and fifty million dollars for ninety-two per cent of the company,Caijing reported. State regulators had received no notification of thesale--which was ordinarily a legal requirement--and a tangle of overlappingboards and shareholders seemed designed to obscure the identity of the newowners and where their money originated. Nearly half of the purchasing capitalcame from an untraceable source, Caijing discovered.
After Caijing attempted to publish a brief follow-up,authorities ordered the story removed from the Web site and the newsstands. Thestaff in Caijing's Shanghai office are said to have torn up issues by hand."Everybody felt humiliated," a former editor said.
Since then, Caijing has referred occasionally to itsLuneng investigation, but Hu is not eager to discuss the case; she considersthat run-in with the government the magazine's "largest disaster." Aperson who is involved with Caijing and is familiar with the story said thatrevealing the attempt to profit wildly from the privatization deal had come tooclose to implicating the children of senior Party leaders--a taboo that trumpseven reformists' desire for a more open press.
In 2007, the Nieman Foundation, at Harvard, gave Hu anaward for "conscience and integrity." The award was well deserved,but it placed her in slightly awkward company: previous winners included apublisher in Iran who was repeatedly summoned to court for her magazine'sreporting and an editor in Zimbabwe who had been arrested and tortured by themilitary.
Hu does not live the marginalized life of a samizdateditor or sign dissidents' communiques. For all her skepticism and intensity,her writing is notably short on outrage. When she criticizes, either in hercolumn or in her editing choices, she uses the language of loyal opposition.Following the conviction of a high-level official in a pension-fund scandalthat erupted in 2006, she didn't challenge the moral peril of one-partygovernment but argued that China's weak asset-disclosure laws let officials'relatives and colleagues profit. In a column from 2007 entitled "Yearningfor Reform," she declared that "the public's top concern is therampant corruption and an imbalanced power system." She went on,"Some argue that pushing forward with political reform will be destabilizing.Yet, in fact, maintaining the status quo without any reform creates a hotbedfor social turbulence." In other words, political reform is the way toconsolidate power, not lose it.
In her office one afternoon in June, shortly after theanniversary of the Sichuan earthquake, I asked Hu why she thought that otherpublications had been punished for covering the collapsed schools, whileCaijing had not. "We never say a word in a very emotional or casual way,like 'You lied,' " she said. "We try to analyze the system and saywhy a good idea or a good wish cannot become reality."
If a Chinese paper dwells on the names of specificofficials who allowed the construction of unsafe schools, it might be scoring apoint for accountability, but the investigative coup also leaves the papervulnerable to petty political retribution. Hu said, "We try not to giveany excuses to the cadres who don't want to get criticized." Ultimately,she said, the important question is not "which person didn't use good-qualitybricks fifteen years ago" but something deeper. "We need furtherreform," she said. "We need checks and balances. We needtransparency. We say it this way. No simple words. No slogans."
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