The Portrait of an Olympic Host -- China's Local Censors Muffle an
Explosion, Media Forbidden To Probe Deaths At Popular Bar/Washington Post

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China's Local Censors Muffle an Explosion

Media Forbidden To Probe Deaths At Popular Bar

http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2007/08/01/GR2007080100133...

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 1, 2007; A10

TIAN SHIFU, China -- By 9 p.m., the Tianying karaoke bar was jumping.
Two co-ed parties were underway, with celebrants drinking and singing.
In the bathhouse section, men were soaking in hot tubs and enjoying the
company of prostitutes, while other customers tried their luck in a
pocket-size gambling den.

That is when the blast went off.

More than 400 pounds of nitrate-based explosives, used in nearby coal
mines, ripped through the Tianying compound, reducing it to debris. Many
of those partying inside were killed, along with several passersby. The
concussion knocked in walls and shredded windows in nearby buildings,
sending out sprays of glass shards that injured people gathered with
their families to watch television.

What happened that sultry evening of July 4 seemed to be news by
anybody's definition. It was the worst disaster in ages to hit Tian
Shifu, a raw town of 40,000 residents in the wooded hills of Liaoning
province 350 miles northeast of Beijing. But local Communist Party
censors decided otherwise. They blacked out news of the explosion,
barring papers and television stations here in Benxi county and the
nearby provincial capital of Shenyang from investigating what had
happened and telling the public about it.

The party's vast propaganda and censorship bureaucracy, although best
known for curbing national media, has long exercised its most drastic
controls in the newsrooms of China's provincial papers and television
stations, such as those that serve the people of Tian Shifu. Unfavorable
news -- information that could put local leaders in a bad light in
Beijing -- is routinely suppressed by multiple layers of party
propaganda officials in towns, counties, cities and provinces.

As a result, Chinese who live in towns or in the countryside -- the
majority of China's 1.3 billion inhabitants -- have grown used to living
largely in ignorance of what goes on around them, settling for
half-truths and daring not to ask for more. This tight control of
information has long been an effective tool for the Communist Party to
maintain its monopoly on power. It has become even more important in the
last two decades as corruption has spread through the party hierarchy,
with many city, county and provincial officials eager to hide their
association with local entrepreneurs.

"We ordinary people don't know what happened," said a woman who works at
Tian Shifu's outdoor food market just behind the destroyed Tianying
entertainment complex. "They haven't told us."

In Beijing, officials in the central government of President Hu Jintao
have suggested repeatedly that a more open attitude is necessary in the
age of cellphones and the Internet. Wang Guoqing, vice minister of the
government's national Information Office, told China Central Television
last month that local attempts to block coverage of negative news are
"naive" given the new technology.

Whether Wang was sincere or not in his call for more openness, the
message has not gotten through in China's provincial propaganda offices.
At those levels, senior propaganda officials often are on close terms
with local newspaper and television editors; they attend the same party
meetings and follow similar career paths. Coverage of Tian Shifu's
explosion was a case in point.

"The Liaoning Propaganda Department director knows how to control the
media," a local reporter said. "He is a former newspaper editor."
'Standard Practice'

One reporter in Shenyang, the provincial capital 50 miles north of here,
said he got a call from a friend right after the blast and quickly
passed on the news to his editor, hoping to be sent to the scene. But
the editor, with reflexes honed by years of censorship, told the
reporter to wait and see what the government wanted to do. As a result,
no news of the explosion appeared in his newspaper -- or any other --
the morning of July 5.

Party censorship officials in Benxi county and Liaoning province,
meanwhile, went into action. After maintaining silence through the
night, they authorized a bulletin on the province's official Dongbei
News Network Web site at 6:20 a.m. saying an explosion had destroyed the
karaoke bar, killing five people. Two hours later, the same short item
moved on the official New China News Agency, which meant the rest of the
country also learned of the disaster.

At about the same time, the provincial Propaganda Bureau faxed orders to
Liaoning newspapers and television stations saying they could print and
broadcast only what the official agency reported. According to a local
journalist who saw the fax, it said no reporters could investigate on
their own and newspapers must de-emphasize the story by playing it
inside without any photos.

At the same time, New China News Agency reporters were ordered to back
off the story and relay only what investigating officials issued through
the Propaganda Department, according to an Internet account quoting
disgruntled reporters. Any other discoveries were to be reported
internally, in dispatches that go only to authorized officials, the
account said.

A group of reporters who showed up in Tian Shifu anyway the morning
after the blast were escorted by police to another karaoke bar and told
they could not continue working, according to a local professional.
Asked why no one tried to defy the ban, a reporter answered: "Who would
dare?"

In the early afternoon of that same day, Dongbei and the New China News
Agency moved new items reporting that the death toll had risen to 25 and
that police were investigating the cause of the blast. That was the main
news dispatch circulated around China, broadcast on local television and
radio stations and printed in five of the seven main regional
newspapers. Two of the newspapers printed nothing at all, local
journalists said, one in protest and the other because editors were
eager to display zeal in implementing party directives.

"It is precisely because it happened in our back yard that we could not
report it," said a frustrated reporter in Shenyang. "It was impossible
for a newspaper or television station to investigate this news.
Everybody knew clearly they couldn't report on it."

The tight atmosphere was established several years ago, he said, when
now Commerce Minister Bo Xilai was governor of Liaoning province and
decreed there would be no negative news in Shenyang and Dalian, the
province's two main cities.

Li Xianpeng, who heads the news division of the Liaoning provincial
Propaganda Department, said "standard practice" in such cases is that
government investigators should be the only source of information. It
was in that light, he said, that local publications and stations were
told to stick with the New China News Agency reports relaying what
officials said.

"For some social issues, reporters can do their own investigations," Li
said. "But in cases of serious incidents, government departments should
do the work. If reporters can do investigations on everything, then what
is the use of government departments?"

Four days after the blast, the New China News Agency issued a short item
quoting investigators saying the final death toll was 25 and the blast
occurred because of "spontaneous combustion" of explosives in the
building. It offered no further explanation.
Missing Details

A 46-year-old man who identified himself only as Xie said he and some
companions enjoying the bathhouse that night smelled heavy smoke just
before the explosion. They all ran for the exit, he said, because the
smoke was filling the room.

"I was the last one," Xie added from his sickbed in the First People's
Hospital of Benxi, the county seat. "As I got to the door, it went off,"
leaving him with multiple injuries to his head and legs.

Xie said he had no idea what set off the blast. But other Tian Shifu
residents said they were told that a man who lost heavily in the gaming
room had returned to get revenge. Still others said the owner's longtime
mistress had taken a new lover and might have plotted with him to burn
the place down.

The karaoke owner, known as "the kid" and variously identified as Qu Hua
and Qu Yijie, was killed in the blast. His former mistress was taken in
for questioning by police, the residents noted.

Qu, they said, was known as a wealthy man who had owned wildcat coal
mines in the surrounding hills and dealt in wholesale explosives for
small coal mine owners, many of them running illegal operations. His
karaoke bar was a center for prostitution and gambling as well as
singing, they said, and the bodies of 18 unidentified women were taken
from the debris in addition to the 25 reported by authorities. Also
among the victims, they added, were two local policemen.

These accounts, from neighbors and other Tian Shifu residents, were
impossible to verify. But many playing cards were seen lying about the
debris after the site had been bulldozed flat, and employees of the
nearby Chuang Ye Department Store said eight of its saleswomen were
among the victims.

Journalists for several big-city newspapers and magazines, out of the
local censor's grasp, reported some of these details. The Beijing News
identified Qu, for instance, and the Beijing-based Legal Daily
pinpointed stored explosives as the cause of the blast two days before
the official report. One aggressive Internet news site,
http://www.163.com, quoted police as saying they could not exclude the
possibility that the explosives were detonated intentionally.

But local publications followed the orders to keep silent. In addition,
Tian Shifu residents said police had warned them not to talk about the
explosion even among themselves. As a result, all were promised
anonymity in conversations with a foreign reporter.

At stake, they said, was a compensation payment of up to $26,000 that
the government was offering to victims' families. But in any case, they
added, it would be dangerous getting on the wrong side of the police in
this small country town.

"Every word could lead to trouble," one resident said when asked to
explain what he knew about the blast. "We are not even supposed to
gossip about it with our neighbors."

Researcher Jin Ling contributed to this report.

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