Fatal Beating Victim: Journalist or Fraud?

BEIJING, Jan. 24 -- About Lan Chengzhang this much is certain: He was fatally beaten Jan. 10 during a visit to a coal mine near Datong in the gritty hills of Shanxi province. The rest is clouded in doubt and controversy.

To some, Lan was a brave reporter who died for the cause of press freedom and investigative journalism in China. To others, he was a fraud, pretending to investigate a mine so he could shake down the owner in exchange for not revealing safety violations.

News of the crime has reverberated across China and beyond during the last two weeks. As is often the case in China's heavily censored media system, the killing was revealed on the Internet by an anonymous poster. Then national publications and foreign news agencies followed up, making the obscure 34-year-old reporter an international cause.

Officials in Datong, about 160 miles west of Beijing, told reporters Tuesday that they had received instructions from President Hu Jintao and Li Changchun, the Communist Party's senior propaganda official, to get to the bottom of the case and report back.

Lan's killing was particularly notable because it cut through some of the touchiest issues in China. Reporting has long been severely restricted here; about 30 journalists are in prison for what they have written. Moreover, mine safety has grown into a political headache for Hu's government, and Shanxi is China's top coal-producing area. More than 4,700 miners were killed in accidents in 2006.

But Datong police said Lan's death also involved blackmail journalism, a growing practice in the Chinese media. Jin Runxi, the deputy director of Datong police, told reporters there that Lan had suggested to a colleague, Chang Hanwen, that they go together to the mine because it was operating illegally and the owner would give them 1,000 yuan each, or about $128, to withhold the information.

At the Daobanfang Coal mine in a nearby village, owner Hou Zhengrun demanded to see credentials. When he noted that Lan and Chang had no official stamp on their cards, Jin said, Hou accused the pair of trying to blackmail him and ordered his men to beat them up, an official police report said. After the beating, Hou tossed 1,000 yuan each at Lan and Chang and drove off.

Lan died at 9:20 a.m. the next day in a Datong hospital, Jin recounted. Seven people were arrested in the beatings last week, and Hou turned himself in Friday, along with two accomplices.

But the debate about Lan was far from over. Lan, who once worked as a storekeeper in a state-owned mine, started a new career in 2005 as one of three dozen investigators at the Safety Education Weekly, a subsidiary of the Modern Consumer Guide in Shanxi province. Local reporters said the investigators frequently blackmailed mine owners for safety violations. Some reports alleged the publication was simply a front for the blackmail.

The publication was reorganized last summer and Lan was let go, along with most of the other investigators. On Jan. 3 he went to work for the Datong bureau of the Beijing-based China Trade News, an organ of the semiofficial China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.

But Chang Xuri, the China Trade News bureau chief in Datong, said Lan was not on assignment to investigate the mine when he was beaten and, according to Lan's colleague, made the trip for the explicit purpose of blackmail.

Chang also said Hou might have had a reason for being outraged when he was hit up for hush money. According to police, Lan and his colleague were the fourth group in a week to show up at the mine asking for cash, he said.