China's Muckrakers for Hire Deliver Exposés With Impact

Stock trader Shuai Xingyou paid a journalist $265 to write about corruption affecting farmers in his home town. (By Li Jie -- The Washington Post)

"I am against corrupt officials," he said in an interview, "but I am not against the Communist Party."

That is just the way Shuai Xingyou, a Qinglong native, said he felt when he got in touch with Xu on behalf of his parents and their neighbors in the little village of Lianchi, part of Qinglong township. "The government of China is very good," said Shuai, now a stock trader in the nearby provincial capital of Chengdu. "I support President Hu Jintao."

The problem, he recalled, was that local officials early last year colluded with businessmen to confiscate about 25 acres of paddies, affecting several thousand farmers and their families, then offered compensation amounting to only $15,000 per acre. "Their slogan was economic development, but the money for the land ended up in their pockets," Shuai said.

For months, the farmers protested. They petitioned local officials. They petitioned provincial officials in Chengdu. They traveled to Beijing, more than 900 miles to the northeast, and petitioned national officials. But nothing worked.

Shuai become so absorbed by what had happened to his parents and their neighbors that he began neglecting his stock trades. He bought lawbooks. He bought government regulations in pamphlet form. He searched the Internet for speeches by Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao in which they promised protection for farmers whose land was under pressure from economic development.

"What happened here didn't seem right," he said.

Shuai went from house to house explaining to the farmers what he had read and urging them to resist the confiscation. He handed out Wen's annual government report and pointed at the section on protection for farmers. He read the law to them in their baked-mud, concrete-floored farmhouses and around courtyard wells.

He said he was thrown into jail in surrounding Pengshan county for 31 days because of his activism. Local leaders visited him in his cell and tried to persuade him to call off the campaign, he recalled, but when he was released, he started again with renewed vigor.

Shuai also enlisted the help of Wang Shuangquan, a respected former official in a neighboring Qinglong village. Wang, 63, who still wears a Mao suit and proudly recites Communist Party slogans, said what happened was unfair because, deprived of their land, the farmers had no other means of making a living. He took documents describing the situation to several levels of local government and made the trip to Beijing as well, only to be dismissed.

"They said they wanted the land for construction and economic development, but in fact they colluded with the businessmen," Wang said of officials. "Farmers cannot live without land, but local officials don't care. Today they are local officials; tomorrow they change to be bosses."

Over the months, Shuai and others said, several hundred of the farmers mounted repeated protests, sitting on their land and trying to prevent bulldozers from getting it ready for construction. Led by Shuai, farmers fixed posters to stakes and drove them into the contested ground; the posters showed revered Chinese leaders Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Sun Yat-sen.

The protests were broken up, sometimes brutally, and construction continued relentlessly. Since then, the "Qinglong Economic Development Zone" administration has occupied spanking new headquarters with glass walls, and rows of stores and warehouses have risen around it. A giant billboard has gone up on the road from Chengdu, depicting a large industrial zone and inviting businessmen to come to Qinglong and "get rich."

Early in the protests, Shuai had threatened local officials with exposure. In a letter, he warned them that even if censors prevented local news media from reporting on the conflict, reporters from Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere had expressed interest.

"When it is necessary, we will secretly arrange for them to report here and publish the story in newspapers and on Web sites," he wrote.

In fact, however, when the farmers had contacted reporters from local newspapers and television stations, the reporters said they could not cover such a story. When Shuai tried contacting reporters in Chengdu, he received the same response. Overtures to China Central Television and national newspapers in Beijing produced the same result.

Some reporters suggested they could come, but only for a price. As for reporters in Taiwan and Hong Kong, Shuai acknowledged, he and the farmers had no idea where to call.

Then one night, Shuai recalled, he saw a Web-based reporter named Wang Ganlin in a television interview. Before long, he and Wang were exchanging e-mails. Wang said he was not interested, because it was a local dispute, but by then Shuai thought he had found what he needed. He contacted about 30 Web journalists in all, he said, asking each how much they would charge to look into the Qinglong dispute.

Several said they were willing to investigate if their expenses were covered. Shuai chose Xu, he said, because the reporter's expense estimate was not too high and he liked the other exposés on his site.

"When I finally settled with him that he was coming," Shuai said, "I was so excited I could not sleep."