China's Local Censors Muffle an Explosion

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.