INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS
Circle 19 has selected and translated into English the following impactful Chinese investigative reports. These reports are undeniable evidence demonstrating that independent journalism by journalists in the People’s Republic of China has benefitted Chinese society throughout history. They also enable readers from all around the world to discover impactful pieces of Chinese investigative journalism and pay tribute to the work of Chinese journalists.
Categories: Environment Public health, Social justice, Corruption and crime
1979: The article that exposed the corruption of local officials in China
Liu Binyan’s “People or Monsters,” published by People’s Literature in 1979, is a fictionalized story based on factual reporting about a corrupt government official in Heilongjiang Province, and the whistleblowers who exposed her. Liu paints China’s governance as a web of interlocking connections (a social mechanism known as “guanxi”) rather than a system based on…
2002: How a “China Business News” investigation sparkled debate on police brutality
In August 2002, plainclothes police in Yan’an (Shaanxi Province) entered the home of a married couple after receiving a tipoff that they had been watching porn. The husband, surnamed Zhang, was taken in custody and beaten up, requesting hospitalisation. Two months later, the police arrested him again on account of the previous incident under the…
2003: The article that shut down China’s 800 infamous migrant detention facilities
“The Death of Detainee Sun Zhigang,” published in 2003, marked a pivotal moment in Chinese journalism, whose impact in China is comparable with the Watergate scandal in the USA. This article tells the story of a young economic migrant working for a clothing company in Guangzhou, who was arrested for failing to show police a…
2003: The early days of SARS outbreak in China
This story, published in February 2003, outlines the early days of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Guangdong Province and documents how the government’s silence led to chaos, confusion and widespread rumors. Journalists Chen Hai and Jiang Hua, reporting for Southern Weekly, describe the impact on society of the new and unknown illness…
2005: The news article that led to the strengthening of safer medical practices in Chinese hospitals
In 2005, an AIDS epidemic in Xingtai, Hebei province had over 200 infected patients, including children. Investigative journalist Wang Keqin used official government documents, several years of media reports, and interviews with doctors as well as 34 AIDS patients to prove that the epidemic was caused in large part by Xingtai hospitals which were using…
2007: The article that startled China’s environmental consciousness
In November 2006, the local government announced it would build a new chemical plant producing toxic compounds just 7 km away from Xiamen City, with a population of over 2.2 million. This story, published in Hong Kong’s Phoenix Weekly in May 2007, is the first news article about the issue and uses public records as…
2008: The article that showed how corruption contributed to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake’s terrible death count
On 12 May 2008, a devastating 7.9-magnitude earthquake shook China’s Sichuan province, resulting in the collapse of an estimated 21,600 buildings, including around 7,000 schools and the deaths of at least 70,000 people including 19,000 school students. In the aftermath of the disaster, human rights media 64 Tianwang denounced the shoddy design, due to local…
2008: The news article that led to the strengthening of Chinese food safety standards
This news article accused the Sanlu Group, one of the country’s largest dairy producers, of selling a milk powder contaminated with melamine, a poisonous substance that sickened an estimated 300,000 children in China and killed at least six infants in 2008. After the article was published, the government identified a total of 22 companies whose…
2009: When state-run agency Xinhua was also doing investigative journalism
In August 2009, the Economic Information Daily, a newspaper owned and operated by the state-run Xinhua news agency, released a series of hard-hitting reports investigating the unusually high rate of lead poisoning among children in the city of Fengxiang, Shaanxi Province. The story, written by Xinhua reporters Chen Gang and Liu Tonglian, revealed that 84%…
2010: How an undercover reporter exposed suicides and extreme working conditions at China’s Foxconn factories
From 2009 onwards, Chinese media started reporting on a string of suicides at the Taiwanese-owned iPhone maker Foxconn’s factory in Shenzhen. In 2010 alone, 14 young workers had committed suicide by jumping to their deaths from Foxconn buildings. All of the workers were in their late teens or early twenties. In early 2010, Southern Weekly…
2010: Southern Metropolis Daily investigates China’s notorious “black prisons”
In Autumn 2010, several newsrooms started to report on China’s “black prisons” — secret, unlawful detention centres employed by the authorities where detainees are subject to intimidation, abuse and torture. Most of the reports focused on the private security firm An Yuan Ding, a company that operated multiple “black prisons” and primarily targeted citizens who…
2010: Years before #MeToo, a Chinese daily helped bring down a CEO’s predatory empire
In 2010, years before China’s #MeToo movement reached its full stride, Southern Metropolis Daily published the first investigation on sexual assault in the workplace in China. The piece discusses the case of Sunmoon Group, one of China’s largest cram school chains spanning over 300 locations across China and abroad, and its CEO Song Shanmu, who had…
2011: Corrupt official exposed following railway disaster
In 2011, on the heels of a train crash that killed 40 people and stoked the public’s ire, Caixin revealed large-scale corruption in the building of the country’s high-speed rail system. The long story exposed the “broken system” in the Railways Ministry and in a subsequent issue, put the railways minister Zhang Shuguang on its…
2011: How Caixin exposed government-sanctioned child trafficking
From 2002 to 2005, Shaoyang City (Hunan province) experienced what is referred to by locals as the “wave of baby snatching,” during which the local family planning department forcibly took 13 infants from their families. Several were later found to have been sold to adoption agencies in Western countries for a price of 3,000 USD each…
2011: The “Wukan protests” — how a little village stood up to corrupt officials
The article is covering the protests that first broke out in Wukan, a village in China’s Guangdong province. In 2011, this was the most detailed article covering the protests at the time. The protests were sparked by local officials’ illegal sale of collectively-owned village land, leading to widespread anger among the villagers.
2016: A vaccine scandal that shook China’s health system
While on probation, Pang conspired with her daughter to trade 260,000 of non-refrigerated vaccines to 18 provinces, and made 570 million RMB (75 million EUR) from the trade. The vaccines were feared ineffective due to the improper transport and storage, though unlikely to cause toxic reactions.
2017: How China Youth Daily exposed a massive mortgage scam that targeted China’s elderly
In 2017, China Youth Daily revealed that, between 2015 and 2017, dozens of elderly homeowners in Beijing were being scammed — and some evicted — after signing “reverse mortgage” agreements with private lenders. The scheme was meant to grant homeowners access to loans based on their home’s value. After the report was published, nearly a…
2018: Exposing faulty construction of a major metro line in Hong Kong
In early summer 2018, Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily published a series of reports, of which three are translated below, exposing faulty construction along the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) line linking ShaTin to Central. The investigation demonstrated that structural walls and platforms at three MTR stations had construction defects that could lead to potential collapse.…
2019: Connecting the dots of China’s largest bribery scandal
In October 2019, Xing Yun, the Deputy Director of the National People’s Congress of the Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia, was charged with bribery and sentenced to death with reprieve. With an estimated 449 million CNY (62 million USD) that Xing had illegally appropriated across his two-decade-long career in Inner Mongolia, it became at the…
2020: How a Wuhan doctor brought China to realise the seriousness of the Covid-19 epidemic
This story by Renwu Magazine sets out how Ai Fen became the first whistleblower. Ai Fen is a doctor at the Central Hospital of Wuhan. In December 2019, she was one of the first doctors to encounter patients infected with the virus that would become known as COVID-19. On 30 December, she received a diagnostic…
2020: In the aftermath of the Covid-19 outbreak, China News Weekly revealed how authorities failed to contain the virus
The cover story of China News Weekly put together a detailed timeline for the month leading up to 23 January 2020, the day that the city of Wuhan closed down. The story presented the local government’s response and what officials from the local and national Center for Disease Control and Prevention did in those critical…
2020: The report that shed light on Chinese delivery drivers’ appalling working conditions
Since there are no trade unions, Chinese delivery workers cannot fight against the time allotted by the platform’s algorithms, and have to resort to dangerous practices to ensure on-time delivery, which causes traffic accidents, some fatal.
2023: “White Paper protests” — How extreme Covid-19 measures led Chinese youth to the streets
This story is about a group of friends in China experiencing the stringent lockdowns and restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The oppressive measures, including enforced citywide quarantines and mass testing, have led to feelings of frustration and despair, provoking the white paper revolution. Central to the narrative are personal stories of friends Yan Liu, a…
2024: A mother’s pursuit of justice for her son beaten to death by police
In 2018, police officers took unconscious Sun Renze to the hospital in Yining City, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and claimed he had choked on water while in custody. Sun died 43 days later. An autopsy, carried out after repeated requests from his mother, revealed multiple organ failure likely caused by external injuries as a result…
Copyright statement: All copyrights of the investigative reports collected and translated by Circle 19 belong to the original authors, who may request the withdrawal of their work at any time. As most of these pieces have already been censored in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Circle 19 is largely promoting them without the convenience of contacting their authors. This is a not-for-profit website: no remuneration is received, directly or indirectly, from the website viewers.