INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS
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…
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…
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…
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: 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.
2015: The documentary that exposed China’s air pollution crisis
Title: Under The Dome Director: Chai Jing Release date: 2015 Duration: 124 min Language: Mandarin Subtitles: Simplified Chinese; English, Spanish, French, German or Japanese. “Under the Dome” By Chai Jing “Under the Dome” (2015), directed by investigative journalist Chai Jing, confronts China’s escalating air pollution crisis with unflinching clarity. Through powerful visuals and hard-hitting investigations,…
2016: The documentary that triggered China’s waste import ban
Title: Plastic China Director: Wang Jiuliang Release date: 2016 Duration: 82 min Language: Mandarin Subtitles: English “Plastic China” By Wang Jiuliang “Plastic China” (2016), directed by filmmaker Wang Jiuliang, takes an unfiltered look at the lives of two Chinese families who survive by recycling plastic waste imported from developed countries to be treated and recycled…
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.…