INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS
SOCIAL JUSTICE
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…
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: 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…
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.…