The investigative journalism boom had emerged from a propitious alignment of political and social conditions. The consequences may be ruinous to the leadership’s aspirations for China to become an economic superpower.

The diminished spirit threatens to stifle innovation, professionalism and the long-held “can-do” ethos among the Chinese. State oppression has decimated civil society and negated years of social progress, casting a pall on the public mood. Having suffered a decline as rapid as their rise, muckraking journalists feel lost.Īnd these sentiments are widespread, felt beyond the world of journalism. One casualty is investigative journalism. More than five years into President Xi Jinping’s rule, the more insidious implications of his authoritarian revival are coming into focus. The newspaper’s journalists, heralding the new era, wrote in a 1999 editorial that investigative journalism should “give power to the powerless, and motivate the pessimists to march on.”īut we don’t hear that pledge, or anything like it, today. National politics, which had disappeared from public conversations after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, again felt immediate and personal.Ī middle school student at the time, I spent weekend afternoons poring over Southern Weekly, the standard-bearer of investigative journalism, devouring exposés of urban crimes and corporate scandals, a reality that was worlds apart from my cocooned life in a university neighborhood. BEIJING - As unfettered capitalism reached a fever pitch in China in the early 2000s, a boom in investigative journalism was hailed as the most salient example of growing citizen power.

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