3/14/01 17:26

On March 6, an explosion leveled a small primary school in the Chinese town of Fanglin, killing 38 children and four teachers. The surrounding county is a center of fireworks production, and many people who live in the town, including other pupils and parents, say that the children were forced to make fireworks in the classrooms. The students were literally sitting atop a powder keg, and the safety standards in Chinese fireworks factories are appalling. Parents had complained to higher authorities many times. Regardless of what the exact cause of the explosion was, it was an accident waiting to happen.

That's about all we know about this incident, and probably all we'll ever know. There will be no forensic investigation; the school has already been bulldozed. The reason this tragedy can't be faced head-on is simple -- it occurred during a meeting of the National People's Congress, China's legislature. While this is largely a rubber-stamp body, delegates do occasionally raise awkward questions in full view of the world's media. So this emotive issue -- involving the state's inadequate funding for education and failure to protect children -- had to be hushed up, and the government mobilized all of its resources to that end.

But the local newspapers and Internet news sites are much faster than the government these days. They reported details of the fireworks operation before the propaganda department could implement "news discipline" -- i.e. censorship. So a news blackout wasn't good enough. The [party's name ommited] had to come up with an alternate story, to wit: A local oddball nicknamed "Psycho" entered the school with a bomb and blew it up, taking his own life along with those of the children.

For this disinformation job, the party recruited its most credible spokesman, Premier Zhu Rongji, a man with a reputation as a straight shooter. He appeared before Hong Kong reporters last Thursday and claimed that the school had never been used as a fireworks factory. And on the theory that the best defense is a good offense, on Monday the Foreign Ministry spokesman lashed out at the foreign and local media who had interviewed local witnesses by telephone and reported what they found, finding them guilty of violating "the professional ethics of journalism."

The party is overconfident of its ultimate ability to stage-manage coverage of this event. It did score a big victory against the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement in January when state media showed footage of five people seeming to be setting themselves on fire on Tiananmen Square. The propaganda machine claimed that they were Falun Gong members, and then showed interviews with bed-ridden hospital patients, supposedly the survivors, who professed belief in the movement. No outside reporters were allowed to meet with these survivors to corroborate the story. Nevertheless, the media campaign turned the tide of public opinion decisively against the Falun Gong "[Chinese government's slanderous word]"

So far the government's "psycho" story seems to be having some success, too. The authorities have produced a "wanted" poster of the alleged madman who blew up the school, even though he is supposedly dead. Usually reliable news sites like Sina.com have been forced to take down the stories about the students making fireworks. A large proportion of the mainland public seems to have accepted, at least for now, Mr. Zhu's explanation.

But it will be interesting to see whether this is true a week from now or a month from now. The spread of reliable witness accounts from Fanglin Village will be facilitated by the Internet, whether or not the most popular sites carry them. The network of "back alley information" will take these accounts from electronic vendors to most homes. It's hard to escape the conclusion that Premier Zhu has picked a fight with an opponent in a much higher weight class. His credibility, which could have come in handy in a crisis, will be forever tarnished with the public. That's because the country has come a long way since August 1975, when the collapse of shoddy dams on the Huai River, which killed up to 230,000 people, was concealed from everybody but local residents. It became widely known 20 years later, and today the 1975 disaster is often cited by Chinese opponents of the Three Gorges Dam. Even small disasters can no longer be covered up, meaning that accountability is increasing.

The press is far from free, but there are some very courageous journalists who expose official corruption or negligence at considerable risk to themselves. Sometimes the story has a happy ending, both for the journalists and the public interest. For example, after the collapse of a shopping mall last December in the Guangdong town of Dongguan, the local authorities tried to cover up the number of dead. After local media published contradictory reports, the central government got involved and the officials were punished for negligence.

In other cases, journalists haven't gotten many thanks. Reporter Gao Qinrong exposed a fake water project constructed by corrupt officials in Shanxi Province, and his story was picked up by the national media. But the officials succeeded in getting him sentenced to 13 years in prison, which he is now serving. After a massive explosion in downtown Urumqi last year, local journalists broke the story that a military truck carrying explosives, not a terrorist bomb as initially suspected, was the cause. The two reporters were fired and an editor demoted for violating "news discipline."

The Fanglin school explosion could prove to be a seminal political event in China, the latest step in a steady evolution. People's Daily writer Liu Binyan pioneered investigative journalism in the 1980s, and today CCTV's "Jiaodian Fangtan" program breaks some stories of corruption. While many journalists are on the take, others take up the cases of people who were wronged and have exhausted all other avenues of seeking justice. That the government had to throw up roadblocks around Fanglin village to keep out the reporters is a good indication of how things have changed. Premier Zhu will need to take some quick lessons in spin from his Western counterparts if he wants to regain his lost credibility.