China outcry grows over beating death of reporter
Source: Reuters
(Adds details about police inquiry in paragraph 3) By Chris Buckley BEIJING, Jan 17 (Reuters) - Chinese police are trailing the suspected killers of a reporter beaten while probing the country's deadly coal mines, media reported on Wednesday amid an outcry about media rights in the one-party state. Lan Chengzhang, who worked for the China Trade News, died of an apparent brain haemorrhage on Jan. 10 after he was beaten along with his taxi driver while visiting a mine in Hunyuan county in the northern province of Shanxi, an editor with the paper told Reuters. "The coal mine owner sent more than 20 thugs in their twenties from Datong to beat up the two men," a police detective told the official Xinhua news agency. Datong is a dusty city at the heart of Shanxi's booming coal industry. Communist Party censors strictly control the Chinese press, but even state-controlled media have seized on Lan's death, raising questions about local officials' conduct, Lan's motives, and the rights of the country's beleaguered reporters. "For a reporter to be beaten to death is undoubtedly a major event in a world that venerates democracy and freedom of information," said a comment on the Web site of the Southern Daily (www.southerncn.com). "Any country that even slightly values citizens' right to know and freedom of the press would actively and appropriately investigate and deal with this case." Shanxi officials have said Lan was not an accredited reporter and suggested he might have been seeking payoffs in return for not reporting problems at the mine, the China Youth Daily said. "THUGS" But the Trade News editor-in-chief said Lan was "certainly a real reporter" and Chinese newspapers said Lan's lack of official approval was no excuse to beat him. "I don't know whether Lan Chengzhang was reporting or blackmailing, but it is ignorant and disgraceful to absolve thugs of responsibility by citing blackmail," commented the Southern Metropolitan Daily, a tabloid based in Guangzhou, on Wednesday. The Trade News' chief reporter in Shanxi, who gave his surname as Chang, said officials from China's official journalists association were there investigating Lan's death. "We take the issue seriously, and after we got the information, we sent staff to investigate," Li Cunhou, the Communist Party secretary of the association, told Reuters. "If it concerned a real journalist, we will protect his rights and deal with the issue severely." Shanxi has assigned 70 police officers to investigate the beating and death, Xinhua reported. Chinese journalists who went to investigate Lan's death were blocked by police from entering the hospital where he died, igniting a clash between reporters and police, it said. China's coal mines are the deadliest of any major producer, and Shanxi is a focus of official efforts to reduce fatalities. A total of 4,746 Chinese coal miners were killed in about 3,000 blasts, floods and other accidents last year, down 20.1 percent from 2005, the State Work Safety Supervision Administration said last week. In 2006, prosecutors in Shanxi investigated 135 people for dereliction of safety duties linked to mine accidents and 66 were convicted, Xinhua said. An official in the Hunyuan local government said he had heard of the death but knew no details. He said the county had shut down all unlicensed mines. (Additional reporting by Guo Shipeng and Vivi Lin)
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