THREE YEARS AGO, Xinhua journalist Gao Xinrong happened to be travelling by train when he overheard fellow passengers angrily discussing a 200 million yuan irrigation scheme built by the Communist Party leaders of Yuncheng, a drought-stricken prefecture in the south of Shanxi province. Intrigued, the 43-year-old veteran reporter went to investigate and discovered a scam of enormous proportions. Armed with the evidence of interviews and hundreds of photographs, he showed how the money had been wasted by building thousands of water cisterns for an irrigation scheme that never existed. He sent a report to Beijing, where it was published in Internal Reference News, the secret newspaper read by China's rulers. As chief of the department of political and legal affairs of Xinhua's Shanxi bureau, Gao expected to be praised for answering President Jiang Zemin's national appeal for an urgent fight against corruption. 'He did not think about his own safety. He was very righteous and confident that he could expose the dark side,' says his wife Duan Maoying, as tears pour down her face. The response was swift. The party's Central Disciplinary Inspection Committee sent a team of investigators, who detained Gao. In April last year, a Yuncheng court sentenced him to 13 years in prison, on charges his family says were fabricated. In its annual report this year, the international Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said 19 journalists were imprisoned last year on the mainland, and condemned the country's record on press freedom as the worst in the world. Organisations like the CPJ or the World Association of Newspapers, which regularly single out China's record, report the repression of those who start up Web sites or try to publish without permission. Yet even official mainland journalists say they are beaten or even tortured when they expose local corruption. 'It is a problem when reporters encounter bad and corrupt local leaders,' says veteran Xinhua journalist Dai Huang. 'Although Premier Zhu Rongji said journalists should uphold justice, some of them are persecuted so they dare not speak out. 'I don't know how many are in prison, but things are much worse than the 1980s when Hu Yaobang was secretary general.' Gao's case is as revealing about the impunity of local officials as it is about press freedom. When the 4.3 million people in Yuncheng were struck by drought in 1995, most peasants lost their crops, apart from those in two villages which had built themselves a series of water pipes and cisterns to irrigate their orchards and fields. When Shanxi's vice-governor, Wang Xuewen, went on an inspection tour, he praised them and triggered what local press started calling 'a new Great Leap Forward movement'. The local party officials declared that within a year, about 66,500 hectares would be irrigated in the same way, and by the end of the century, the project would irrigate six times as much land, about 70 per cent of the total farmland. The whole district was mobilised in a frenzy of construction as the local party secretary, Huang Youquan, made Yuncheng a national model for water conservancy. As visitors arrived from around the country to learn from its achievements in using scarce water, Yuncheng hoped to host a national meeting on water conservancy. Local newspapers reported astounding achievements. The Yuncheng Daily reported that 67,000 tanks covering about 46,000 hectares had been built in six months. One district boasted of building 5,000 water tanks in a month while one township said it had completed an irrigation network extending over thousands of hectares in just 10 days. The local officials ordered that most of the water tanks should be built alongside roads so they could be visible to visitors. But Gao, a loyal party member who had joined the PLA in his youth, visited eight out the district's 10 counties and was shocked to find that, impressive as the tanks were from afar, upon close inspection, they were nothing but theatrical props. No channels connected the cisterns to any water reservoir and there were no pipes taking water into the fields. 'One midnight, we received a very threatening anonymous call,' recalls Duan Maoying, Gao's wife. 'I tried to persuade him not to report his story, to think of his daughter.' Once before, Gao had lost his job for exposing the nepotism practised by a corrupt cadre. This time he again went ahead. His story ran in the Internal Reference News and in the People's Daily. Soon, a team from the provincial and local Central Disciplinary Inspection Committee detained him for questioning. 'They kept asking him the same questions: what his motives were and what his sources were. He would not reveal his sources because he had seen these things for himself,' Ms Duan says. At first Gao was not detained, and went to Beijing to further expose the story. Southern Weekend, published in Guangdong, ran his article in which he named names, including those of two key officials from the provincial Central Discipline Inspection Committee. The Youth Daily, Peasant's Daily and Legal Daily carried stories and the People's Daily twice sent journalists to investigate and interview experts who confirmed that the reported achievements were bogus. China Central Television (CCTV) programmes Jiaodian Fangtan and News Investigation responded too. When a TV crew from News Investigation first arrived in Yuncheng, officials refused to meet them, while agents dogged their steps and monitored their phone calls. Back in Beijing, the programme-makers were besieged by officials pleading with them not to make a report. In the autumn of 1998, the TV journalists returned, this time secretly, hiring transport in Luoyang in the neighbouring province of Henan. The programme eventually aired two 30-minute documentaries - a devastating exposure of the folly and corruption at work in Yuncheng. Journalists showed how the brick cisterns were overgrown with grass, or had been dismantled. A reporter pulled pipes out of the ground showing how they were connected only to pieces of wood. The camera caught one township chief yelling at local peasants: 'You will see how I will punish you if you say something that I don't want to hear and something that is not good for me!' The peasants, however, kept insisting that the scheme had never worked, although they had been required to pay to build the cisterns. The CCTV team finally managed to interview local Party Secretary Huang Youquan, who was cornered into confessing on tape that there had been some exaggeration. 'The project was good but we didn't calculate properly how much [land] could be irrigated,' he said. He said he had tried to finish the project in six months, in time for a national water conservancy conference. Mr Huang reacted with fury to the TV documentaries and ordered the arrest of Gao's friends to extract damaging allegations which could lead to his punishment, according to Goa's wife, who says some of their friends were held for 15 days until they submitted allegations. Gao then went to seek help from the Central Discipline Inspection Committee, but a posse of police officers sent from Yuncheng seized him in Beijing on December 8, 1998. Gao's one-day trial took place in Yuncheng on April 29 last year. A crowd of more than 200 visitors as well as his wife had gathered outside. All were excluded from the court. Secret police had surrounded her house and her phone had been bugged to prevent her from contacting the press, she says. Gao was sentenced to 13 years in prison on charges of embezzlement, bribery and pimping. 'My husband told me, 'Don't worry, everything will be all right,' because he thought he had done nothing wrong, just answering the party's call to fight corruption,' Ms Duan says. 'We've sent material to Jiang Zemin but I don't think he received it. But I still hope that if he does, then he will investigate.' Writing from prison, Gao expresses his bewilderment: 'I never thought things would turn out this way. It is strange that under the leadership of today's Communist Party, such things can still happen. 'Corrupt cadres are closely linked together with lawyers. They have formed a stronghold to prevent the attacks from inside and outside the party and the people. Whoever is against them, they use their power to take revenge.' The national press, which had previously supported his cause, has now been ordered to stop reporting the case. When his wife went to CCTV to ask for help, she says she was told: 'They all support each other, and one of the high ups is protecting Huang. You can never underestimate the power of local officials.' Local party chief Mr Huang is still in power and local officials insist the project is working well - even in a year when no rain has fallen. 'The irrigation scheme is performing well,' a Yuncheng official, who identified himself only as Mr Li, told the Post. 'I can't say exactly how much area is being irrigated but this is a huge and good project.' Jasper Becker ( jasper@a-1.net.cn ) is the Post's Beijing bureau chief
