【观点】| Insight

For Sale

By Jointing.Media,  in Shanghai, 2024-11-08

The wind is on the rise and it’s autumn again. It’s Journalists’ Day. But there are no real journalists left in our lives.

It is incomprehensible that this article was completely deleted from the Simplified Chinese website. In this article, which is not subject to review, the words ‘institution of evil’ and ’system of evil’ do not even appear. JM still believe that our country is on the road to freedom and democracy. Having been taught from childhood that ‘it is the responsibility of a citizen to take care of the prosperity and decline of my country’ and ‘to take care of all the affairs of my own family, our country and the world’. What is wrong with pointing out the problems in today’s society? You can’t hide the truth or make your life better by hiding it. Just as you can’t cure an illness by hiding it.

In a way, the legalisation of the fight against corruption in recent years is an acknowledgement that our system needs to be improved and changed. However, the current approach fails to address both the symptoms and the causes of the problem. But in fact, the people do not care about this kind of ‘represented’ political life environment, nor are they able to change it, the people only look at the most affordable – their own life is good or not. If it is good, the system is good; if it is bad, the system is bad.

After the old case of a stallholder accidentally killing an urban management officer in 2006, we learned that China did not have a comprehensive urban management law. It was only in August 2017, 10 years after the incident, that the State Council issued the Measures for the Investigation and Punishment of Unlicensed and Unauthorised Operations, which took effect on 1 October 2017. Since then, the stall has had a legal status. In the aftermath of the Covid-19 epidemic, with people’s livelihoods in jeopardy, the ‘night-time economy’ was once again championed by the government, and street vendors proliferated as far as the eye could see.

Looking back a little further, there is “China’s First Seller”, known as “Fool Melon Seeds”. If Deng Xiaoping had not recognised his innovations and instructed the local community not to punish him, it is difficult to know where the founder of ‘Fool Melon Seeds’ would have ended up. Deng Xiaoping said: “In the early days of rural reform, Anhui produced a ‘fool melon seed’, and many people were uncomfortable at the time, saying that he had earned one million yuan and advocating that he should be moved. If I say I can’t move, people will say the policy has changed and the gains outweigh the losses.

The industry of investigative journalism first emerged in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is closely associated with the “muckraker” movement, in which the journalist Lincoln Stephens wrote “The Shame of the Cities”, which exposed social problems and corruption in power. The period 1902-1912 is known in American history as the “golden age” of the muckraking movement, during which the social status of investigative journalists was established and widely recognised. In China, investigative journalists began to appear in the 1990s and gradually became an important group in the Chinese press. In 2019, Liu Wanyong, a well-known investigative journalist, submitted his resignation to the China Youth Daily. At that time, the whole industry was evaluated: the last investigative reporter left the Chinese traditional media.

Edited by Wind and DeepL

Photo by Sacima | Autumn Colours in the American West（2024）

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