Some thoughts from our sometime intern and current student of International Affairs at Tsinghua University, Mike West:
Last Sunday night I sat down with my girlfriend to enjoy an evening of unadulterated, brain-rotting Chinese television. After back-to-back episodes of a Song-dynasty murder mystery (大宋题型官 Da Song Tixingguan if anybody’s interested), the impulse to channel-hop took over and I soon found myself gripped by a real-life murder case, only this time the mystery was why such inflammatory viewing was being broadcast on Phoenix TV to a prime time audience of tens and possibly even hundreds of millions Chinese.
The program I’m referring to, of course, is ‘’Wentao Investigates’’ (文涛拍案, Wen Tao Paian) in which the popular television presenter devoted his thirty minute program entirely to the brutal beating to death of the citizen reporter/’martyr’ Wei Wenhua, who died at the hands of local security forces in Tianmen, Hubei province on January 7 as reported earlier on this website. The episode was broadcast at 8 pm on Phoenix TV on January 13 less than a week after Wei’s tragic death.
The highly emotive documentary, which seethed with silent anger, had me clinging to the edge of the sofa from start to finish. It began with detailed background on the garbage dispute in Tianmen (the Chinese for which is ironically the same as Tiananmen but without the character for ‘peace’ sandwiched in the middle), the filming of which led to Wei being mortally pummelled. Before long the program turned to footage of the incident that Wei filmed, pictures of bloodied people beaten by the security forces, and a poignant montage of lingering stills of the family including one of a beaming, besuited Wei framed by a wreath taken at the funeral wake. There followed the inevitable barrage of excoriation from his niece who was an eyewitness to the sordid incident. However, despite this the content of the documentary was strictly objective, making viewing all the more poignantly compelling.
The harrowing documentary of what people have started to refer to the ‘Tianmen incident’ made a number of new revelations. When Wei was dragged from his car, his niece claimed that he had told the emforcement officers who killed him that he would hand over and delete the film he had recorded. Among the last words uttered from his smashed mouth were “I surrender.” And, when his family paraded his lifeless body in front of the offices of the town government, the corpse was snatched by plain-clothes enforcement officers who dragged it out of sight so hastily they accidently ripped off Wei’s underwear. Perhaps most powerfully the documentary repeatedly hammered home the point that the 41-year old engineer and general manager of the local Water Resources Bureau was a loyal Party member.
This last revelation would appear directly calculated to heap opprobrium on the lawlessness and thuggery of powerful local officials who mete out such beatings with impunity probably on a daily basis in China’s hinterlands. Given this Communist country’s iron grip on the official media, which has a monopoly on news in China, such a program would have required Central government approval from the Ministry of Propaganda. Moreover, all journalists in important editorial posts double as Party members who scrupulously check, recheck and check again every program. It is impossible for minor politically incorrect transgressions to slip through the censor’s net, to say nothing of a program like this. However the real significance of Sunday’s documentary lies in the fact that it was broadcast on Phoenix TV which has a growing audience of over a hundred million Chinese, especially in Southern China where the Tianmen Incident unfolded (the Hong Kong-based television station Phoenix, owned by Rupert Murdoch, is notoriously sensitive about upsetting the Chinese government). Whether media pressure will end in the timely bringing to justice of Wei’s murderers and his widow’s request for Wei Wenhua to be given the title of a ‘martyr’ remains to be seen and will be an important test for China’s embryonic civil society.