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 《经济家》杂志文章：一个令中国企业界生畏的女人 |
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wanderer
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作者：wanderer 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
《财经》杂志主编 胡舒立
Keeping An Eye On Business
May 27th 2004
How scared should corporate China be of Hu Shuli?
HU SHULI rushes in late, hair dishevelled, a notebook falling out of her bag. Beaming and offering Chinese tea, the 51-year-old breathlessly explains that she was at lunch with John Thornton, former president of Goldman Sachs and now a professor at Tsinghua University. An ex-editor of the International Herald Tribune is about to drop by. She has an edition to put out.
The editor of the twice-monthly (soon weekly) Caijing magazine—the name means finance and business—brims with the excitement of a genuine news-hound. China's shift towards a market economy has triggered a wave of corruption and business scandals. In the past few weeks alone, D'Long, a big private conglomerate, has run into financial difficulties; Lucent has fired its top four China managers, alleging that they took bribes; and the government has arrested the entire senior management of a steel plant near Shanghai for “illegal” expansion. “In China there is more news than journalists—it is the opposite of the West,” says Ms Hu. “We are the world's luckiest reporters.”
As the news flow has increased, so has the freedom of Chinese journalists to report it. The market is still dominated by state-owned papers such as the People's Daily and the Worker's Daily that regurgitate government propaganda. But gradual deregulation of the media has allowed several feisty, relatively independent publications to spring up. Caijing is the best-known.
Founded in 1998 and owned by a group of Chinese intellectuals—notably Wang Boming, the son of a former deputy foreign minister—who earlier helped to set up China's stockmarkets, Caijing combines investigative reporting with the sort of critical commentary that a decade ago would have landed its journalists in jail. A story on investment funds a few years ago was so hard-hitting that Ms Hu was dubbed “the most dangerous woman in China”. The magazine (which in the past has had a joint publishing deal with The Economist Group) has a circulation of 80,000 and 40 journalists crowded into a dingy office in Beijing. But thanks to the deep pockets of its parent, SEEC, which Mr Wang wants to build into China's biggest print media group, Ms Hu has the country's biggest editorial budget per journalist. Thus, she pays her writers well, discouraging them from the normal practice among Chinese journalists of accepting envelopes full of money from firms in return for favourable write-ups.
Caijing's mission is to stop China, as it lurches towards the market, from succumbing to the crony capitalism widespread in Asia. “We want to influence decision-makers, not reflect what they think. That makes us very different from the official papers that write what they are told to and the commercial papers, which pander to readers. We suggest solutions,” says Ms Hu.
This editorial mission regularly pushes at the boundaries of China's still-limited press freedom. Judging exactly how hard to push has, so far, been one of Ms Hu's greatest strengths. Having spent a decade at the Worker's Daily, she knows how the official media work. Several stints in America, including a year at Stanford University, taught her about the power of a free media. In 1991, she wrote the first book in Chinese on the principles of American journalism. This, and powerful friends (she counts Wu Jinglian, China's top economist, among her mentors), have honed Ms Hu's instincts when it comes to assessing whether Caijing's latest scoop will push the authorities too far. It is a skill she will increasingly need as she takes Caijing beyond financial scandals into more dangerous territory—commenting on government policy. The Falun Gong sect and the Tiananmen Square protests are off limits, she says. Mostly she can “just feel” if a story will be too controversial. Last year, she ran reports about Beijing's cover-up of the SARS epidemic, for example. These won her many plaudits—yet she reserved her severest criticisms until after the government publicly admitted its errors, and fired its minister of health and the mayor of Beijing.
She is a risk-taker, nonetheless, boasting that Caijing has even lost two court cases. (But she denies a rumour that the magazine was pulled from the news-stands for a story on a Shanghai property magnate, Zhou Zhengyi.) Getting sued in China is easy for a paper. A single mistake in an article can lead to prosecution for “false reporting”: judges typically decide for a plaintiff unless a publication can prove that its entire article is true. But, so far, Caijing has avoided the fate of the Southern Metropolitan Daily, a tabloid in Guangdong province. In March, its editor-in-chief and general manager were jailed on bribery charges, in what appears to be retaliation for aggressive reporting on the SARS cover-up.
Don't publish and be damned
A degree of self-censorship may be the only pragmatic way to operate in China today. But it does raise questions about how deep Caijing's independence goes. Perhaps Caijing is being tolerated—or even used—by the authorities as a safety valve: criticising certain scandals and corruption cases that the public is already aware of, and angry about, but letting the really big fish off the hook and the most sensitive issues go unreported. If so—and Ms Hu denies it—Caijing may be contributing to the maintenance of a system it says it is trying to change.
Meanwhile, even as Ms Hu admonishes her subordinates at Caijing to print only “facts, facts, facts”, she notes that increased press freedom has meant that more and more Chinese newspapers are happy to publish rumours and gossip dressed up as news. With falling financial support from the state, magazines are having to compete ever harder for readers and investment. Caijing is feeling the heat, with circulation flat and imitators nipping at its heels. Ms Hu says that the sweeping redesigns of desperate editors are not for her. Yet she worries that she should care more about “commercial things like the cover art”. In the end, her biggest challenge as an editor may be one familiar to her western counterparts—resisting the pressure to dumb down.
作者：wanderer 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 《经济家》杂志文章：一个令中国企业界生畏的女人 -- wanderer - (6297 Byte) 2004-5-29 周六, 06:47 (2265 reads)
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