Guerrilla Tactics of Investigative Journalists in China

[From 1st paragraph] Thanks to socio-economic and political change in China, investigative reporting had emerged as a new genre of Chinese journalism by the 1990s. Both the Party and the people seemed to welcome its rise (Zhao, 1998, 2000). This tendency reached its peak in 2003, when both domestic and foreign media hailed coverage of several important stories, especially the SARS epidemic and the Sun Zhigang event, as a breakthrough in Chinese journalism. Such stories were often covered first and best by Southern Metropolis Daily (nanfang dushi bao), which became very popular for its tough investigative reporting on social issues and dodgy doings by local officials.