Reporter confined by county official

An official with the land and resources bureau of Nanpi county in Hebei province confined a journalist who was investigating a land-seizure case.

The reporter was released unharmed after six hours, and the incident is under investigation.

Xue Wenyuan, the bureau's office director, spoke and behaved inappropriately to a journalist from China Newsweek, according to documents delivered to the magazine by the bureau on Dec 27.

The decision to investigate Xue was made on the evening of Dec 26, after the land and resources office in Cangzhou city, which oversees the county bureau, formally requested an investigation into the case.

The announcement came several hours after China Newsweek said on its micro blog that its reporter was detained by Xue while looking into an illegal land-seizure case in the county. The micro blog post was forwarded more than 61,000 times within hours.

Xu Zhihui, 35, the reporter whom Xue confined, told China Daily on Dec 27 that he was held for nearly six hours.

Xu said he had been followed by two men since Dec 25 while he was covering the story at the Nanpi county countryside.

The two men invited him on the morning of Dec 26 to visit the office of Nanpi county's land and resources bureau, promising to explain the land-seizure case to him and provide him with detailed data, the reporter said.

However, after Xu followed them to the bureau's office, he did not get any information about the case. Instead, Xue, the office director, gave him 10,000 yuan ($1,600) in cash and begged him to stop reporting on it.

Xu said that he refused to accept the money and was ready to leave the official's office, but was stopped by two men who said that he must take the money and agree to stop reporting the story.

Unable to leave the office, Xu tried to persuade the official to let him go. During that time, he was tightly monitored.

"Even when I went to the bathroom, there were two men standing on both sides of me," he said.

About an hour later, Xue and several other officials took the reporter to lunch and tried to persuade him to drink liquor.

"I think they were trying to get me drunk and to misbehave, so I kept a clear mind and had only a little liquor out of politeness," the reporter said. "The two officials shared two bottles of liquor."

After lunch, Xue offered more money — 20,000 yuan — which Xu refused.

"I closely watched my bag in case they put the money in it," he said.

After the reporter again refused to accept the money, Xue made a phone call to Liu Wanyuan, Xu's editor and a member of the editorial board of China Newsweek, asking her to withdraw the news report.

The official even made a written statement, at Liu's request, in which he said that the county's land resources bureau "didn't need news media to publish any report".

The statement, with the stamp of the county's land resources bureau, was faxed to Liu.

The official called Liu "sister" and promised to give her money. He told Liu in the phone: "You name a price, 50,000 or 100,000 yuan?"

Xue said he would release the reporter if Liu accepted the money and if the news magazine killed the story.

"I told him that I would not bargain with him, and he must release the reporter without any conditions," Liu told China Daily on Dec 27.

After Liu's demand that Xue release the reporter was ignored, Liu exposed the situation on her micro blog at about 4:25 pm.

Xue's written statement was uploaded by Liu onto her micro blog, attracting the attention of thousands of netizens who forwarded the post.

China Newsweek also exposed the issue on its verified micro blog, calling for the public to express concern for the reporter's safety.

At about 5:30 pm, an official surnamed Guo, who identified himself as the deputy director of the county's publicity department, came to Xue's office and asked the reporter whether China Newsweek could delete its micro-blog posts on the issue.

"I became not so worried about my safety after the publicity official's arrival because it showed that the public had expressed its concern about the issue through micro blogs," the reporter said.

Xu said he was escorted by the bureau officials to the railway station at about 6:30, and he reached Beijing safely that night.

An official from Nanpi county's land and resources bureau told China Daily that Xue's office was locked on the morning of Dec 27, and he did not show up that morning.

"There was no official paper released about whether Xue was removed or not," the official said on condition of anonymity.

China Daily could not reach Xue for comment on Dec 27.

The Cangzhou city's land and resource bureau said in an announcement on its website that the bureau is going to investigate the land seizure case involved with Xue.

Liu Xiaoying, a professor of media research at the Communication University of China, said that it was the micro blog that attracted the public's interest in the issue and finally led to the release of the reporter.

"Although the reporters' right of disclosing the truth was guaranteed by the law, they are always harassed or even attacked when covering negative news," he said.

The micro blog made the issue more transparent to the public, and as a result, the government could not misbehave, he said.