About New Express

New Express

New Express, known in Chinese as Xin Kuai Bao, is a Chinese-language daily newspaper published in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, by the Guangdong New Express agency under the Yangcheng Evening News Group. Founded on 30 March 1998, it was the first comprehensive daily newspaper in China to be printed entirely in colour, and it is counted as one of Guangzhou's three major daily newspapers, with influence across Guangdong and mainland China. A tabloid aimed at middle-class urban readers, New Express built a national reputation for investigative reporting — a reputation that also brought it into repeated conflict with the authorities, most famously in the Chen Yongzhou case of 2013, when its front-page campaign for a detained reporter made headlines around the world.

Founding and format

New Express was launched on 30 March 1998 as a spin-off of Guangzhou's Yangcheng Evening News, the group's flagship, which had been founded on 1 October 1957. It was published with a Chinese unified serial number of CN44-0180 and distributed across Guangdong Province. Directory listings describe it as a large-format provincial comprehensive daily of about 40 quarto pages a day, sold for one yuan. Its full-colour printing was a genuine first in the Chinese newspaper industry in 1998 and helped mark it out on Guangzhou newsstands. The paper's headquarters are in the Yangcheng Creative Industry Park at 315 Huangpu Avenue, Tianhe District, Guangzhou. Chinese reference sources record that the paper is supervised and sponsored by the Yangcheng Evening News Group while being actually operated by the Kingold Group, with the group's party secretary Liu Hongbing serving as the paper's president and Sun Xuan as editor-in-chief in recent listings.

An overseas edition in Australia

The New Express brand was also exported. On 30 June 2004, the Yangcheng Evening News Group and the Kingold Group jointly launched the Australian New Express in Sydney, a comprehensive Chinese-language daily newspaper published in Australia. The venture showed how a Guangzhou metropolitan title, barely six years old, had become a brand its owners believed could serve Chinese-speaking readers overseas as well as the Pearl River Delta readership at home.

A reputation for investigative reporting

Through the 2000s, New Express became known for what Chinese journalists call depth reporting. In March 2008 the Communication University of China Press published Depth Sunshine, a 325-page collection of ten of the paper's investigative cases, edited by the newspaper's own editorial committee. The book's foreword recalls the pressure surrounding the paper's autumn 2003 reporting on the case of Japanese tourists involved in a collective prostitution scandal in Zhuhai, which drew harsh criticism from authorities at the highest level even though, the paper maintained, the reported facts were accurate. Former reporters describe the paper as having produced cutting-edge reports on the melamine-tainted milk scandal, the controversial Three Gorges hydroelectric project and the 2011 high-speed rail crash. That record made New Express one of the Guangdong titles most watched by China media observers.

The removal of Lu Fumin in 2012

In July 2012, the paper's editor-in-chief, Lu Fumin, was removed from his post and moved sideways to a position of equal rank on the political and cultural news desk of the parent Yangcheng Evening News. The China Media Project reported that the move followed the paper's decision to re-run, on 10 July 2012, a full-page article from Jinan Daily exploring the origins as "educated youth" of several serving Politburo members, including the presumed president-in-waiting Xi Jinping; the page, A23, disappeared from the electronic edition's page list. The newspaper appeared in truncated form, without most of its sections, for a second day running, and media insiders spoke of a complete overhaul of New Express that would focus it more on entertainment coverage and less on hard news. The episode took place months before the 18th Party Congress leadership transition, in a period of tightened control over the Guangdong press.

Another reporter detained: Liu Hu

Chen Yongzhou was not the first New Express journalist to be detained in 2013. In August that year, Liu Hu, another reporter with the newspaper, was taken away by Beijing police after he posted accusations online against a former senior official in Chongqing. The two detentions, weeks apart, made the Guangzhou tabloid a recurring subject of international reporting on the risks faced by Chinese investigative journalists, and they form the immediate background to the paper's extraordinary front pages that October.

The Chen Yongzhou case

Chen Yongzhou, a New Express journalist for about four years, wrote a series of reports — 15 articles published between September 2012 and June 2013, by the count used by the Committee to Protect Journalists — questioning the revenue and profit figures of Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science and Technology, China's second-largest construction machinery maker. The reports alleged exaggerated profits, false financial reporting, abnormal sales practices and losses of state assets at the company, which is partly owned by the Hunan provincial government, its largest shareholder with about one-sixth of the shares, and which was listed in Hong Kong and Shenzhen with a market capitalisation of more than eight billion US dollars. Zoomlion filed a complaint with police in its home city of Changsha in September 2013. On 17 October 2013, according to the Chinese account of the case, Chen and his wife were told by police to attend a Guangzhou police station to supplement materials about a burglary at their home a month earlier; on 18 October he was taken into custody there by officers from Changsha, some 700 kilometres away, on suspicion of damaging the company's business reputation.

"Please release him"

After attempts to secure Chen's release behind closed doors failed, New Express did something almost unheard of in Chinese journalism. On Wednesday 23 October 2013 it filled its front page with an appeal in oversized black characters: "Please release him." The editors said they had thoroughly vetted Chen's stories and found only one factual error, and that responsible reporting should not lead to criminal prosecution. The next day the paper repeated the demand — "Again we ask for his release" — arguing that everything must be resolved within the framework of the law and that police could not detain first and rationalise charges later. The Yangcheng Evening News Group's leadership said it was closely following the case and hoped the dispute would be handled strictly according to law. Censors moved against the story, and the editorial was taken down from major news portals by midday, but photographs of the front pages had already circulated worldwide.

Confession, apology and overhaul

The campaign collapsed within days. On 26 October 2013, Chen appeared on the state broadcaster CCTV, in handcuffs and with his head shaved, confessing that he had taken money from an unnamed middleman — he spoke of 500,000 yuan — to publish stories written by someone else, without verifying them. On Sunday 27 October, New Express published a front-page apology, much smaller than its appeals, saying a preliminary police investigation had found Chen had published numerous false reports for money, that the paper had not carefully reviewed his articles, and that the affair had taught it a profound lesson; it pledged to rectify its problems and strengthen management of its editorial staff. China's press regulator then called for a reshuffle at the paper, saying preliminary investigation showed it had published numerous incorrect reports about Zoomlion between September 2012 and August 2013 and that its editorial management was chaotic. The Yangcheng Evening News Group carried out a comprehensive rectification of the newspaper.

Conviction and significance

On 17 October 2014, a court found Chen Yongzhou and Zhuo Zhiqiang, a freelancer who had co-written some of the articles, guilty of defamation and bribery — formally, of damaging commercial reputation and of bribery as non-state employees. Chen was sentenced to 22 months in prison and fined 20,000 yuan; Zhuo received 10 months and a 10,000 yuan fine. The case is listed in the Committee to Protect Journalists' prison census and remains a standard reference point in discussions of Chinese press freedom: a commercially successful, party-group-owned tabloid that had vetted its reporter's work and publicly demanded his release was obliged, within four days, to apologise for the same reporting. New Express continues to publish in Guangzhou as one of the city's three major dailies, but the events of October 2013 define its place in the history of the Chinese metropolitan press.