ABSTRACT
Looking back it was a small thing, but the episode has stayed with me. In 1997 when I was a young reporter for a national broadsheet newspaper in Beijing, I went to cover a story in the countryside of an inland province. As our Jeep arrived in the village, there were dozens of farmers gathered. They surrounded me, and in their emotionally charged thick local accents, competed with each other to pour out their stories of how a new local construction project was ruining their lives. Back in Beijing, I excitedly wrote my report of the anger and resentment this ‘rural development’ had aroused. But my story was ‘spiked’ by the editor. He was kind and encouraging, but experienced enough to know that publishing the article was impossible. The local government head in charge of the project had a national reputation as a ‘model figure’ in rural development, and so was simply beyond the reach of prudent criticism.
