China at last tries to report the news first

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By Lucy Hornby

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese media's increased reporting of protests over land, labour and investment issues reveals an attempt by the government to manage the impact of bad news by acknowledging it, sources said on Thursday.

Propaganda authorities have issued a writ authorising news organisations to report on unrest, rather than allow rumours to take hold among Chinese worried about the impact of the global financial crisis on the mainland's economy.

Strikes by taxi drivers and protests by newly laid-off workers have been reported regularly, as have riots in northwestern Gansu province this week and a mass petition in Beijing.

"The Chinese government has started to loosen its control on the negative information," an academic source close to propaganda authorities told Reuters.

"They are trying to control the news by publicising the news," said the source, who declined to be named.

The shift, if continued, would be a bold move for China, which only legalised the reporting of the death toll from natural disasters in 2005.

A party official confirmed that the policy towards news had gradually changed this year.

"It's almost impossible to block anything nowadays when information can spread very quickly on the Internet, " he told Reuters.

"We also noticed that it will benefit us if we report the news first."

Chinese media were allowed unprecedented freedom in the first week after the devastating May 12 earthquake in Sichuan, which killed about 80,000 people and unified the country around the dramatic rescue effort.

But coverage shifted to accolades of central government leaders and soldiers as soon as questions began to surface about why so many schools had collapsed.

A blackout of bad news during the Beijing Olympics in August resulted in delayed reporting of milk tainted with melamine, that ultimately killed at least four babies and made thousands sick.

"The central government has permitted local authorities to publicise negative news themselves, with no need to report to upper governments any more," the academic said.

"They have a principle of 'report the facts quickly, but be cautious on the causes behind the facts'."

Official news organisations often lag behind reports posted on the Internet by bloggers and investigative reporters, and usually downplay any elements that might raise distrust of the Communist Party, which prizes stability.

Thousands of people rioted this week over a resettlement scheme in Wudu, in Gansu province's poverty-stricken region of Longnan, where 1.8 million people were made homeless by the Sichuan earthquake.

Protesters attacked officials and police with iron rods, chains, axes and hoes and threw stones, bricks and flower pots, according to the local government's report of the incident.

UNUSUAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Its emphasis on the demonstrators' violence towards police and authorities echoed similarly graphic denunciations of Tibetan uprisings in towns across southern Gansu in March.

The Xinhua news agency on Thursday made an unusual acknowledgement of protests in the capital, when it reported that nearly 400 people, angry at losses in an illegal Chinese fund-raising scheme, gathered in Beijing.

The petitioners gathered at the municipal government office on Wednesday and left after "persuasion" by staff, Xinhua said, citing the police department. It did not give details of the scheme.

The increased openness in reporting may also help the government as it pursues a policy goal of expanding a social safety net and combating the economic downturn. In previous years, a sharp uptick in reporting of rural unrest helped push through central government initiatives on the rural sector.

($1=6.829 Yuan) (Editing by Nick Macfie and Valerie Lee)

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