In this land of 'tea money', the public gets a bad press

Letter from Beijing: During the summer, I went out to one of Beijing's working-class suburbs to look at a curious event. The district is preparing to meet the challenge of hosting an event in the 2008 Olympic games. The area will stage the softball competition - not a sport that many locals know anything about.

With typical thoroughness, however, the local council has decided that it needs, not just the proper facilities, but an enthusiastic audience. So it has encouraged local street committees to form their own softball teams, and people of all ages are busily swinging their bats.

It is not an earth-shattering story, but I thought it might make a few lines for a future piece on the Beijing Olympics, and I went along to the council's press conference in a shabby little room beside the public park.

To my great surprise, the room was packed with eager young reporters. I sat through the conference, collected my bumph and reflected on the way home that it must have been a slow news day.

It was only when I was miles away and glanced through the press releases I had been handed that I noticed a nice red envelope tucked in among them. I opened it and found two fresh 100 yuan notes inside.

This amounts to €20, not a vast amount of money, but not, in China, an insignificant sum either. It could buy enough rice to feed a family for a week. It would mean quite a lot to the working-class people on whom the journalists at the press conference were reporting.

When I asked what it was for, I was told it was "tea money" - a sum paid in lieu of providing tea for the reporters. Now tea is relatively expensive in China, but it does not cost 200 yuan a cup. The money was essentially an inducement to the reporters to cover the story. Everyone who turned up got the nice red envelope.

This is, I discovered, common practice. It began with corporate and product launches, but has become so endemic that even public bodies (using public money) feel they have to do it.

Since then, when I've been arranging trips to far-off places to see factories or businesses, I've twice been asked whether payment would be required - payment, that is, to me. As the answer has been a curt "no", I have no idea how much would be on offer, but I assume it would be proportionate to the distance travelled and the trouble taken.

Compared to the wining and dining of journalists at corporate news conferences in Europe, the practice of paying for coverage has the virtue of directness. But its very nakedness, obscured only by the flimsy and transparent fig leaf of "tea money", is telling.

If little attempt is made to hide the transaction, it is a sure sign that it is regarded as neither shameful nor unusual.

China has some of the best and bravest journalists in the world, but it also has a rich seam of media corruption. If "tea money" is at one of the spectrum, the other end is outright extortion.

It is a relatively small ethical step from taking money to write favourably about a company or institution to demanding money to suppress unfavourable reports.

An editor in Sichuan demanded 300,000 yuan (€30,000) from a food-processing company for not printing allegations that it injected its pig carcasses with water. In Zhejiang, the bureau chief of China Business Times extorted 350,000 yuan from an oil company for suppressing a report.

In the same city, two journalists demanded 58,000 yuan from villagers and workers abused by a construction company, then produced a fake issue of their paper with the story that was never, in fact, published.

Four reporters for Xinhua, the state news agency, took bribes to cover up the number of deaths in a mining disaster in Shanxi.

The problem has two sources. If power corrupts, so does powerlessness, and the experience of working in an environment where real news and analysis are tightly controlled and real journalism can be dangerous undoubtedly contributes to cynicism.

But media corruption owes as much to the free market as it does to state censorship. There are now 1,900 newspapers in China, and with cover prices very low, they depend on advertising revenue to survive in a fiercely competitive environment.

Journalists are under pressure to raise money for their bosses - the China Business Times bureau chief charged with extortion revealed that, as well as reporting, he was expected to raise 400,000 yuan in advertising revenue every year. In this environment, the idea of selling coverage for money doesn't seem so strange.

The consequences are obvious. Pressure for a free press is weakened by the perception that journalists have little concern for the public interest.

Good journalists who try to investigate wrongdoing can find themselves accused of digging for dirt purely in order to engage in blackmail. Censorship can be justified by claiming that the media are so corrupt that they have to be controlled.

In a free market without free expression, the public gets a bad press.