Reporters join inspection teams, uncover problems

Reporters will now be included in inspection teams in Sichuan province, according to Yuan Jian, information officer for the provincial Discipline Inspection Commission.

The decision was made after a successful trial in which six reporters joined inspection teams in looking at government organizations. In May, three teams went to Panzhihua, Deyang as well as the Aba Tibetan and Qiang autonomous prefecture. The teams covered the provincial departments of agriculture and water conservancy; bureau of press, publication, radio and television; three institutions of higher learning; and three State-owned enterprises.

Yuan said two reporters found problems that might have otherwise evaded the teams.

Dissatisfied with the routine reports given by local officials, Chen Song, a reporter with Sichuan Daily, and Dai Zunhong, a reporter at Sichuan Television Station, decided to look for problems themselves.

Passing the Ma'erkang town government, they heard villagers from the Hongcao valley talk about concerns of a possible landslide during the rainy season.

"They told me that a rain-related landslide in the wee hours of June 30 last year damaged their houses and narrowed the riverbed near their houses," Chen said. "Nearly one year has passed since the disaster, but the site of the landslide has yet to be repaired by the local government."

An on-site investigation convinced him what the villagers said was true.

Dai, visiting Xihua University in Chengdu, found that more than 29,000 students had paid nearly 6.8 million yuan ($1 million) more this year to buy textbooks.

The university should have refunded the money to students in cash. Instead it had refunded all the money to a card used by students to buy food in its canteen. Although students complained, the school did not refund the cash.

Dai aired the story and the university agreed to refund the cash. Bian Huimin, the university's Party chief, said it would make use of the incident to teach its officials to have a sense of discipline and do the right thing.

The idea of including reporters in inspection teams originated in a plenary session of the Discipline Inspection Commission in January, which asked for cooperation between it and the media in combating unhealthy tendencies.

In April, the commission and the publicity department of the Sichuan Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China asked the media in Sichuan to expose acts that violate Party discipline in formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and extravagance.

It is the first arrangement of its kind in the country, according to Fang Fang, head of the Sichuan government information office.