Whistleblower scribes face challenges against China new regime

From deadly curses to death threats, China's new generation of whistleblower journalists face challenges while attempting to cross redlines of the official media, testing the new leadership's claims to fight graft.
Zhang Han, a journalist from The Beijing News was reportedly cursed by Wang Lin, a rich Chinese healing practitioner for publishing an article exposing his claims to produce snakes from thin air and how he was a middleman between rich businessmen and top officials.
Wang's claims that the snakes were freshly caught in the field by his spirit, which could leave his body and travel thousands of miles in the blink of an eye were shattered by Zhang's expose that he was seen buying snakes from the local market.

Zhang, on the other hand told state-run Global Times that she was not afraid of such "threats" and will keep covering such stories.
Her article further revealed Wang's friendship with Liu Zhijun, the former minister of railways.
Wang offered to give Liu a feng shui stone that could secure his success in officialdom for a lifetime. The stone most obviously failed, as Liu was given a suspended death sentence for graft.

In a similar expose by the media, Song Lin, the chairman of China Resources Holdings, a state-owned enterprise and a Fortune Global 500 conglomerate faced charges of breach of duty after a journalist posted the "fraudulent" activities in his microblog.

The allegations were posted by Wang Wenzhi, chief reporter with the Economic Information Daily, a newspaper affiliated with the state-run news agency Xinhua, on his Sina Weibo.
Wenzhi claimed that Song and other senior managers were involved in a fraudulent acquisition in 2010 made by China Resources Power, a subsidiary of the corporation, in which it intentionally overpaid a Shanxi-based coal company, resulting in billions of yuan of losses in State-owned assets.
Wenzhi's report quickly attracted wide public attention, prompting China Resources to deny the allegations.
The move came two months after Liu Tienan, the former director of the National Energy Administration (NEA), was toppled due to online exposure by Luo Changping, the deputy managing editor of Caijing magazine.

All the three are from official media as China yet to permit private media. But the media personnel now are making using of micrblog media to carry out their exposures.
"As these cases draw further public scrutiny, so too has the role of whistleblowers, particularly journalists who use their Weibo (Chinese Twitter) accounts to take down corrupt officials.
In doing so, they gain massive public attention, but it comes at a high price - they put themselves at risk and often become the focus of news themselves", a Global Times feature on them said.