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该国的审查机构可能会让情况变得更糟
上个月，中国当局披露，东部省份浙江的三名男子因一项被称为“新闻敲诈”的奇特罪行而被判刑。他们挖出（或在许多情况下捏造）了 180 多家正准备上市的公司的黑料，然后勒索封口费，威胁不给钱就在社交媒体上予以公布。检察官表示，最令人担忧的是，一些公司并没有向警方报案，即使这些人威胁要公布的信息并不是真实的。相反，他们只是交钱了事，以避免对上市进程造成干扰。一家公司送去了 50,000 元人民币（约合7,000美元）以使问题消失；另一家公司则送去了 30,000 元。
许多地方的公司可能都希望交钱能够按下一篇负面新闻报道，或者可能产生一篇正面报道。但在中国，这种做法十分盛行，并且不仅限于网络骗子。在2002年一起臭名昭著的案件中，强大的国家广播电视台新华社的四名记者从一家矿业公司收受了现金和黄金，作为掩盖一起致命爆炸事件的回报。2015年，国有大报《21世纪经济报道》的一名高管因敲诈勒索被判处四年监禁。去年，一名富有影响力的财经博主被发现从他所撰写的公司中赚取了 700,000 元。在其中一起案例中，他虚假地声称一家上海公司的员工被一名不满的客户刺伤，并且只有在收到一笔丰厚的“信息服务”费后才将文章删除。
政府将该问题归咎于害群之马。但研究机构“中国传媒研究计划”的戴维·班杜尔斯基在最近的一篇博客文章中写道，往往正是中国自身对媒体的严格控制导致了腐败行为。国家媒体记者的工作往往是通过他们的故事来创造“正能量”，以此来奉承政府。这鼓励了不道德的做法。而且在中国，让不受欢迎的新闻报道消失几乎不会引起什么审查，因为由于拥有一支审查大军，故事总是会在没有任何解释的情况下消失。
另一个问题是，在中国，媒体公司仅靠出售新闻来生存是格外艰难的。极少有媒体成功说服读者为订阅付费。一位心灰意冷的前记者哀叹道，这是因为“这里的媒体不被允许写真实的事情”。她在一开网络媒体工作了一年，该媒体专门撰写针对公司的负面故事，直到这些公司签署广告合同。她说，敲诈勒索仅仅是“通过报道来赚钱最直接和最有效的方法”。
News extortion is rife in China
The country’s censors may be making it worse
Jun 18th 2026 | Beijing
Last month China’s authorities revealed that three men in Zhejiang, an eastern province, had been sentenced for a curious crime known as “news extortion”. They had dug up (or in many cases made up) dirt on over 180 companies that were preparing to go public and then demanded hush money to not publish it on social media. What was most concerning, said prosecutors, was that some companies did not report the extortion to the police, even though the information that the men threatened to publish was not true. Instead they just paid up to avoid disruptions to the listing process. One firm sent 50,000 yuan ($7,000) to make the problem go away; another, 30,000 yuan.
Companies in many places might hope that paying money could spike a negative news report or perhaps generate a positive one. But in China the practice is rife, and is not just limited to online scammers. In a notorious case in 2002 four journalists at Xinhua, the powerful state broadcaster, took cash and gold from a mining company in return for hushing up a deadly explosion. In 2015 an executive at the 21st Century Business Herald, a state-owned broadsheet, was sentenced to four years in prison for extortion. Last year an influential financial blogger was found to have made 700,000 yuan from the companies he wrote about. In one case, he falsely claimed a Shanghai firm’s employee had been stabbed by an unhappy customer, and only removed the article after receiving a hefty fee for “information services”.
The government blames bad apples for the problem. But it is often China’s own strict controls over its media that lead to corrupt behaviour, writes David Bandurski of China Media Project, a research group, in a recent blog post. The job of state-media journalists is often to create “positive energy” with their stories so as to flatter the government. That encourages unethical practices. And making unwelcome news reports vanish attracts little scrutiny in China because, thanks to an army of censors, stories disappear all the time without explanation.
Another problem is that it is especially tough in China for media companies to survive just by selling news. Few have persuaded readers to pay for subscriptions. That is because “the media here aren’t allowed to write about real things,” laments one dispirited former journalist. She spent a year at an online outlet that wrote negative stories about companies until they signed advertising contracts. Extortion, she says, is simply “the most direct and effective method to make money through reporting”.■ |
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