BEIJING, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- In recent weeks, Chinese local officials have shown contrasting attitudes toward "negative reporting" by the nation's media, some flying into a rage and others breaking into applause.
The latest sensation to rock Chinese cyberspace is a Chinese Communist Party chief's retaliation against a Beijing journalist for writing an article the cadre claimed had defamed him "maliciously."
China Youth Daily reported that Zhang Zhiguo, Party chief of Xifeng County in the northeastern province of Liaoning, had dispatched police officers to subpoena Zhu Wenna, a female reporter for Faren Magazine.
Zhu published a story on Jan. 1 this year, saying that Zhang had ordered the arrest of a woman for libel after she had sent a sarcastic text message alleging corruption after her gas station was demolished to make way for a market with meagre compensation.
More than 14,000 Chinese netizens have left comments on a forum of Sina.com, one of China's leading web portals. An overwhelming majority of them denounced the Xifeng County officials and demanded justice.
"Zhang was recklessly abusing his power when the 'negative report' riled him," said an anonymous netizen from Liaoning.
An Internet user from Jiangsu Province wrote, "Since an innocent person will be innocent no matter how wrongly he is treated, I think officials should not be afraid of 'negative reports', let alone send police to arrest the reporter in such a tyrannical way."
While some Chinese officials are enraged by such reporting, others are even inviting them.
Qiu He, the Party Chief of southwest China's Kunming City, became a controversial star among Chinese netizens when he solicited "negative reports" from the media to "improve shortcomings in the government's work" last December.
Netizens applauded Qiu's courage and called for more media supervision of officials.
Some of them quoted Chinese President Hu Jintao's words from his speech at last year's 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China when he said officials must "improve the mechanism of restraint and supervision" and stressed that "power must be exercised in the sunshine to ensure that it is exercised correctly".
Zhang Xinshi, Communist Party head of Suqian City in Jiangsu Province, published a letter from a foreign investor, who complained to him about the local government's inefficiency and the rudeness shown by officials in dealing with his complaints, on his blog a week ago.
Zhang's "voluntary exposure of the family shame", as some media have put it, showed his determination and commitment to exposing the wrong doings of some government officials, many netizens said.
"A negative report does not necessarily bring about a negative impact, as long as you face up to it and handle it well," said an editorial on a news website called Red Net, based in Hunan.
