The Most Awesome Chinese Female Reporter Ever

(Daqi)  The Most Awesome Female Reporter Ever.  July 5, 2007.

Recently, a blog post by a female reporter at China Times (mainland, not Taiwan) drew a great deal of attention.  This particular blog post recorded how she got into a fistfight with a colleague in an editorial meeting.

Here is the story as recounted in the Sohu blog of the female reporter.

July 2, 2007 is the most embarrassing day of my entire professional career so far.  It was really really embarrassing!

Today, the 7-year-old China Times has its N-th re-design.  This time, it was very thorough as we changed from general news to financial news and from a tabloid format to a broadsheet.  From afar, our newspaper looks like the current <21st Century Economic Report>.

Today, I finally saw the new China Times.  32 sheets, broadsheet, good quality paper.  They must have invested quite a bit of money!  I finally understood just what was new about the "new mainstream financial media" that our new chief editor Shui Pi was talking about!

But I could not see anything else new.  Compared to the old China Times, this one had entire pages and pages of articles plagiarized from other media.  On the page with stock market news, there were four articles plus some advertisements and three of those articles were plagiarized!

I thought that this was very, very embarrassing for China Times!!  That was the first embarrassing thing of the day.  

Then I had a fight with a newcomer at the newspaper named Liu Aixiang.  I did not win and I ended up breaking the glass door on the bookshelf of the chief editor!  That was embarrassing.  I did not win and I was beaten by a quasi-illiterate person!

On one of the pages in the newspaper, there were three articles with more than 3,000 words that were totally plagiarized.  This is not just Shui Pi and the plagiarizers who lose face.  As a member of China Times for over three years, I feel that this is embarrassing!  Then I had a fight with the chief plagiarizer Liu Aiqiang.  This was my first physical fight as a grown-up and I did not win.  To make the story simple, this woman Liu Aixiang was under the aegis of someone at the newspaper and she published three articles on our "new mainstream financial media" that were almost totally plagiarized from original articles from other media published on the Internet.  Later on, everybody found out.  She became mad and picked a fight with me.  I was not psychologically prepared to start a fight and I lost the fight to that bitch.

During the editorial meeting at noon today, the new deputy chief editor Xie Jingwen gave everybody a tongue lashing.  He said that the quality of the articles in the first new edition of the newspapers were very, very poor to the point of being unreadable.  We knew that without him saying so because we read the newspaper ourselves and there was nothing much to read!  Apart from the plagiarized articles, there was nothing interesting left.

After this meeting was over, this woman named Liu Aiqiang from the Stock News Department charged at me to start a fight!  When the meeting was finished, I had just gotten up and started to walk exit.  Liu Aiqiang showed up only during the last few minutes of the meeting and she sat with the man named Han Fuheng from her department near by the door.  As I started to exit, this Liu Aixiang slapped me in the face and knocked me dizzy!  When I oriented myself, she came at me again.  I slapped her back but a rookie male reporter unfairly pulled me back so that I missed.  Instead, Liu Aiqiang hit me in the face again.  A group of people tried to mediate but they were only just putting on a show.  So that was how I and Liu Aiqiang were wrestling with each other.  But she was bigger and stronger than me and she kicked me a few times in the belly!  Still, I managed to slap her in the face as well as give her a punch.  I also scratched her in the face with my nails.  But my colleagues told me later that my blows were weak and I left no marks on her face.  Instead, her slap caused my face to swell under the eye.

At that moment, the new chief editor Shui Pi came up.  Liu Aixiang must have realized that the fight was going to be over, so she used all her strength to push me.  I peddled backwards at the force and rammed up against the row of book shelves in Shui Pi's office.  The glass door on the books shelf was smashed to pieces when my body and head hit it.  Shui Pi came up and Liu Aixiang fled through the door.  Shui Pi tried to stop her but she shoved him aside.  I tried to find something on Shui Pi's desk to use to hit her, but there was nothing there except for some pieces of papers. 

As Liu Aixiang went out, she cursed at the office.  She yelled: "Fuck!  You say that I plagiarized.  I'm not the only one who plagiarized.  You are talking about many people."  At the time, we did not understand what she meant.  Later on, we analyzed it and concluded that she was saying that many of the  other articles from her department were also plagiarized and not just her articles.

Strangely enough, the subject of plagiarism in her department was never brought up during this meeting.  I had only read a comment in my blog last Saturday that many of the articles in the new China Times were plagiarized from the Internet.  At the time, the first person that I suspected was Liu Aixiang because her shallowness and ignorance had astounded me in an earlier group meeting.  I did not think that she had any of the qualifications of a professional news workers.  Now that she wrote four articles in a row, I felt that she could not written them herself.  So I checked one of the those articles, searched for it on Baidu and found it was copied from elsewhere, with some of the paragraphs being completely identical including the punctuation marks.  When I came back to the newspaper at noon, I told the colleagues in my department that the articles from the Stock News Department all came from the Internet.

So how did this affair get resolved?

At the time, I said that I wanted to call the police.  This woman Liu Aixiang attacked me in front of so many people.  But Shui Pi and other deputy chief editors stopped me.  Shui Pi even accused those present of doing nothing to stop the fight.  I said that I can call 110 myself and take the matter out of your hands.  But the cowards took away my mobile phone to prevent me from calling the police!  Fuck!  Where is the justice!  What kind of dogfart newspaper is this!  What a joke!

Then I said that I want to call my family and see what my parents have to say.  But they forbade me to make any calls.  

Fuck!  Xie Jingwen then said, "Forget it.  Don't cause trouble."  I said, "Are you out of your mind!  Fuck!  You are old enough to understand that when your children get assaulted, would you just forget it!?"  Then he grew silent.

According to report, Shui Pi said at a middle-management meeting afterwards that the affair was defined as a China Times veteran picking on a newcomer.  According to a newly arrived deputy chief editor, this was a case of class struggle created by a veteran worker!

Fuck!  Idiots!  Perverts!

Alright, I am a veteran worker and I want to pick on a newcomer!  But in the new China Times which has appeared in black-and-white all over the streets, Liu Aixiang has published several thousand words that were plagiarized from the Internet.  Am I trying to pick on her!?

Please do not embarrass China Times!  We have been at China Times for so many years and we have never encountered anything that was so shameless and odious.  Several thousands of words from entire articles!  How else can I describe this newcomer except as shameless?

You can embarrass yourself and I don't care.  But the problem is that your plagiarized articles are published inside China Times.  How will we ever able to go out and face people?

I just finished dinner.  I had five dishes.  Then I went out to buy a lot of nutritional stuff.  I need to replenish my physical strength in order to have another duel with that bitch.

Frankly speaking, my belly hurts a bit right now.  Liu Aixiang must weight at least 60 kilograms.  There is a bruise on my leg where she kicked me.  And why did I trim down my fingernails the day before!  No wonder my scratching left no mark on her face.  I am going to get sharp nails tomorrow so that I can make bloody holes in her face!  Does that sound nasty!?  But that would be nothing compared to my breaking the glass door on the bookshelf.  That was something that only appears as movie special effects!

I have glass pieces all over my hair and I don't dare to remove them myself.  I don't even dare to lie down sleep.  So I'll drink some coffee and stay up all night.  I'll get a shampoo tomorrow.  I'll make sure to remind the hairdresser to wear gloves because I don't want her to get injured.

Should I tell my mother about this?  Frankly it was embarrassing because I did not win and my eye is swollen.  But I am the only daughter and if my family should hear about this, they will all show up at China Times in a carload.  I have so many uncles, aunts and cousins that it would take more than a truck to transport them.  Although the newspaper did not want to call the police this time, they might change their minds later.  I don't want all my family members in jail.

[The China Times articles by Liu Aixiang were then listed with their original sources]