October 26, 2013.

China State TV Shows Reporter Confessing to Taking Bribes

Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water. A figure in blue overalls was coming down the pavement, not ten metres away. It was the girl from the Fiction Department, the girl with dark hair. The light was failing, but there was no difficulty in recognizing her. She looked him straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had not seen him.

BEIJING----Three days after a Chinese newspaper made a rare front-page appeal for police to release one of its reporters, the man was shown on state television Saturday confessing to have taken bribes to publish defamatory articles about a Chinese company.

For a few seconds Winston was too paralysed to move. Then he turned to the right and walked heavily away, not noticing for the moment that he was going in the wrong direction. At any rate, one question was settled. There was no doubting any longer that the girl was spying on him. She must have followed him here, because it was not credible that by pure chance she should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure backstreet, kilometres distant from any quarter where Party members lived. It was too great a coincidence. Whether she was really an agent of the Thought Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly mattered. It was enough that she was watching him. Probably she had seen him go into the pub as well.

China Central Television showed a handcuffed Chen Yongzhou admitting to have published fabricated reports under his name about Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science & Technology Co. 000157.SZ +1.11%  , one of the country's biggest construction equipment makers.

It was an effort to walk. The lump of glass in his pocket banged against his thigh at each step, and he was half minded to take it out and throw it away. The worst thing was the pain in his belly. For a couple of minutes he had the feeling that he would die if he did not reach a lavatory soon. But there would be no public lavatories in a quarter like this. Then the spasm passed, leaving a dull ache behind.

Mr. Chen was shown saying he hadn't written any of the stories----which alleged that Zoomlion had falsified its accounts----but had been given the text for them by a third party, which he didn't identify.