Beijing state newspaper closes its investigative team

A prominent Chinese government newspaper disbanded its investigative reporting team, which had won plaudits for its aggressive muckraking, amid a sweeping clampdown on the media and human-rights activists. Reporters at China Economic Times said the decision to eliminate the roughly two-year-old investigative team, whose hard-hitting exposes helped win legitimacy for the newspaper as a public watchdog, was announced at a meeting Monday morning. The move, which was disclosed at a meeting convened by the newspaper's Communist Party Committee, comes as Beijing has been tightening its grip amid concerns over growing internal unrest that have grown sharper following the popular uprisings in the Mideast. Led by veteran journalist Wang Keqing, the newspaper's investigative reporters have pushed political boundaries in recent years, producing in-depth articles on topics ranging from the fatal mismanagement of vaccines by provincial authorities in central China last year to the mysterious death of a village activist found crushed beneath the wheels of a truck earlier this year. China Economic Times is published by the Development Research Center, a think tank directly controlled by China's State Council.