Everyone Loves a Spy Story - Even if it's Fake

China Central Television news anchor Fang Jing's good name has been restored. On Sunday night, China time, the journalist reappeared on CCTV as the host of the World Weekly news program.

For the past week, the Chinese media has exploded with allegations that the 38-year-old journalist is a spy for Taiwan.

The rumor started when a Zhou Yijun, a former CCTV colleague of Fang's, who now teaches journalism at Peking University, wrote on his blog that she had been arrested for spying after volunteering to host the Defense Watch program in order to gain access to military intelligence. Zhou, who writes under the pen name, A Yi, apologized for that blog entry a few days later, but added that he never alleged she was a spy, just that she had "leaked information to the outside."

Fang has denied the claims, saying she would never betray China. She had hosted Defense Watch until May, when she was unexpectedly pulled from the program. That's when rumors started circulating that she had been involved in spying. Chinese message board postings even included grand theories that Fang was romanced by a Taiwanese man and given money in exchange for secrets.

A 15-year veteran CCTV reporter, Fang was involved in the network's three-day coverage of the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. She studied at China's top broadcast journalism university and was a visiting scholar at Harvard University.

Like the rumors itself, there have been various accounts of how this story got all pear-shaped:

According to a Danwei.org translation of a Chinese newspaper, Zhou said that he disclosed the information about Fang within a story about students cheating on tests. The newspaper wrote:

"A Yi said that he should have realized that readers would ignore the test cheating and seize on the secret leaking, regardless of whether it was intended as a joke."

A joke gone awry perhaps?

Others have alleged that the story was engineered to get her back on the air after Fang was released from the show for another reason. Apparently the perpetrators had the foresight to know that the allegations would be so wild that the network would be forced to bring her back to clear her name.

The Financial Times offers another interesting analysis: That perhaps these rumors were so believable given that just a month ago, Yu Jiafu, a senior Xinhua news official was sentenced to 18 years for selling state secrets to South Korea and Japan. The court also found that Yu had previously accepted cash and golf clubs from a South Korean diplomat in exchange for information, including a schedule of a visit to North Korea by Chinese president Hu Jintao. Yu's lawyer said that the information Yu had released had already been reported and were not state secrets.

It is common for Chinese journalists to be given information that is not expected to be released and many journalists in China also accept trips, cash or gifts in exchange for news coverage.