BEIJING (MCT) — "Beijing power struggle heralds end of China Communist Party," screams one headline.
More sensational headlines purport to reveal how the wife of recently sacked Politburo member Bo Xilai poisoned an Englishman, who may have been her lover.
And if that weren't enough, other stories claim that "Bo planned airline crash" and "slept with more than 100 women."
It's payback time for Chinese exiles, especially those with a printing press, television station or just a computer at their disposal. From the newspaper and television network run by the banned Falun Gong to independent Chinese-language news sites in the United States, opposition media are having a field day covering sensitive topics that would be zapped by censors in China.
China is in the midst of a once-in-a-decade leadership transition, which has precipitated a political schism and a cascade of salacious scandals. But hardly a word of it appears in the mainland news media, forcing political junkies to look offshore for their fix, either watching with satellite dishes or surfing the Internet with virtual private networks to get around the government firewall.
The exile news sites, often stridently anti-communist, once had all the credibility of supermarket tabloids trumpeting tales of UFOs. But like some non-mainstream media in the United States — the National Enquirer broke the story of John Edwards' affair, and the TMZ celebrity news site was first with reports of Michael Jackson's death — these operations have had their genuine scoops.
"We used to read these sites mainly for fun. Nobody took them seriously. But now some of these astonishing things have turned out to be true," said Jin Zhong, editor of the respected Hong Kong-based Open Magazine.