A CRH1A high speed train before depart from Shenzhen station.

It was July 23 and we were in a coal manufacturing town in Anhui when my fiance’s father (who is from Holland) asked: “Hey, did you hear anything about the train crash near Wenzhou?” He had received a news alert from a Dutch news agency. The speed train from Shanghai to Fuzhou is one that I have taken on more than one occasion. I wanted to know more, but state media released few details and even fewer questions were being asked. We knew only that two trains had collided on the high-speed rail near Wenzhou.The death toll – which now stands at 40, with 191 injured – was unclear and underreported at the time.

Later the next morning, as we were on the road headed towards Anhui’s Yellow Mountain (Huangshan), I received a text message from a friend in Beijing: “Morning – what’s the situation down in Qingtian with the train collision?”

While living and traveling in China, you can’t rely on official media outlets for news. Propaganda authorities ban search words on the Internet and state media are offered “guidance” on what to report and what not to report.

So I find out what’s going on via text messages from friends and from foreign news sources. The Chinese rely on such texts, too, and younger, more web-savvy Chinese rely are able to log onto twitter-like applications (Twitter is banned in China) and message boards where the real discussion takes place. The Chinese are sounding off, speculating, and venting frustrations. There are questions of corruption, of a cover-up, of a slowed response by authorities to acknowledge the cause of the accident and to properly punish those responsible. These boards and blogs are usually clamped down upon by the Chinese Internet police, but these days, it seems that the angry talk about the Wenzhou train crash is running unusually free of censorship.

The dialogue seems to have opened up after Premier Wen Jiabao (lovingly referred to as Grandpa Wen by the Chinese people who see him as a more benevolent and caring communist official, famous for parachuting into disaster zones) belatedly visited the train crash site. It was 5 days after the accident, and his appearance has caused further speculation about Wen’s influence and standing in the Communist Party.

From this week’s Economist:

Mr Wen’s comments on the accident itself were no less intriguing. In another rare departure from common practice, he took an open slap at the Ministry of Railways, conceding that “the public had many suspicions about the cause of the accident and the way it was handled”. He promised to investigate whether corruption, equipment or management problems were to blame, with no “soft-pedalling”.

State media began to loosen their lips after Wen’s statements. Official news agencies like Xinhua and state broadcaster CCTV began reporting on widespread suspicions circulating about the reasons for the crash. The Economic Observer, a weekly Chinese newspaper, published an open letter to a rescued two-year-old girl. She was orphaned by the crash, and the letter openly criticized systemic corruption and hypocrisy. And, already during the early hours of the crash, microblogs provided an outlet for Chinese journalists to publish details on the accident.

There are good Chinese journalists out there who want to do their jobs. They want to report what they see and what they hear. They want to raise questions, find answers, provoke independent thinking, and to hold government accountable for their actions/inactions. There is a hunger from the people to know the truth, and an urge for journalists to start providing those truths. That much is clear.

This week’s Economist points out that in the case of Wenzhou’s train crash, authorities have no one to blame but themselves:

The anger expressed there and elsewhere poses a problem for the authorities. Other disasters have spawned scandals and earned public scorn, as after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which many children died because of shoddy school construction. But that disaster was a natural one, and the government’s response was in many respects effective. After the ethnic clashes that rocked Tibet and Xinjiang in recent years, officials were able to deflect blame on to minority agitators and outside provocateurs. This time they have no such recourse.

I am leaving China via the Shanghai Pudong airport at the end of the week. I could take the speed train, but relatives warned against it and bought me a bed on a 7-hour overnight sleeper bus instead.

The Chinese government has spent billions of dollars improving the country’s railway network, with plans to spend $120 billion a year for several years on railway construction. The newest high-speed rail link, the Beijing-Shanghai route, is the latest and most celebrated instalment. The government hopes that line will stretch over 28,000 miles by the end of 2015.

I had approached the follically-challenged, bespectacled man sitting on the brown, wooden bench on a Lower Manhattan subway platform, thinking he might make a good interview.

Admittedly (and I admitted this to the man himself), the story I was nosing around about, was a light-hearted piece about…cats. It’s not hard hitting journalism and I never pretended it was.

So while I was taken aback by his rudeness and his seriously skewed view that there are “commies” in the White House, one thing struck me after this encounter: he was right about one thing.

What am I writing about and why?

Do we, the journalists, have the responsibility to write what the public wants to read? Or is it our written word that shapes the appetite for news?

There are times I am inspired by what I believe to be a journalist’s calling to shape public opinion, and to steer the public into thinking, reacting and caring about important issues.

But in a world where headlines announcing Brittany Murphy’s death trump news that Democrats have secured enough votes to pass health care reform, I sometimes lose a little faith. You want more readers to surf to your site, to pay for your paper, to subscribe to your magazine… so how do you strike a balance between hard and soft news? Between what’s easy to digest and what might be harder to swallow?