China Removes Editor of Progressive Weekly

Amid a major shake-up of China’s press, the chief editor of the country’s biggest weekly newspaper has been removed from her post by officials dissatisfied with its investigative reporting and social criticism, according to media sources Tuesday.

The move may herald the decline of Southern Weekend, widely considered one of China’s most progressive newspapers and a barometer of intellectual freedom in China during much of the past decade.

“To put it bluntly, many of us are in a state of despair,” said one dejected journalist at the paper. “We had invested our ideals in the paper, and now we feel it’s just not worth working so hard for [them] anymore.”

Propaganda officials in booming Guangdong province transferred Jiang Yiping to the paper’s business side early this month, sources at the paper said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In their quest for profits, China’s tabloids and weekend editions have bucked the Communist Party’s definition of news and ignored its injunctions against negative reporting and sensationalism.

Last April, media insiders say, the vice chairman of the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department criticized Southern Weekend for ignoring “propaganda discipline.” Nonetheless, the paper largely stuck to the critical reporting that has made it famous and earned it a nationwide circulation of 1.3 million.

The paper had long been protected by its own popularity and liberal provincial authorities, including Guangdong party chief Xie Fei, who died last October.

Sources close to the paper say Jiang’s removal was prompted by the Southern Weekend’s publication last November of an article by a Chinese academic defending the media’s coverage of public scandals.

Southern Weekend is the weekend edition of the Southern Daily, the official paper of the municipal committee of the Communist Party in the city of Guangzhou. All media outlets in the country must have official affiliations; Beijing does not allow ownership by individuals or companies.

In August, the party and government issued orders to begin a major restructuring of the press, which has grown to include more than 2,000 newspapers and 8,000 periodicals nationwide. As many as one-fifth of these may face closure or mergers, according to official reports.

The stated objective was to get rid of redundant or unpopular newspapers that were a drain on state coffers and a “burden on the masses,” according to the official Press and Publishing News.

The orders called for the closure or merger of papers published by state industries and government departments, largely vestiges of China’s centrally planned economy. But the measures are also forcing tabloids to merge with party paper conglomerates--or stop publishing.

According to the Southern Daily, Guangdong officials recently implemented the orders in the southern province by shutting down 11 newspapers and six magazines, while nine papers were merged into conglomerates.

As the flagship of a party newspaper conglomerate, the Southern Daily must reserve much of its front page for soporific official pronouncements. Financially, however, it has relied heavily on the more profitable, reader-friendly Southern Weekend.

Combining a finely honed sense of commercial appeal and a humanist social conscience, Southern Weekend’s exposes have, until recently, been filled with thuggish, greedy and ignorant officials. Its politically charged editorials and irreverent cartoons railed at social injustices, while its book reviews profiled the works of independent-minded intellectuals.