Censored: A Chinese Journalist’s Inside View
JONAH KESSEL, COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTSJournalist Liu Jianfeng worked at the China Economic Times newspaper in Beijing for fifteen years. Eventually, frustration with the nation’s state-controlled media system and pressure from his colleagues prompted him to quit. He then did brief stints reporting for China Reform...
Media Censorship and Its Future
OUYANG BINThe year 2013 has gotten off to an inauspicious start for China’s press, especially for its most outspoken members. At the end of last year, when many of the country’s media were heralding newly installed Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit to Guangdong province as a modern...
Online and Off, Social Media Users Go to War for...
TEA LEAF NATIONWhen Mr. Tuo Zhen, the propaganda chief of Guangdong province, rewrote and replaced the New Year’s editorial of the Southern Weekend newspaper without the consent of its editors, he probably did not think it would make much of a splash. Indeed, Mr. Tuo might have believed that...
The Old Fears of China’s New Leaders
JONATHAN MIRSKYI felt a shudder of déjà vu watching the mounting protests inside China this week of the Communist Party for censoring an editorial in Southern Weekend, a well-known liberal newspaper in the southern city of Guangzhou. It is all too similar to the disciplining in April 1989 of...