Financial Times
March 15, 2006

China’s censors are launching a comprehensive clampdown on press freedoms, that reveals insecurities among elite threatened by rampant corruption and rural strife as a sensitive Communist party anniversary approaches, officials and journalists said.

China’s censors are launching a comprehensive clampdown on press freedoms that reveals insecurities among a ruling elite threatened by rampant corruption and rural strife as a sensitive Communist party anniversary approaches, officials and journalists said. Officials and editors said yesterday that the Communist party’s propaganda department had recently been working overtime, enforcing a new tougher set of censorship guidelines, criticising editors and disciplining or shutting down publications. The starkest example so far has been the dismissal this month of two senior editors at Southern Weekend, the country’s hardest-hitting newspaper. The newspaper’s main “error” was the publication of a series on a criminal gang that exposed shortcomings in the country’s penal system. Not since a crackdown on free speech that followed the repression of the unauthorised “China Democracy party” in 1998 have controls been enforced so comprehensively upon the increasingly lively and emboldened state media. Although the operations of the propaganda department are shrouded in secrecy, evidence of a concerted crackdown is building. A magazine, Today’s Celebrities, was closed recently and its journalists sent to attend “study sessions” after it carried an article that officials felt disparaged the memory of Deng Xiaoping, China’s late leader. Qin Shuo, the editor of Nan Feng Chuang, a controversial magazine in the easygoing southern province of Guangdong, was summoned to Beijing two months ago to receive criticism from the propaganda department. His transgression, according to journalists familiar with the issue, was the publication of a series of stories about the plight of peasant farmers suffering the twin burden of stagnant incomes and rising taxes levied by unscrupulous local officials.