A standoff between one of China’s biggest newspapers, Southern Weekend, and the national government ended last week with compromises on both sides. Southern Weekend hit the newsstands as usual on Thursday, after protesting staff members backed down from a threatened strike. The authorities, for their part, made tacit concessions, ending pre-publication censorship by the Communist Party’s propaganda arm in Guangdong Province and permitting greater editorial independence.
The episode drew worldwide attention to the problem of press freedom in China and threatened to escalate into broader protests across Chinese society. Over the past decade, standards of journalistic professionalism have risen in China, even though most news organizations are controlled, directly or indirectly, by the state. These news outlets do not challenge the basic legitimacy of Communist rule, but have raised their standards for evaluating news according to journalistic significance rather than party interests.
But in the last few years, amid rising social unrest, the government has intensified its efforts at “preserving stability.” One consequence has been a dramatic increase in control of the media. As a senior commentator at Southern Weekend for six years, I experienced both the flourishing of journalistic professionalism and its decline. Although I sometimes sharply criticized the government, my standpoint was impartial and balanced rather than antagonistic, and I did my best to maintain a position of independent neutrality. Most of my colleagues at Southern Weekend took the same approach.
Even so, at the end of March 2011, I was forced to resign from Southern Weekend, without any warning or explanation. This was a time of heightened tensions, when the authorities worried that the democratic revolutions taking place in the Middle East and North Africa might spread to China, and cracked down on individuals seen as potentially encouraging unrest. The pressure on commentators like me followed a similar crackdown on investigative reporting, much of which had been devoted to exposing corruption and had threatened special interest groups that are influential in elite Chinese politics.
Investigative reporting and opinion commentary are the two hallmarks of Chinese journalism, and the party has moved to crack down on both. My departure from Southern Weekend came as the editors capitulated to government pressure and quickly constrained the space for open discourse. Former colleagues have told me that since my departure, Southern Weekly’s journalists find themselves walking a tightrope with every sentence they write.
This state of affairs came to a climax last May, when Tuo Zhen became head of party propaganda in Guangdong, China’s most populous province. He enforced his power to the extreme and without an iota of flexibility, and micromanaged every aspect of media operations. Major topics of news coverage had to be approved by him, as did important articles, especially opinion essays. He even ordered changes in punctuation.
He was in fact a tyrant who cracked down on the press as zealously as Wang Lijun, the former police chief in the city of Chongqing, had cracked down on criminals without due process. Under Mr. Tuo, the press in Guangdong retreated into its darkest period since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” policies in the late 1970s. Southern Weekend, a symbol of news professionalism because of its relative independence, bore the brunt of Mr. Tuo’s attacks.
The run-up to the 18th Communist Party Congress in November was accompanied by the most oppressive social atmosphere of the past decade. The flare-up at Southern Weekend, over an editorial that had called for greater respect for constitutional rights until it was changed by censors, was the culmination of rancor that had been building for a long time.
The crisis has subsided, but there is little room for future optimism, because the deep-seated question has not been resolved: Is there, in fact, room for professional journalism to survive and develop within the system? It is on this question that not only journalists but Chinese in every sector of society have expressed doubt and exasperation. The repression of journalistic professionalism is not merely a journalistic issue, but also signifies the government’s assault on society in general, and has exceeded the limits of public tolerance.
The fate of journalistic independence in China will depend on whether the authorities implement or backtrack on their tacit concessions. Public vigilance is essential if progress is to occur.
Does the political system have the flexibility to tolerate the professionalism pursued by journalists, and the press freedom demanded by society at large? How much will the new party leadership make good on its commitment to governance reforms and adherence to the Constitution? The Southern Weekend episode does not provide a clear answer.
Any sign of progress is worth encouraging, but rather than shedding tears of gratitude for promises that may prove empty, the Chinese people need to keep their shoulders to the plow and continue their own efforts to create the society they wish to live in.
Xiao Shu is the pen name of Chen Min, who was an opinion writer at Southern Weekend until 2011. He is on the editorial board of the history journal Yanhuang Chunqiu and a fellow at the Transition Institute, which focuses on political reform in China. This essay was translated by Stacy Mosher from the Chinese.