Censorship in China marches on. A report from RFA on the death—or at least neutering—of one of the few muckraking print publications, called “Commoners,” here in China. Since the RFA site is not–surprise!–accessible in China, I’ll reprint the entire story below.
Commoners, RIP. (And remind me again, when does the much predicted pre Olympic warm and fuzzy China show up…?)
China Neutralizes Cutting-Edge Magazine
HONG KONG, May 3, 2007—China’s powerful propaganda czars have pronounced
the death knell for a magazine that ran hard-hitting exposes of official
corruption, turning it into a cultural and lifestyle digest of mainly
previously published materials, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports.Baixing, whose title translates roughly as “ordinary people” but is known
in English as Commoners, was a popular monthly magazine under the aegis of
the agricultural department, which made a name for itself exposing
corruption among local officials in the countryside.In an interview, former editor-in-chief Huang Lingtian told RFA’s Mandarin
service that from the May 2007 edition, Baixing would take a digest
format. “They want to turn it into a sort of digest publication, a
cultural magazine aimed at young people in the countryside,” Huang, who
has been moved to edit another publication under the agricultural
department, told reporter Shen Hua.“They will try their best not to produce any original material at all. Our
treatment will be the same as for LifeWeek,” he said. This radical
transformation into a lifestyle publication that cherry-picks the best
writing from the Web effectively means Baixing will no longer employ
in-house staff to originate its own articles.LifeWeek is a magazine that suffered a similar fate, following the
publication of articles on the politically sensitive topics of the
Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and the Tangshan earthquake (1976). It was
then ordered to stay off current affairs topics by the Communist Party’s
central propaganda department, which runs tight monitoring and controls of
China’s media.Police probes
Under Huang, Baixing had already received a lot of heat from the
authorities because it dared to report on real situations. The magazine’s
online edition had been repeatedly closed, and Huang himself was relieved
of his position there at the beginning of the year.According to a source familiar with the situation, Huang has remained the
target of several police investigations since leaving the magazine.Huang said: “First, there is absolutely nothing to be done about it.
Second, we have to be firm about what we believe in.”Staff reassigned
Huang said nearly all his former team at Baixing, from deputy editor, to
reporters, to circulation and advertising staff, had almost all left the
magazine after he did.A journalist with Baixing who called himself “Mr. Wu” said he too was in
the process of leaving the magazine.“We are being posted away, too. We are following editor-in-chief Huang
Liangtian. I am in the process of doing the paperwork. I’m going to work
for him on the Agricultural Products Weekly. It’s also a Department of
Agriculture publication.”Both Huang and “Wu” said the order to change the content of Baixing hadn’t
come from the department of agriculture, but from the propaganda
department at a high level. “Wu” said most of the new staff of had been
posted there from another publication run by the department.“They all come from within the system. From Chinese Countryside. Our
magazine is one of a stable of five or six publications. The leaders and
the staff all rotate between them. Some people are hired from outside.”Long process
Sources said the decision to change Baixing’s format and content had been
taken long ago, but Huang, who still cared about the magazine, had tried
even after being moved elsewhere to convince those in charge not to go
ahead.He had also been instrumental in ensuring that his staff were all placed
in good jobs after he left Baixing: “I did it to preserve the deep ecology
of Chinese culture, and also my own sense of justice, fairness, and
conscience,” Huang said.Asked if he thought that qualities of justice, fairness, and conscience
were common among journalists in China today, Huang said: “These qualities
are being severely challenged. But as intellectuals in public service, we
should try to stand by them. It’s really not easy, not easy at all, to be
an intellectual in China.”Critical story
Last August’s edition of the magazine printed an article titled
“Ground-level investigation into evictions and demolitions in Jiangyin
city,” an expose of how Jiangyin municipal government officials had
grabbed land from local rural families and evicted them, imprisoning their
representatives with manacles.Just before the issue went to press, the editors came under pressure from
the city government and officials higher up in its chain of command, in
the agricultural department, to spike the article.But then editor-in-chief Huang stuck to his guns and printed the article,
providing a major boost to the civil rights movement in Jiangyin and
causing major shocks in official circles in the city, with some officials
losing their jobs. That was the last of such articles to appear in
Baixing.Internet surveillance
As well as issuing regular edicts and daily guidelines limiting news
coverage in traditional media, Beijing has invested billions of yuan in a
nationwide Internet surveillance system and manages to block Web sites it
considers sensitive.Many prominent Chinese academics and journalists have spoken out against the
Propaganda Department, saying it has become more restrictive since the
change of leadership from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao.Critics also say such heavy-handed oppression of the media will harm the
country’s overall development because so few channels exist to monitor the
actions of officials.