Chinese Authorities Shut Down Publication
(Jan. 26, 2006)
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 24, 2006; 4:27 PM
BEIJING, Jan. 24 -- China's ruling Communist Party suspended one of the premier publications in Chinese journalism on Tuesday, escalating the government's prolonged campaign to rein in the state media and its toughest crackdown on freedom of expression here in more than a decade.
The decision to shut down Freezing Point, a four-page weekly feature section of the state-run China Youth Daily that often tested the censors and challenged the party line, came less than a month after the authorities replaced the top editors of another daring newspaper, the Beijing News.
The China Youth Daily is the official newspaper of the Communist Youth League, a power base for President Hu Jintao. Because any move to punish it would almost certainly require his approval, the decision to close Freezing Point was seen as further evidence of Hu's personal support for a tightening of controls on the media that began two years ago.
Party officials summoned the senior editors of the China Youth Daily and ordered Freezing Point closed a day after distributing a five-page document that accused the section of "viciously attacking the socialist system" and condemned a recent article in it that criticized the history textbooks used in Chinese middle schools.
Propaganda authorities issued an order barring all media from reporting the suspension, all reporters from participating in any news conference about it and all Web sites from carrying any discussion about it, journalists said.
The chief editor of Freezing Point, Li Datong, confirmed the suspension in a message on his blog before censors deleted the page. "My colleagues and I just finished the full-page proof of tomorrow's Freezing Point, but it looks like it can't come out," he wrote. "Freezing Point tenaciously survived for 11 years, and it has finally died."
Reached by telephone, Li said it was inconvenient to discuss what happened in detail, but said he planned to write an essay to fight the decision. He said propaganda officials issued a notice criticizing him and the newspaper's editor-in-chief by name, and ordering the section closed until it is "rectified and fully recognizes and corrects its mistakes."
Li, a party member and veteran journalist, stunned the propaganda authorities last summer with a lengthy letter attacking a plan to award bonuses to reporters at the newspaper who won praise from government officials while deducting the pay of reporters whose articles were criticized by officials. After the letter was leaked, the newspaper scrapped the bonus plan.
Although some publications ordered to undergo "rectification" by the party resume operations within weeks, others never publish again. Li said he planned to meet with his colleagues before deciding how to proceed, but indicated he did not believe Freezing Point had erred in publishing the article about the history textbooks.
The piece, written by Yuan Weishi, a reform-minded scholar at Zhongshan University in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, criticized Chinese textbooks for teaching an incomplete and biased history of China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing, and its interactions and battles with foreign nations.
For example, he challenged the textbooks for portraying the 1900 Boxer Rebellion as a "magnificent feat of patriotism" without describing the violence committed by the rebels or their extreme anti-foreign views. He also criticized the books for blaming the Opium Wars entirely on foreign nations, without mentioning the Qing government's record of violating treaties by refusing foreign merchants access to Chinese cities.
Such accounts, Yuan argued, taught Chinese children to believe that because "the foreign devils were invaders, anything the Chinese did was right and should be extolled," fostering blind nationalism and closed-minded anti-foreign sentiment.
The article, published Jan. 11, prompted an outcry by conservative academics, who sent a letter of complaint to the party leadership, as well as on the Internet, where many users condemned Yuan as a traitor.
The piece was the latest in a long series of articles in Freezing Point that have carefully pushed the limits of permissible journalism in China. In November, the section published an essay describing the "White Terror" of authoritarian rule in Taiwan during the 1950s and democratic Taiwan's efforts to cope with that history of political repression. The contrast with events in mainland China was obvious but unstated.
"Freezing Point has always had a special place in the Chinese media. It published what couldn't be published elsewhere. It has a conscience," said Pu Zhiqiang, a lawyer who often represents the press and is a friend of the section's journalists. "People have been trying to shut it down for a long time."
That they have finally succeeded, he said, "shows the party is very scared, very worried about the existence of a newspaper with even limited space to speak the truth. It's shameless. A party that doesn't dare listen to the truth will be scorned."
Researcher Jin Ling contributed to this report.
(boxun.com)
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