"China Spring" Protests Against Crude CCP Censorship Widen

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China: press freedom row erupts over censored editorial

A bitter feud over press freedom has sparked growing protest in China threatening to throw up the first major challenge to incoming president Xi Jinping.


By Tom Phillips in Shanghai
5:31AM GMT 08 Jan 2013

Celebrities, academics and other leading opinion formers have come out in support of one of the country's most respected and liberal papers which has been the subject of aggressive censorship by the authorities.

The crisis at the Southern Weekend newspaper exploded into the open last week after reporters accused the Guangdong province propaganda chief of transforming a lengthy newspaper New Year editorial calling for political reform into a gushing homage to China's Communist Party.

According to an analysis by the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project, the original editorial had argued Chinese citizens should be allowed to "voice their criticisms of power loudly and confidently".

The altered text, however, was less critical and was published under the headline: "We Are Now Closer to Our Dream Than Ever Before".

The censorship provoked an acrimonious dispute between government officials and journalists and was joined this week by celebrity online protests.

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In a message posted on China's Twitter-like microblog Weibo, actress Li Bingbing told her 19 million followers: "Hoping for a spring in this harsh winter." Fellow actress Yao Chen evoked the words of Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. "One word of truth outweighs the whole world," she wrote on her Weibo account which has nearly 32 million followers.

The influential Chinese blogger and author Han Han also lamented the newspaper's plight.

"Southern Weekend has informed me a lot as a reader. It gives power to the weak and hope to the hopeless," he wrote on Monday. "So, in its moment of weakness and desperation, I hope we can all lend them some strength, even if just a little, and help it carry on." Yesterday hundreds of people converged outside the Guangzhou newsroom of the Southern Weekend in a rare street protest. Photographs posted on social media showed demonstrators carrying signs calling for "free press, constitutional government and democracy".

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David Bandurski, the China Media Project editor, said the "in your face [and] offensive" intervention by the local propaganda chief Tuo Zhen had proved the final straw for many of the newspaper's censorship-weary staff, who reportedly decided to go on strike on Sunday.

The newspaper's journalists believed propaganda officials had broken "a gentleman's code of how you do and don't control the media," Mr Bandurski added. "If they don't push back what will be left of their paper?"

The crisis at the paper had already escalated last Friday when journalists publicly slammed Mr Tuo's "brutal", "ignorant" and "catastrophic" intervention.

Dozens of leading academics then followed suit, using an open letter to call on Guangdong's new party chief, Hu Chunhua, to sack Mr Tuo for his "overbearing actions".

He Weifang, a legal expert from Peking University and one of the letter's signatories, said the incident was a "challenge to the new central leadership".

"So far they have not displayed their stance on political reform. This time, public anger may well test the new leadership." Several of the protesters who took to the streets outside the newspaper's Guangzhou HQ yesterday arrived yellow chrysanthemums in an apparent allusion to the death of press freedom.

One protester, Ah Qiang, told The Daily Telegraph the crisis was about more than newspapers.

"This involves not just one media outlet – Southern Weekend – but everyone. It is everyone's business.[It is about] everyone's rights," he said.

Mr Bandurski said the controversy now posed serious questions of the direction China was likely to move in under incoming president Xi Jinping.

"It is not just a media story anymore. It is about what direction China is heading in," he said.

"Ever since the 18th Communist Party Congress [Xi] has touted himself and the new top 7 leaders as representing a new style of leadership and this has been pushed very heavily by the state media." But while media reports had painted Xi as a "Spartan, no-nonsense and more open" leader, the so-called "New Year's Greeting" episode had led many to doubt that.

"These are signs that look right now like steps backwards not steps forward," Mr Bandurski said.

Mr He, from Peking University, said it was too early to say if Mr Tuo would be sacked or what consequences the newspaper's journalists might face.

But the central government's reaction would give an early indication of what ordinary Chinese could expect from their government over the coming decade, he added.

[CHINA HUMILIATED by CCP]

n a message posted on China's Twitter-like microblog Weibo, actress Li Bingbing told her 19 million followers: "Hoping for a spring in this harsh winter."

She is also a CHINESE PATRIOT!

[CHINA HUMILIATED by CCP]

"Hoping for a spring in this harsh winter."

1.3 billion Chinese agree.

[CHINA HUMILIATED by CCP]

"The crisis at the Southern Weekend newspaper exploded into the open last week after reporters accused the Guangdong province propaganda chief of transforming a lengthy newspaper New Year editorial calling for political reform into a gushing homage to China's Communist Party."

Crude stupid Stalinism is so passe!

[NO WAY JOSE]

Youd like that wouldnt you lapdog. . Look how the ZOGs devastated the West.

[CHINA HUMILIATED by CCP]

Poor little "CCP Princeling in Brooklyn"!

Whatever will you do when the stolen cash from the Chinese state stops flowing and your CCP daddy ends up swinging from a lampost in Beijing?

Maybe I'll toss some pennies into your beggar's bowl.......

maybe.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

[CHINA HUMILIATED by CCP]

HOORAY for a FREE and DEMOCRATIC China!

[CHINA HUMILIATED by CCP]

NO WAY JOSE wrote:

Youd like that wouldnt you lapdog.. Look how the ZOGs devastated the West.

So you CCP are Red Facists and closet Nazis?

How unsurprising.

[lct]

some idiots jumped out.

their masters in west will write off their accounts in western banks.

and ccp will have to fine them for illgal money washing, transfore, or not paying taxes.

wonderful.:)

[Snowflake]

A little protest is good, we have weekly protests in Berkeley and San Francisco.

[AYE]

CHINA HUMILIATED by CCP wrote:

<quoted text>
So you CCP are Red Facists and closet Nazis?
How unsurprising.

Typical libtard.

[Tasmaniac]

China needs democracy now

[CHINA HUMILIATED by CCP]

lct wrote:

some idiots jumped out.
their masters in west will write off their accounts in western banks.
and ccp will have to fine them for illgal money washing, transfore, or not paying taxes.
wonderful.:)

So you are saying the criminal regime of the Chinese Communist Party will use any means, and fabricate any lie to ruthlessly threaten and terrorize its Chinese slaves, as it has done for the last sad thirty years of murder, political terror, and primitive thuggery in mainland China under the CCP dictatorship?

Everyone knows that, dummy.

[CHINA HUMILIATED by CCP]

AYE wrote:

<quoted text>
Typical libtard.

Typical Red Fascist scum.

[CHINA HUMILIATED by CCP]

CHINA HUMILIATED by CCP wrote:

<quoted text>
So you are saying the criminal regime of the Chinese Communist Party will use any means, and fabricate any lie to ruthlessly threaten and terrorize its Chinese slaves, as it has done for the last sad thirty years of murder, political terror, and primitive thuggery in mainland China under the CCP dictatorship?
Everyone knows that, dummy.

Sorry, make that SIXTY YEARS!

[TEE HEE]

Tasmaniac wrote:

China needs democracy now

And the CIA can deliver!

Like they have everywhere else in the world.

[Tasmaniac]

TEE HEE wrote:

<quoted text>And the CIA can deliver!

Like they have everywhere else in the world.

I'm sure they are sowing the seeds somewhere

[lct]

Tasmaniac wrote:

<quoted text>
I'm sure they are sowing the seeds somewhere

so this is CIA operation, is it?