Beijing – A dozen former Communist Party officials and senior scholars – including a onetime secretary to Mao Tse-tung, a party propaganda chief and the retired bosses of some of the country’s most powerful newspapers – have denounced the recent closing of a prominent news journal, helping to fuel a growing backlash against censorship.
A public letter issued by party elders, dated Feb. 2 and circulated to journalists in Beijing on Tuesday, appeared to add momentum to a campaign by a few outspoken editors against micromanagement, personnel shuffles and an ever-expanding blacklist of banned topics imposed on China’s newspapers, magazines, television stations and websites by the party’s secretive Propaganda Department.
The letter criticized the department’s Jan. 24 order to shut down Freezing Point, a popular journal of news and opinion, as an example of “malignant management” and an “abuse of power” that violates China’s constitutional guarantee of free speech.
In addition to shutting down Freezing Point, a weekly supplement to China Youth Daily, officials responsible for managing the news media have since late last year replaced editors of three other publications that developed reputations for breaking news or exploring sensitive political and social issues.
The interventions amounted to the most extensive exertion of press control since President Hu Jintao assumed power three years ago.
But propaganda officials also are facing rare public challenges to their legal authority to take such actions, including a short strike and string of resignations at one newspaper and defiant open letters from two editors elsewhere who had been singled out for censure. Those protests have suggested that some people in China’s increasingly market-driven media industry no longer fear the consequences of violating the party line.
The authors of the letter predicted that the country would have difficulty countering the recent surge of social unrest in the countryside unless it allowed the news media more leeway to expose problems that lead to violent protests.