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 ördinary 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 ofChina'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 inChina."
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.
Original reporting in Mandarin by Shen Hua. RFA Mandarin service director:
Jennifer Chou. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta
Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
Radio Free Asia
Copyright ? 2007, NewsBlaze, Daily News