BEIJING – Journalists and activists are pressing their battle against the Communist Party censorship at one of China's most daring newspapers, the Southern Weekend, which has seen 20 stories per issue altered or scrapped by party censors.
Free-speech protesters in masks Tuesday competed with flag-waving communist loyalists in the southern city of Guangzhou in a dispute over censorship at the newspaper.
Strict state censorship has prevailed in China in print, broadcast and online for more than six decades, but last week's wholesale rewriting of Southern Weekend's 2013 new year editorial has unleashed a wave of opposition and prompted authorities to shut down blogs that run statements of support for the newspaper.
This "open and collective protest toward the control mechanism of the propaganda department" goes far beyond the journalistic community to include "other intellectuals and netizens in general," said Hu Yong, a journalism professor at Peking University.
A rare street protest was held on Monday, and several online petitions have emerged that have indicated widespread support for the newspaper across the Chinese Web, including the celebrity power of two popular actresses.
"Southern Weekend has a very loyal readership, and so it has a wide influence," he said of the newspaper that won an interview with President Obama in 2009.
The original version of the Southern Weekend editorial focused on China's unrealized dream of constitutional rule. But it was changed to a piece praising the Communist Party.
On Monday, Southern Weekend journalists went on strike, and a peaceful protest for media freedom, outside its headquarters in southern China's Guangzhou city, attracted hundreds of supporters.
With no clear signal coming from the central government in Beijing, the incident has snowballed into a public test of the new leadership's commitment to political change following a decade of paralysis under Hu Jintao, the former party general secretary who steps down from his less important post as president in March.
"Censorship is always there; before it was not really secret, but nobody really made it public," as this case has achieved, said Hu Yong.
Widespread support in recent days for Southern Weekend "is a very strong indication that people can no longer bear censorship as before.
"It's a strong appeal from below that the new leadership must change its media policy," said Hu in reference to China's fifth generation of Communist leaders, including top man Xi Jinping, who took over in November.
He Weifang, a Peking University law professor who signed a petition supporting the newspaper, said the matter has become a test for the new leadership.
"People closely follow this issue because it has become an issue in which we can clearly see whether the new leaders will seriously promote reform of the political system," He said. "The top leadership will definitely be involved in dealing with this, but I feel their political views are not as open as people hope."
In the past year, the control exerted by the party's Guangdong propaganda chief Tuo Zhen, a former investigative reporter widely blamed for rewriting the new year editorial, "has grown ever tougher," while the newspaper has "increasingly lacked critical spirit," He said. The online petitions by the newspaper's journalists and others have called for Tuo's removal.
During his two months in office, Xi Jinping "has been touting himself as a new kind of leader," with a new style of governing and media relations, said David Bandurski, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project. After the crackdown on Southern Weekend, and a separate, historical journal in Beijing, "we have to ask 'are you serious about media openness? Is this real? Are you going to take China backward?'"
Guangdong's propaganda leaders "have violated the accepted rules of the game," which include two-way negotiation between editors and officials, Bandurski said.
"The bottom line, for decades, is that, 'We can't always tell the whole truth, but we won't tell outright lies.' But in this case outright lies have been foisted upon Southern Weekend," he said.
"The attitude among top propaganda officials is really worrying. They feel it's OK to run roughshod over a paper" that epitomizes the reform spirit in China, Bandurski said.
Actresses Li Bingbing and Yao Chen, who have millions of followers in China, are among many thousands of Internet users who have posted online support for Southern Weekend on Sina Weibo, China's versions of Twitter. Entrepreneur Hung Huang wrote Monday that local official Tuo had overnight destroyed the public trust China's new leadership strives to re-establish.
After the news Monday that China will change its widely hated labor camp system, following public demands for change, Yuan Yulai, a Zhejiang-based lawyer, asked his 450,000 followers on Sina Weibo to direct their efforts toward opposing media censorship.
Public pressure, often expressed online, can sway China's authoritarian government, as shown by an official climb-down this weekend over tough new traffic penalties. But experts warned not to expect significant changes to the party's longtime system of media control.
"Tuo Zhen will probably not step down, and maybe even Southern Weekend will not be as brave as before in reporting social injustice," media analyst Hu said.