A prominent Chinese journalist has been dismissed for writing for a Hong Kong website — the first case of its kind made public after the Chinese government warned journalists earlier this month not to cooperate with overseas news agencies.
The journalist, Song Zhibiao, was forced to terminate his contract on Friday with China Fortune, a monthly magazine owned by Southern Metropolis Daily, a relatively liberal newspaper in the southern city of Guangzhou.
According to Mr. Song, the magazine’s editor in chief informed him on Friday morning that local propaganda officials had said that Mr. Song, an officially credentialed journalist, violated the government’s new rule by writing commentaries for Orient, a news website belonging to the Hong Kong-based Oriental Press Group. The Southern Media Group, which owns Southern Metropolis Daily, received a notice from the local propaganda office that Mr. Song should be dismissed. On Friday afternoon, Mr. Song signed a statement terminating his contract with the magazine.
Although Hong Kong, a former British colony, returned to Chinese rule in 1997, it has retained many civil liberties, including freedom of the press, that are unavailable on the Chinese mainland, and its media are treated as overseas news outlets by the Chinese authorities.
Song Zhibiao
COURTESY OF SONG ZHIBIAO
Ren Tianyang, the executive editor of Southern Metropolis Daily, said by telephone that he did not know the reasons for Mr. Song’s departure.
Mr. Song had been a well-known commentator for Southern Metropolis Daily until 2011, when he was forced to resign after he wrote an essay on the third anniversary of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which almost 70,000 people died. Mr. Song had questioned the government’s culpability in the deaths of so many children in poorly constructed school buildings. After leaving the newspaper, Mr. Song began working for its affiliated magazine, China Fortune.
Chen Min, a former editor at Southern Weekend, a sister newspaper of Southern Metropolis Daily, until he himself was dismissed in 2011 because of his criticism of the government, said that the firing of Mr. Song and recent instructions not to cooperate with foreign media outlets “reflect the authorities’ deep insecurity, their profound distrust of society as a whole and their growing concern that they are losing control of public opinion.”
Mr. Chen, widely known under his pen name Xiaoshu, says that because the government’s hold over public opinion has weakened, thanks to the Internet and the rise of more commercially oriented journalism in China, the authorities have been adopting measures to try to regain control.
“They purge you from traditional media, then crack down on you on Weibo,” Mr. Chen said. “And then they see you can still have a voice in overseas media. So, how to control that? They cut down the journalists.”
Qiao Mu, director of the Center for International Communication Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said, “They are frightened by public opinion and want to maintain a single voice on many issues.”
Mr. Qiao said that the recently issued restrictions on working with foreign media outlets were consistent with the campaign to “clean up the Internet” that the government began last year, and which has targeted influential microblog commentators and resulted in the arrests of people who are alleged to have spread “rumors” online.
In May, the journalist Gao Yu, 70, was detained by the police after being accused of providing a “secret central document” to a foreign website.