Has the propaganda ministry applied pressure to the magazine’s owners? Have long-running internal financial squabbles come to a head? Is the magazine’s indomitable editor, Hu Shuli, maneuvering to ensure she can continue pushing the boundaries of press freedom, either at Caijing or at a new publication?

Any one of these three scenarios is plausible, and they are not mutually exclusive. As a July New Yorker profile of Hu points out, Caijing has accomplished a rare feat in China by becoming both influential and highly profitable while also reporting aggressively on stories that extend beyond business to politics and social issues, from SARS to the shoddy construction of schools that collapsed in the Sichuan earthquake. Though they have been slapped on the wrist many times, Hu and Caijing’s investors have managed to avoid the harshest of reprisals through a combination of keen political instincts and by having the right friends in high places.

But Caijing may now be testing the Chinese media’s equivalent of Ohm’s law: The more readers, money and fame a publication accrues through muckraking, the greater official resistance becomes.

See also articles from Reuters and the AP.

Update: Read Evan Osnos’ take on the current situation at Caijing:

I profiled Hu Shuli, the founding editor, in the magazine in July, and she struck me as determined to significantly expand the impact of her news organization. Caijing, which began as a magazine, had expanded into a conference promoter and an online news provider, and it is developing a wire service called Cai to compete with the likes of Bloomberg and Dow Jones. But that has also put her even farther out of step with China’s media mores. Caijing is a restless competitor in a sphere that operates on the principle that the media knows its own boundaries and rarely crosses them. As Caijing has grown, it has become both expensive and profitable, making it harder for everyone involved to take the risks that it could when it was just a fledgling print magazine a decade ago. There has been growing pressure from advertisers to print rosier business news, which Hu rejects, and, of course, there is the usual pressure to avoid controversial subjects. For years, she has stepped as close to those as she can without getting the place shut down. Rumors have circulated recently that senior government media officials are unhappy with Caijing’s aggressive reporting.

Also, China Daily has a surprisingly candid report on the resignations:

The mass resignations followed escalating pressure in recent months by the SEEC to rid the outspoken magazine of its widely reputable editorial independence, two inside sources told China Daily on the condition of anonymity.

“The key is, the SEEC wants to intervene and censor all of our financial stories, particularly cover stories and investigative reports. That’s unbearable (for us),” one source said.

“None of the real stories we used to run would have been OK (with the SEEC) if they stepped in,” the source said.

Hu Shuli, Caijing’s founder and editor, is also likely to leave the publication, according to both sources, who said most editorial staff will “fight on” with her and leave if she does.

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Post tags: Caijing, Hu Shuli, media commercialization, media conditions
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Caijing, the highly respected Chinese business magazine, has been thrown into turmoil after 11 high-ranking business executives resigned because of a dispute over its shareholding structure and its future development, according to people who work at the magazine.

Caijing’s general manager, its top advertising executive and the head of its conference unit all submitted resignations over the past few weeks, along with nearly 70 other business-side workers, according to several current and former magazine staff members, all of whom requested anonymity because they feared losing their jobs.

Caijing’s editor, Hu Shuli, and several top executives have been trying to gain greater control over the publication’s finances in order to expand its operations and develop new media properties, including a news service. Caijing’s top executives have also been trying to bring new investors into the magazine, hoping to expand its shareholding structure, these people say.

See also reports from:
- Wall Street Journal
- China-based Alibaba.com
- Financial Times
- The Australian

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Post tags: Caijing, Hu Shuli, media commercialization
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An ambitious plan, set forth in guidelines last week by China’s State Council, envisions the creation of entertainment, news and culture companies with a market orientation and with less government backing. China, in short, would like to consolidate its industry into companies resembling Bloomberg, Time Warner and Viacom, analysts say.

“There appears to be a feeling at the highest levels of government that they need a media machine commensurate to the rising status and power of China,” says Jim Laurie, a former ABC News correspondent who teaches at Hong Kong University and recently met with Chinese state broadcasting executives.

Beijing hopes the moves will even improve the nation’s image overseas — part of a longstanding effort to use “soft power,” rather than military might to win friends abroad.

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Post tags: media commercialization, media conditions, media reform, shanghai media group
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The irony is that the dominant Western narrative on China has it that market-oriented development would inevitably lead to liberalization, including, presumably, for the news media. This narrative’s assumptions look increasingly flawed, however. Instead, the Chinese authorities are working out a recipe for CCP media values—“watch what you can watch, and don’t watch what you cannot watch” as a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson recently explained—to trump genuine market values of open competition, transparency, and rule of law.

Even more impressive is that the “market-based censorship” model has been achieved in the context of a rapidly changing media environment; the CCP is successfully adapting controls from old media to new, including the internet.

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Chinese newsstands get more impressive by the day: So much is on offer that most of them have opted to add a few extra magazine holders on the pavement. Here, a holder brimming with publications on collecting and the arts, interior decoration, and architecture. Opposite, another one with magazines on golf and various sports, cars, aviation, video games and so on. Conspicuous consumption publications abound, taking pride of place among the plethora of fashion magazines that becomes ever larger: all the famous international names are there, from Vogue to Cosmopolitan, busy “educating the taste” (as they claim) of contemporary Chinese urban women…

(...)
Read the rest of China’s Journos Dodge the Censors – Ilaria Maria Sala¬† (293 words)

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Post tags: magazines, media censorship, media commercialization, press freedom, Sanlian
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As news of a visit to Henan Province by Politburo member and top propaganda official Liu Yunshan was pegged to the top of one of Beijing’s leading Internet portals today, the message, buried deep in a pile of Party shibboleths about the “scientific view of development” and “advanced Socialist culture”, was the need to develop and commercialize culture as an industry in China, thereby increasing the country’s “cultural soft power”. The message was not new, but rather a reiteration of President Hu Jintao’s guiding policy toward the media in China and a reminder of where he stands: squarely on the side of commercialization under Party control. [Full text]

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From EastSouthWestNorth Blog:

On March 17, 2005, Hunan Normal University began to offer a class on how to sensationalize news (新闻炒作学). After two sessions, this course has now been suspended due to the public outcry.

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Post tags: media commercialization, news media, press reform
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