From RFA, via the Time China blog:
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.
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. [Full text]