From the Washington Post:
This fall, a scholarly magazine that focuses on Communist Party history pushed the envelope again.
Editors, emboldened a few years ago after writing about a rarely mentioned former top official the party had purged, published a cover story about a former party chief banned from mention in state-controlled media because of his support for students during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
Propaganda officials waited two months before visiting the magazine’s director, Du Daozheng, an 85-year-old party loyalist. At his office, he said, they delivered a subtle message. “Mr. Du, you have been working so hard. And you are old now, right?” the men reportedly told Du, director of Yanhuang Chunqiu, last month. “The implication was that I should resign now,” he said in an interview.
Read more about Yanhuang Chunqiu and Du Daozheng via CDT’s Biganzi. All of CDT’s coverage of Yanhuang Chunqiu can be found here. See also a translation of an article from Yanhuang Chunqiu, about the origins of the Red Guards, via Zhong-Mei Guanxi.
On a related topic, ESWN translates an article from Southern Weekend about the arrests of journalists this year:
Our investigation showed that the many cases of journalists being arrested all involved other cases behind them, and the informants were arrested as well. The reporter for
magazine was charged with “suspected libel,” but all the other cases had to do with “suspicion of taking a bribe.” Each of those cases is puzzling and mysterious, which attracted extra public attention. Let us revisit these cases of journalists being arrested, and contemplate carefully the roles of official authority, the rule of law and the professional code for journalism.
