After two years of state-imposed firings and staff reassignments and the suspension of one of its sister publications, the Chinese authorities have sharply stepped up their tactics in a campaign to rein in China's most widely respected news organization.
In recent weeks, alleging managerial corruption, provincial courts have handed down harsh prison sentences for senior executives of the Southern media group's Southern Metropolitan Daily and have initiated charges against the newspaper's top editor.
The provincial authorities in Guangzhou, China's third-largest city and a longstanding incubator of innovative journalism, have accused the newspaper's leaders of embezzlement. But reporters throughout the country and international advocates of press freedom see the case as a major test of China's new, reform-minded leaders' pledges to transform the country into a law-based society that tolerates greater freedom of expression.
Chinese journalists say that more than any other publications, Southern Metropolitan Daily and its sister magazine, Southern Weekend, the country's most popular weekly, have been responsible for reinventing the Chinese press, by creating a journalism that even within the constraints of state ownership and censorship pushes for the truth.
In the last several years the publications have broken news about deaths in police custody and environmental damage related to the huge Three Gorges dam pro-ject and have celebrated repeated scoops over the outbreak, cover-up and then recurrence of the SARS virus.
If the newspaper's leaders lose their judicial appeals, journalists from the Southern media group, Chinese intellectuals and colleagues from other publications say, the embattled newspaper will have also exposed the limits of free expression and political reform
in their country.
In an unusually bold petition, dozens of prominent journalists and academics have decried the prosecutions as the "illegal use of all kinds of measures, including juridical methods to limit press freedoms and crack down on the media and limit its space."
If the persecution of the newspaper did not end, the signers warned that "the authority and credibility of the party and the government bodies and the legislature will be questioned, and news media whose responsibility is to push the society forward will find it difficult to survive."
Although the official charge was embezzlement of bonuses, most observers believe the most immediate apparent cause for the Southern Metropolitan Daily's legal troubles was its reporting, last December, of a suspected reemergence of the SARS virus.
Yu Huafeng, the newspaper's general manager, was recently sentenced to 12 years in prison. Li Minying, a former editor-in-chief, was sentenced to an 11-year-term. Cheng Yizhong, the paper's top editor, is under arrest and has also been charged with embezzlement.
"The convictions and trials are a severe blow to the country's media reforms," said Xiao Qiang, director of the University of California-Berkeley's China Internet project.
"It shows the leadership fears the country's press might be getting out of control, and has decided to strike back," Xiao said.
The Southern media group has curious origins for a muckraking paper that regularly irritates the authorities. It was founded in 1997 by the provincial Communist Party, just as the region's economic growth kicked into high gear.
For weeks, reporters and editors at the newspaper and at Southern Weekend have been unwilling to speak publicly about their situation for fear of inviting further trouble for their publications, or being made targets themselves.
Privately, however, several spoke of an atmosphere of fear, but also of intense pride at what their journalism has been able to accomplish.
"There is an end-of-an-era feeling about this building, filled with all kinds of feelings: depression, sadness and anger," said one newsroom veteran.
But even if the news staff realized it had to be cautious for now, the reporter said, it would be difficult to stop the push for freer expression.
"I don't think you can say we are all afraid," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "If it closes it closes, but that would create a very strong feeling among people -- both readers and within the industry."
Another staff member from the group echoed a view shared by many journalists.
"If they close the Southern Daily, it wouldn't matter," he said. "The newspaper's example has already been absorbed by journalists all over China, and their goal is not just to copy it, but to do even better."
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