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Chinese business magazine taken off country's shelves

A Chinese magazine with a cover story on a scandal involving one of the nation's richest men has been withheld from newsstands, one of its employees said yesterday amid a government crackdown on the media.

Distributors of the magazine Caijing said its June 20 issue had been mailed to subscribers, but wasn't being sent to newsstands.

The issue reported on the background of Zhou Zhengyi (周正毅), a Shanghai retail and property developer, who is also known as Chau Ching-ngai. Authorities say Zhou's companies are being investigated in connection with loans by the state-run Bank of China. His wife has been questioned by anti-corruption investigators in Hong Kong.

A receptionist at Caijing's complaints hot line said the latest edition wasn't going to newsstands because there were too few copies. She refused to say why the numbers were reduced.

"We had a very limited number [of copies] for this issue, which could reach only fixed subscribers," said the receptionist, who would give only her surname, Wu.

Editors of the magazine, which is known in English as the Business and Finance Review, weren't immediately available for comment.

China recently ordered a crackdown aimed at tightening controls over increasingly lively state media.

The government has loosened controls on media controls in recent years -- in part to boost sales amid falling subsidies. Yet reporters also have been fired and a small number jailed after angering communist authorities by publicizing corruption and other official abuses.

Publication department officials said last week they were reviewing all of China's magazines and newspapers in line with "media reforms" ordered by the Communist Party at its national congress last November.

Publications have been ordered to stop selling subscriptions until the end of September and those that fail to meet standards and regulations will be shut down.

The newspaper Beijing Xinbao was closed after its June 4 issue carried an essay mocking government institutions including the National People's Congress. The commentary included the largely ceremonial National People's Congress on a list of "China's Seven Disgusting Things."

Caijing has a reputation for exposing business misconduct such as falsification of financial data but has begun to report on a wide range of potentially sensitive topics.

Its June 5 issue questioned the government's handling of recent cases of deadly mass food poisonings and praised a doctor who told reporters that the health minister was lying about the number of SARS cases in Beijing.

Its managing editor, Hu Shuli, has also written articles calling for greater government openness in handling financial scandals.

Other articles have criticized the lack of public information from the government about the outbreak of SARS.

Caijing was launched in April 1998 by Hu, a veteran editor and reporter, with support from a government-backed institute that promotes China's financial markets.
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