A walkout by reporters at one of China's leading newspapers, the Southern Weekend, appears to involve, in part, the paper's environmental coverage. The New York Times reported on Jan. 6 that anger over apparent censorship of the paper's New Year's Letter prompted the paper's economics and environmental news staffs to declare that they were on strike.
The next day, hundreds of people showed up at the paper's offices in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, in support of the striking journalists. By Wednesday morning, a tentative agreement had been reached to defuse the strike, and Southern Weekend (also known as Southern Weekly) returned to the newsstands on Thursday.
According to the BBC, the Thursday edition "led with a lengthy report about a fire at a makeshift Henan orphanage. It also contained investigative reports on the environmental damage caused by abandoned coal mines in Shanxi province and a poor man in Jiangsu province who was forced to administer his own dialysis treatments."
A former Knight Fellow living in China, who asked not to be identified, sent me this yesterday in an email:
I've been following some of the news about the protest, but I haven't heard of an environmental aspect. That said, the protests are happening at the same time that news is breaking about a 5-day coverup of a chemical spill in a Chinese river. It would be easy for people to look at the coverup and point to it as a reason we need a free and rambunctious corps of journalists. There have also been a huge number of protests (small and big) around China over recent years and an equally large number of pollution problems. Environmental decay has been a key rallying cry for why China needs to develop a more robust civil society. The Southern Weekly fiasco is tapping that vein. But as far as I can tell, the journalists there are angry about an overzealous propaganda minister changing their words.
I haven't been able to find out more about why the environmental staff participated in the walkout. The most recent story in the Times reports that "people across China have been detained or questioned in recent days by security officers for publicly supporting the journalists at the Southern Weekend newspaper who have been protesting strict censorship, according to a human rights group and online posts discussing the plights of some detainees."
-Paul Raeburn
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