Another press-corps sin now deemed unacceptable: pestering officials in public. During a mid-June news conference, a Beijing reporter embarrassed China's Executive Vice Minister of Health, Gao Qiang, by quoting back to him two of his contradictory statements and then asking which was true. "The Publicity Department said that's even worse than what foreign reporters do," says the editor of a party-run newspaper. Authorities are now reviewing all of the country's newspapers and magazines and may close down other transgressors. So much for the new era of openness that many viewed as the only welcome side effect of SARS.
China Stops the Presses, Again
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China's leadership is drafting an overhaul of its communist-era
constitution that would include guarantees of private-property rights.
But freedom of the press will probably not be part of any charter-reform
package. In its latest attempt to rein in the country's increasingly
boisterous media, the Party's Publicity Department—formerly the
Ministry of Propaganda—this month ordered the closure of the
Beijing New Times newspaper after it ran an article criticizing
China's congress. The department also forbade coverage of other
sensitive topics, including Jiang Yanyong, the doctor who exposed the
government's cover-up of the SARS epidemic; separatist movements in
Tibet and Xinjiang; the financial scandal swirling around Shanghai
tycoon Zhou Zhengyi, and avian flu, which has broken out twice in China
in the past five years and can kill humans.