Media crackdown hits freezing point

China's propaganda overlords have closed one of the country's most controversial and outspoken newspaper supplements in the latest sign of a crackdown on press freedom.

The influential Freezing Point, a weekly section of the China Youth Daily with a reputation for exposing corruption in high places and running scathingly critical opinion pieces, was ordered to shut down earlier this week as part of a campaign by President Hu Jintao's Communist Government to muzzle the media.

Li Datong, editor of Freezing Point, said he had been told to write a "self-criticism" - a style of public confession common during the Cultural Revolution - and stop publishing until the magazine's ideological "issues" had been corrected. "We have nothing to correct," Li told Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper.

Journalists and academics have been unusually outspoken in their criticism of the closure of Freezing Point and Li plans to complain formally about the Propaganda Department's action. The clampdown, he said, was "a step too far". The censors had also ordered Chinese media not to report it.

Last year Li attacked his employer over a plan to link journalists' salaries and bonuses to the amount of praise garnered from Communist officials. His complaint led to the appraisal system being scrapped.

Boasting a circulation of 400,000, China Youth Daily is the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party Youth League, which has 72 million members and is effectively Hu Jintao's power base.

A problem for the censors was an essay by historian Yuan Weishi which suggested Chinese students were being "fed on wolf milk" and that Hong Kong textbooks gave better accounts of historical events such as the Opium Wars and the Boxer Uprising.

It has been a tough few weeks for freedom of information in China, with multi-national internet companies, fearful of losing access to China's 111 million internet users playing their part.

Google announced that it would bow to Beijing's demands that its Chinese website restrict access to information about controversial topics such as the Falun Gong, Tibetan independence and human rights.

Late last year, authorities removed the chief editor of the Beijing News. When Chinese blogger Zhao Jing, better known as An Ti, wrote about the turmoil at the Beijing News, Microsoft shut the site down at the request of the Chinese Government.

In April, Yahoo was accused of supplying data that was used as evidence to jail Chinese journalist Shi Tao for 10 years.

There are 32 journalists and 50 bloggers in jail in China, including New York Times news assistant Zhao Yan and Straits Times correspondent Ching Cheong, who is accused of spying for the Taiwanese. 

- INDEPENDENT