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LEAD: Weekly supplement of China Youth Daily shutdown+(Japan Economic Newswire Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)BEIJING, Jan. 25_(Kyodo) _ (EDS: UPDATING WITH CONFIRMATION BY EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, MORE INFO) A bold weekly supplement of the mass circulation China Youth Daily has stopped publication because of a rift between its editors and Chinese authorities over story content, the paper's editor-in-chief, Li Datong, said Wednesday. On Tuesday, the Communist Party Youth League ordered the four-page, full-color broadsheet supplement "Freezing Point" to stop publishing as of Wednesday, when an issue would normally come out. Although 70 percent of the China Youth Daily's readers said Freezing Point was what they liked most about the paper, officials did not feel the same way, Li said. "If the readers like it, then the party and the officials don't like it at all," Li said. He said government news authorities had not said why they were ordering the indefinite closure of the decade-old supplement with no timeline for a re-launch. A Beijing lawyer close to the case said authorities ordered the paper to stop releasing the supplement and "rectify" it. A newspaper staff member who declined to give her name said the dispute came to a head with a Jan. 11 article about Chinese high school history textbooks. The article said the texts contain errors about the Boxer Uprising of 1900. It said that contrary to the school texts, the government took action to hurt the peasants behind the revolt instead of vice versa as described by the texts. Chinese farmers today have similar disputes with the government, accusing it of land confiscations and violence against long-time activists. The paper also took issue with descriptions in the texts about the European invasion of parts of China in the late 1800s, the staff member said. The Chinese texts slam the eight invaders and sidestep domestic issues that led to the invasion. The article asked whether the texts really offer a "patriotic education" as the government regularly claims. "Of course this (closure) is because they don't like us at all," said the newspaper staff member. Radio Free Asia in Hong Kong reported that the dispute had been brewing for two years but "blew up" in mid-2005 after Li, a founding editor, wrote an internal memo criticizing a reward system linking journalists' salaries to the opinions of top government officials. Li said he had drawn criticism from authorities for years but did not want to change the stories. "Analysts say the move highlights a fresh initiative by President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao's government to tighten state control over China's media," Radio Free Asia said. It said that in late 1995 China Youth Daily readers voted Freezing Point the paper's most popular section. China Youth Daily, founded in 1951, has about 500,000 readers, many of them Chinese students. Freezing Point's target audience is people of any age trying to improve their "personal freedom," Li said. The supplement's eight reporters and five editors do not know what they will do next, Li said. Beijing human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang said in a mass e-mail Tuesday night that Freezing Point would leave a mark. "It's going this far has already created a miracle," Pu said. The closure, he said with a touch of sarcasm, "shows that the great, glorious and correct party's expression of respect for freedom is already extreme." |