The New York Times, 25 July 2016
HONG KONG — China has ordered several of the country’s most popular internet portals to halt much of their original news reporting, in a move that could confine an even larger share of the journalism in the country to Communist-controlled mouthpieces ahead of an important party meeting next year.
The profit-driven portals, several of which are listed on United States stock exchanges, have in recent years expanded their investigative teams to increase readership among China’s more than 600 million internet users by scooping the staid state-owned news media on stories about subjects including industrial pollution, tainted milk powder and even police brutality.
But on Monday, several news organizations reported that the Beijing office of China’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, ordered the websites of a number of the companies, including Sina, Sohu, NetEase and Phoenix, to shut down or “clean up” several of their most popular online news features.
The announcement came within weeks of the surprise departure of the Cyberspace Administration’s director, Lu Wei, and his replacement by an official who had served under President Xi Jinping in a previous position. Under Mr. Xi, media controls have tightened as the Communist Party has tried to squelch news that might put its governance in an unfavorable light.
In February, Mr. Xi visited three of the top state-run news organizations, telling their staffs in a highly choreographed tour that they existed to serve as propaganda messengers for the party. This month, a respected scholarly journal run by retired Communist Party cadres shut down after a quarter-century following the dismissal of its founding publisher.
The edict made public on Monday, which said the web portals were in “serious violation” of a 2005 internet regulation, came before a meeting next year of the Communist Party Congress. The party often puts in place controls on news before important events, such as the party conclave, held once every five years, which will pick a new group of senior leaders.
The news sites are run by China’s biggest internet companies, which also operate social media platforms and produce some of the country’s most popular online games. Sina, which runs a news aggregation service and publishes original reporting, also created Weibo, China’s popular Twitter-like social media site. The companies are roughly the equivalent of the United States’ largest internet companies, like Facebook, Twitter and Google, and their news sites combine articles from other outlets with original reporting and investigative journalism.
It is unclear whether the regulation will end all original reporting at the websites, where hundreds of millions of Chinese turn for their news. Monday’s announcement mentioned specific features at four internet sites, which in recent years have attracted investigative reporters from newspapers such as Southern Weekend. It was among the first news organizations to face restrictions after Mr. Xi became head of the Communist Party in November 2012.
Wen Tao, who until last year was a reporter for “Serious Reporting” at Phoenix, one of the news features shut down by the new edict, said by telephone that in recent years the news portals had played a cat-and-mouse game with government internet censors, pushing the boundaries of censorship by publishing material without submitting it for approval and waiting to see if it was taken down by the authorities.
But Mr. Wen said that even in China, with its notorious army of censors, it was difficult for the government to control news in a market powered by hundreds of millions of readers hungry for news that goes beyond Communist propaganda.
“The flow of information cannot be stopped — it’s like a flood,” Mr. Wen said. “You either need to discharge it or it will run rampant. The regulators are trying to use policies to block the holes.”
Sun Xuyang, a former investigative reporter for Beijing News and Southern Metropolis Daily, was more pessimistic, saying by telephone that Monday’s announcement was a signal that the space for original reporting was being eroded.
“There are no more illusions,” Mr. Sun said.
The news sites targeted by the Cyberspace Administration include Sina’s “News Geek,” which this month published an article, later deleted, about a chemical contamination at a Beijing school, and “Landmark,” run by NetEase, that last year scooped the official news media in reporting the arrest of the brother-in-law of a jailed former top official.
On Monday, the media or investor relations departments at Sina, Phoenix and NetEase did not respond to emails asking how the announcement would affect news operations. A spokeswoman for Sohu declined to comment.
Late Monday evening, the Cyberspace Administration said in a statement that it was investigating eight internet companies in all, saying that their “ideological thinking wasn’t high enough, and they have blindly chased after economic gains.” The statement singled out two companies in particular, Tencent and Phoenix, as having problems with the management of their websites. Tencent did not reply to emailed questions about how the announcement would affect its news coverage.
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