Chinese media resisting party control

Li Datong's protest however did have an impact. Only days after his letter appeared on an overseas Chinese website and was reported widely in Asia, the leadership of China Youth Daily said it planned to abandon the appraisal policy. Staffers say it is too early to know if this is a sincere reversal of policy, or simply a tactical retreat.

Li Datong would not comment for this report. "He knows exactly how far he can and can't go," says one colleague. Li's fame and talent as a journalist allowed him to weather his association with the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen protest when he and many reporters carried signs saying "Stop Forcing Us to Lie." He is now editor of a special enterprise weekly section called "The Freezing Point" that has investigated influence peddling in the state sector, overcharging medical fees, fake college degree scams, and so on.

Yet Li has not gone untouched. On Monday, the editor in chief, Li Erliang, wrote a counterattack, which also got leaked on the Internet. Editor Li attacked Li Datong's journalistic skills and complained that editors should not write critiques that can be leaked.

Li Fang, a senior editor who resigned recently, says that dynamics inside party media were changing from professional ideas about proper content to a cliquish loyalty based on pleasing the party.

Sources say the problem dates to a new attitude by Communist Youth League officials to simply exert power and ignore traditions of respect, and a desire on the staff to push for greater press openness.

In 2004 a new youth league chairman gave a blunt lecture in the newsroom telling the staff they were to serve the youth league party platform, or leave. Columnist Lu Yuegang wrote a 10,000-word complaint that the underlying spirit of the paper was being eroded. Last December new editor Li Erliang impressed the staff by trying to mediate between the propaganda department and the staff. Yet in a few months he became a rubber stamp for the youth league officials,Li Datong argued in his letter. When a famous photo editor complained that a description of Hu Jintao sounded as if it came from the 1960s period, the editor in chief instructed a committee of editors to censure him for "expressing his ideas too freely. He is too liberal."

"He [Li Erliang] stopped listening and started a 'master-servant relationship on the staff.' He was too willing to please the senior officials," says one journalist close to the paper.

In a related event earlier this month, six top reporters resigned from a well-known China weekly, the Economic Observer. The journalist says the editorial direction of the paper was becoming wholly materialistic and lacked the idealism that at one point characterized the enterprise. Economic Observer editors described the collective resignations as a coincidence.

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