Professor Ming Wan appeared on the January 8 edition of the PBS Newshour program to discuss the standoff that had been going on between the Chinese Communist Party officials and journalists at Southern Weekly, a popular weekly news publication based in the southern city of Guangzhou.
Southern Weekly, long considered among the more independent of Chinese news outlets, had published an editorial that was subsequently heavily edited by Party propaganda authorities. In response, the publication’s journalists went on strike.
Protests in support of the Weekly’s journalists were widespread and the debate became a symbol of the tensions between traditional Chinese media control and freedom for the press and social media. Professor Wang and James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Magazine, discussed the reaction to the Chinese government’s crackdown on the Southern Weekly and how it is emblematic of the pressures on the government to change its policies in the face of the many economic reforms taking place in that nation.