China newspaper issues corrections after censorship row

The correction came as a bookend to a dispute in which journalists tested the boundaries of state censorship and in which China's ruling Communist Party showed that it is not ready to loosen its tight grip on the media.

Journalists at the Southern Weekly said the mistakes resulted from last-minute changes made by censors who ignored a usual review by the paper's editorial department. The journalists used the errors to air their frustration and draw attention to how heavy censorship changed the paper's New Year's message from a call for constitutionalism into a tribute to the Communist Party.

Journalists had threatened to go on strike, but the tension fizzled after the editorial staff and the censors reached a compromise that would relax some intrusive controls while keeping much of the censorship in place. Public calls for the ouster of the region's top censor were ignored, and the newspaper was published last Thursday with no hint of the dispute.

This week, the paper ran a correction at the bottom of the second page to fix three glitches from the New Year's edition: a typo, a wrong date and an erroneous numbering of the edition. But there was more: The journalists also made their first -- though oblique and mild -- reference in print to the censorship dispute.

“Newspaper mistakes are always in black and white. In every link of editing and publishing a newspaper, its standard process should always be respected and followed. We have never been more keenly aware of this,” read the correction signed by the editorial staff.

Members of the editorial staff could not be reached for comment Thursday, because they had been asked not to talk to the foreign media.

Calls to the newspaper and its parent company, Nanfang Media Group, were either unanswered or not immediately returned on Thursday.

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