The face-off between liberals and leftists at the headquarters of a newspaper company in southern China came after disgruntled editors and reporters at Southern Weekend last week decried what they alleged was crude meddling by the head of party propaganda in Guangdong Province, which has long had a reputation as a bastion of a relatively free press.
Negotiations between journalists and officials over the dispute are still at a standoff as the newspaper’s next publication date on Thursday looms, said Chen Min, a former senior writer for the paper.
Senior Chinese officials have so far not commented in public on the censorship dispute at the newspaper, which has tested how far the recently appointed Communist Party leader Xi Jinping will extend his vows of economic reform into a degree of political relaxation. But self-proclaimed defenders of communist orthodoxy who turned up at the newspaper headquarters said they were there to make the party’s case.
“We support the Communist Party, shut down the traitor newspaper,” said one of the cardboard signs held up by one of ten or so protesters who came to defend the government.
“Southern Weekend is having an American dream,” said another of the signs. “We don’t want the American dream, we want the Chinese dream.”
Some of the group held up portraits of Mao Zedong, the late revolutionary leader who remains a symbol of communist zeal, while others waved the red flags of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party. Most of the party supporters refused to give their names. They said they came on their own initiative, and not at the behest of officials.
The dueling protests outside the newspaper’s headquarters in this provincial capital reflected the political passions and tensions churned up by the quarrel over censorship, which has erupted while Mr. Xi is trying to win public favor and consolidate his authority.
Hundreds of bystanders watched and took photos on smart phones as the leftists shouted at the 20 or more protesters who had gathered to denounce censorship, and shoving matches broke out between the demonstrators.
At one point, leftists were showered with 50-cent renminbi currency notes. The “Fifty Cent Party” has become a popular term for disparaging pro-party leftists, who are alleged by critics to be willing to take 50 cents in payment for each pro-party message they send onto the Internet.
“It’s the only newspaper in China that’s willing to tell the truth,” said Liang Taiping, 28, a poet from Changsha in southern China, who said he took the train to Guangzhou to show his support for Southern Weekend, which is widely read nationwide.
“What’s the point of living while you can’t even speak freely?” he said.
About 70 police officers and security guards stood nearby. They did not try to break up the protests, but officers recorded them with video cameras and occasionally stepped in to stop shoving and fisticuffs. Later, the rival protesters broke into separate camps concentrated on different sides of the gate to the newspaper headquarters.
The protesting journalists at Southern Weekend have also called for the dismissal of Tuo Zhen, the top propaganda official in Guangdong Province.
They blame Mr. Tuo, a former journalist, for making a drastic change in a New Year’s editorial that originally called for greater respect for constitutional rights. The revised editorial instead lauded Communist Party’s policies.
Chen Min, a prominent former opinion writer for Southern Weekend who is better known by his pen name, Xiao Shu, said staff members at the newspaper have been negotiating with officials over a possible solution to the standoff that might allow the next issue to appear on Thursday, as usual.
The protests at Southern Weekend broke out while Mr. Xi, the party’s general secretary appointed in November, has been sending mixed signals about his intentions. He has repeatedly said he supports faster and bolder reform, but on Saturday he gave a speech defending the party’s history and Mao Zedong’s standing in it.
China’s Central Propaganda Department, which administers the censorship apparatus, issued instructions telling news media that the dispute at Southern Weekend was “due to the meddling of hostile outside forces,” according to China Digital Times, a group based in Berkeley, Calif., that monitors media and censorship issues.
Both supporters and critics of Southern Weekend journalists have claimed that Mr. Xi would back their cause.
“I don’t believe that Xi is totally hypocritical when he talks about reform,” said Mr. Chen, who was forced out of the newspaper in 2011.
“The Southern Weekend journalists have said that they accept party control, but the question is what kind of control and how far should it go unchallenged,” Mr. Chen added.
Jonah Kessel reported from Guangzhou, China, and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong. Mia Li contributed reporting from Guangzhou, and Patrick Zuo from Beijing.
