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
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 before 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 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, 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 ahead of 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, such as 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 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 have played a cat-and-mouse game with the 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 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,” Wen said. “You either need to discharge it or it will run rampant. The regulators are trying to use policies to block the holes.”
© 2016 The New York Times Company
