Inside a Chinese Communist Municipal Newspaper: Purges at the Beijing Daily

Abstract

The Beijing Daily, the flagship media outlet of the Beijing Municipal Party, was one of the most influential newspapers established in the early years of the People’s Republic of China. The newspaper’s principal purpose was to propagate the remarkable achievements of the Chinese Communist Party and to demonstrate the superiority of the Chinese socialist system over the capitalist one. Newly available archival sources reveal a depressing and disturbing story behind the façade of authoritative reporting: an interlocking system of control of editorial management, stringent censorship, skillful manipulation of news, and carefully selected readers’ letters in praise of the Communist regime. In the early 1960s, in contrast to the harmonious picture of Chinese society depicted by the newspaper, senior editorial staff were caught in the middle of life-and-death ideological infighting between the radical Maoists and the pragmatists in the central Party leadership. The staff used a variety of techniques – double talk, fence-sitting, paying lip service to the official lines and conducting self-criticism – to navigate through the perilous political shoals. But they were eventually purged by the Maoists during the Cultural Revolution for siding with the pragmatists. Chinese journalists, including the Beijing Daily staff who worked in the system, lived a precarious life in the authoritarian environment.