Two senior officials at a Sichuan newspaper have been suspended over a classified advertisement saluting the mothers of Tiananmen crackdown victims, a source said yesterday.
Li Shaojun, executive deputy editor-in-chief of the Chengdu Evening News, was suspended because he was on duty on Sunday when a 13-character advertisement was supposed to be vetted before it appeared in the paper on Monday, the 18th anniversary of the bloody crackdown, the source said.
The director of the newspaper's advertising department was suspended and the paper had stopped its partnership with the advertising company that let the notice slip on to page 14 of the paper's June 4 edition.
The advertisement, which read 'Salute to the adamant mothers of the June 4 victims', was published after a young female clerk from the advertising company accepted it from a client on May 30 without knowing what June 4 meant.
Two days later, she phoned the client to ask what the date meant and he replied that it was the date of a mining disaster.
A staff member from the office of the newspaper's editor-in-chief declined to confirm yesterday whether any employee had been punished for the incident.