Magazine by blogger killed off after debut
A magazine started by popular mainland blogger Han Han, entitled Party, is dead before the second issue could be published and the editorial team has been dismissed, the managing editor says.
Ma Yimu, the editor, announced on his Sina.com microblog early yesterday morning that the team was sacked at three minutes past midnight. 'Today is not April Fool's Day,' Ma wrote. 'It's the birthday of Mr Runzhi (another name of Mao Zedong)... I hope [the dismissal] is not true and I firmly believe that we will be back.'
He also posted a picture of a bottle of bubbly rose wine, saying Han was supposed to open one at a celebration party for the second issue.
An editor close to the magazine said the decision had been made because of 'pressure from the top'.
The staff had expected it might end like this, the magazine's art director Zhou Yunzhe told the Phoenix Weekly website.
Party debuted on July 6 and sold more than 1.2 million copies, the publisher said.
Han, a 28-year-old Shanghainese high school dropout and racing car driver, was editor-in-chief. He once told domestic media that he wanted to run a magazine for youth.
The first issue of Party did not go smoothly. It took Han months to find a publisher that he could accept as a censor. After talking to four or five firms, he settled on Huawen Tianxia.
His original cover design - a nude gun-toting man with his genitalia covered by the magazine's logo - was rejected by one publisher who said: 'You've covered up the midriff. That's a deliberate pun on [the Communist] Party's Central Committee.' Both are called dangzhongyang in pinyin. The magazine title is also a play on words - 'the Solo Choir' in Chinese but 'Party' in English.
There had been rumours since late last month that the magazine was dead, but Ma and the publisher brushed off the talk. Both said they were still trying to bring it out.
Analysts believe a major obstacle for the second issue is a failure to obtain a standard serial number for periodicals.
The first issue was published by using a legal loophole - it used a serial number for books. But the trick could not be used twice, given the publicity for the magazine.
One internet user expressed surprise at why a literary magazine without any political or sensitive content was banned. Another suggested Party should be published in Hong Kong instead, 'where people have freedom of publication'.
Author Sha Yexin said cases similar to Party and the detention of Xie Chaoping, who wrote about the Sanmen Dam relocation in the 1950s, were bound to recur.
Artist Ai Weiwei said censorship had almost ruled out independent thinking. 'Creativity in literacy and art has been strangled by the system while retaining stability has become the only priority,' he said.
Han could not be reached for comment by last night.
