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Opinion | Southern Weekly's moment of reckoning

Online protests have grown in intensity over the past few days following a fumbled attempt to censor one of China's most respected newspapers, and are expected to manifest outside the media company's offices today, amid talk of a strike and demands for one propaganda official's resignation.

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10:45AM, January 7

The situation continues to escalate at Southern Weekly, considered by many to be China's most respectable newspaper, where journalists there have been joined by some managerial staff in calling for an investigation into the censorship of its annual address for 2013, and for the resignation of Tuo Zhen, the propaganda official who penned his own unauthorised version.

After the scandal broke, journalists at the newspaper began airing their grievances on their personal microblog accounts, only to quickly be silenced and in some cases have their accounts deleted. Beyond that, efforts at Sina Weibo and other online platforms to censor discussion of media industry and public outrage at Tuo's move have been fast and furious and unrelenting.

On Sina Weibo, where the ensuing discussion is centred, Southern Weekly's official microblog account was seized by management at the newspaper, leading to a fresh round of outrage and protests online, and the decision by several editors to go on strike today.
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In addition, offline protests are scheduled to take place today outside Southern Weekly's offices in Guangzhou and Beijing. Late Sunday evening, mainstream media and even Communist Party mouthpieces such as People's Daily tweeted vaguely worded statements in support of Southern Weekly journalists and editors.  
E-commerce platform Taobao, for instance, wrote early this morning on its official Sina Weibo account, "There is no winter which can't be outlasted. Even now, the swallows are flying toward the South."
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All four of the characters which comprise Southern Weekly's name in Chinese are also currently being filtered from search results on Sina Weibo.

We'll be constantly updating our liveblog below so check back soon, but in the meantime here's some background to the controversy:

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