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A welcome sign of the Shanghai free-trade zone. Photo: Reuters

Shanghai’s propaganda chief Xu Lin calls for tighter media control

As Shanghai’s free-trade zone aims to be a testing ground for unprecedented economic reforms, it was business as usual in Communist Party propaganda in China’s second-largest city.

“Shanghai is at the forefront of the meeting of Chinese and Western thought,” Xu Lin, the head of the city’s propaganda department wrote in Monday’s People’s Daily. Therefore, the city must “strengthen the management” of newspapers, television stations, online platforms, forums and seminars, he wrote. Shanghai will strengthen its capacity to “guide public opinion” and expand its internet monitoring teams, he added.

Xu’s article, which seems to be inspired by an hour-long speech he gave to his subordinates in Shanghai on September 23, is one of a series of briefings throughout the country on a speech by President Xi Jinping on “ideological work” on August 19.

While the full text of Xi’s speech has not been released yet, it “is geared toward promoting hard-line socialist values and absolute obedience to Beijing’s edicts,” wrote Willy Lam, adjunct professor of Chinese studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in a recent analysis for the Jamestown Foundation. “The return of orthodoxy of a bygone era could cast a deep shadow over whatever new ideas Beijing might have for rendering China’s economy more market-oriented,” he warned.

In his speech, Xi called for “ideological purification” according to state media reports, reiterating a campaign initiated by late leader Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s which cracked down on alternative views.

Shortly after Xi’s speech in August, a crackdown on prominent social media commentators began to take shape.

Xu is one of many leading bureaucrats throughout the country spreading the content of the speech to lower-level officials. The Shanghai-born 50-year-old official was one of the Xi administration’s first new appointments in the city, when he succeeded Yang Zhenwu, who currently works as the editor-in-chief of the People’s Daily.

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