Update | Please release him: Guangdong newspaper in rare public appeal for freedom of journalist

Three Chinese characters - “please release him” - cover almost a third of Wednesday’s front page of the New Express, a popular newspaper in Guangdong province, in an unprecedented call for press freedom by a major Chinese media outlet.

The newspaper reacted to yesterday’s first reports of the detention of Chen Yongzhou, a journalist writing for the daily paper, on Friday.

Chen was detained in Guangzhou by police from the central Chinese city of Changsha on suspicion of “damaging the commercial reputation” of China’s second-largest maker of construction equipment, Zoomlion, which is headquartered in the capital of Hunan province.

Chen’s detention follows his fifteen-part investigative report series on Zoomlion, one of Changsha’s largest companies and partly owned by Hunan province, exposing financial fraud. The company denied the allegations, but the reports pulled its Hong Kong-listed stock price to a two-year-low in May.

On Monday evening, Changsha police confirmed on its Sina Weibo microblog that Chen had been placed under criminal detention three days earlier. Police also searched his office in Guangzhou on Monday, the newspaper said on Wednesday.