A newspaper's bold decision to carry without authorisation from the leadership in Beijing a speech made by Deng Xiaoping in Shenzhen during his southern tour 20 years ago was made possible by a local publicity official who overcame enormous pressure, a recently published book says.
The unauthorised report about Deng's inspection tour of Shenzhen appeared in the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily on March 26, 1992. It broke strict Communist Party rules about publicity but pushed the central leadership to revive the mainland's stalled economic reforms.
The paramount leader delivered a series of speeches during the tour aimed at clarifying whether the Shenzhen special economic zone was 'capitalist' or 'socialist' in nature.
'Before I decided to let the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily carry the original speech of Comrade Xiaoping, I prepared for the worst - to be sacked or even put in jail,' Wu Songying a former deputy director of Shenzhen's publicity office, told a seminar in Hong Kong last week. He is the author of a new book about Deng's southern tour.
'I should say thank you to my two ex-leaders, Li Hao, former party chief and mayor of Shenzhen, and Xie Fei, former party head of Guangdong province, because they deliberately turned a blind eye to my 'misconduct' ... all of us made that breakthrough decision based on our sense of historical mission.'
Under the publicity rules, only top party mouthpieces like the People's Daily and Xinhua News Agency are allowed to cover the speeches of the top leaders. Deng was the country's paramount leader at the time, even though he had retired from his last official post in March 1990.
But Wu encouraged Chan Xitian, then a journalist at the Shenzhen paper, to report the important speech Deng made in the city in January 1992. When the relatively unknown local paper ran the story that March, other media outlets - including the Beijing-based Guangming Daily, Xinhua, the People's Daily and China Central Television - picked up the news, which was then widely reported by overseas media.