The most pioneering editor in China’s highly controlled media world has resigned in a battle for control of a magazine she founded and which won fame for its daring reporting.
Hu Shuli, 56, leaves Caijing magazine after leading the publication in exposes of listed companies that had falsified profits, in breaking the deadly 2003 Sars cover-up and in enraging the leadership with reports on shoddy construction of schools that collapsed in last year’s earthquake.
Ms Hu’s departure ends weeks of wrangling with the management who had been trying to silence her ground-breaking team of reporters after their coverage of the bloody violence in western China in July was seen as a step too far for China’s premier business bi-weekly.
She has accepted a position as head of the School of Communication and Design at Sun Yat-sen University, based in southern Guangzhou.
Rumours abound that she is likely to set up a new publication, however, and will be unwilling to leave the world of journalism.
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The Stock Exchange Executive Council, which owns and publishes Caijing, a state-supported consortium of non-bank financial institutions had been trying for months to wrest power from Ms Hu. She is widely credited with creating China’s most influential publication since she launched it in 1998.
A less-aggressive Caijing could set back efforts to build an independent watchdog media. Though the magazine is not shutting down, media analyst Jeremy Goldkorn said that her resignation would hollow out the magazine. Mr Goldkorn, editor-in-chief of the website Danwei that covers China’s media industry, said: “Hu Shuli is almost half the brand, if not more ? No one will take Caijing seriously now.”
Caijing employees said said that dozens of other staff, including several top editors, had left en masse because the SEEC Media Group refused her requests to give editorial staff more money and greater authority over content. They said that most of the departing staff would join a new media venture being set up in a Beijing office by several dozen business department staff who resigned last month. That business group has reportedly been approached by numerous potential investors but no deal had been struck yet.
One of Ms Hu’s great talents, in addition to her journalistic skills, was her ability to assess just how far she could go with her investigative stories in the magazine. Her judgment of what the leadership could endure was finely tuned. Junior staff said she already had a new venture planned. One reporter told Reuters: “”My estimate is more than 90 per cent of editorial staff have decided to leave with Shuli, and we will move to the new office very soon.”
Her resignation from one of the most combative and adventurous publications in China could diminish the influence of Caijing. She had made the magazine into a highly lucrative publication in a crowded market and hoped to expand into online ventures and a news wire-like service, sources have said.