Mark Landler

May 6, 2001

HONG KONG, May 5 - Next week the president of China, former President Bill Clinton and a full complement of corporate titans will gather here for a conference sponsored by Fortune magazine. But for the publisher of Fortune, AOL Time Warner, it will be another high-profile China conference marred by the muzzling of its flagship magazine, Time.

Beijing has banned newsstand sales of Time since early March, 10 days after the magazine published an article on the Falun Gong spiritual movement in Hong Kong, the magazine's Asian editor said. Falun Gong was outlawed in China in 1999, but remains legal here.

Two years ago, China invited Fortune to hold its conference in Shanghai to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the [party's name omitted] state. At the same time, it banned the sale of an issue of Time devoted to the anniversary, because it included essays by two political dissidents, Wei Jingsheng and Fang Lizhi, and the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader.

"When Jiang Zemin was in Shanghai to celebrate the opening of China to the world, our magazine was banned," said Adi Ignatius, the editor of Time Asia. "Now he's going to be in Hong Kong on the eve of China's entry into the World Trade Organization, and our magazine has been banned again."

Mr. Ignatius said the problem may be more serious now; the state monopoly that distributes Time told the magazine it did not plan to resume distribution. Time's Asian edition is edited in Hong Kong and sales here have not been disrupted. "Normally, they will block a single issue or cut out an offending article, and the following week it's business as usual," he said. "But we've had several meetings with them about this, to no avail."

Part of the strong reaction, he said, may stem from the fact that Time's article evaded the government's censors. The article, in Time Asia on Feb. 19, raised the possibility that Hong Kong might be pressured to ban Falun Gong, despite its putatively separate legal system.

China has tightened control of all news outlets in the last few months. Internet services are under closer scrutiny while servers that give access to the Web sites of foreign newspapers, including The New York Times, have been shut down.

[...]

Posting date: 5/8/2001
Original article date: 5/6/2001
Category: News & Media Reports

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