An editor at the liberal Southern Metropolis Daily has been fired after the paper’s Shenzhen edition paired a banner headline of President Xi Jinping’s call for state media loyalty with a lower headline on the sea burial of a prominent reformist, a combination that could be read as a veiled criticism of Xi’s media policy. South China Morning Post’s Nectar Gan and Mimi Lau report:

Liu Yuxia, editor of the Southern Metropolis News in Guangzhou, across the border from Hong Kong, was fired for her “mishandling” of the paper’s front-page published on February 20.

[…] Liu was accused in the circular of showing “a serious lack of political sensitivity” that triggered a misunderstanding of public opinion after some people interpreted the front page “in a malicious way”.

The front page in question in the newspaper’s Shenzhen edition featured a bolded headline high up on the page that read “Media run by the party and the government is a propaganda base and must follow the surname [display complete loyalty] of the party” – a quote from a speech on news and public opinion that Xi gave during a forum last week.

Directly beneath the headline was a large photograph of the burial at sea of Yuan Geng, a prominent reformist figure, with a small headline, “The soul returns to the sea” in the picture’s top right corner.

If the last two Chinese characters on each line of the main headline are read in conjunction with the photo headline below, the text reads “Media following the surname of the party have their souls returned to the sea”. [Source]