At The New York Times, Chris Buckley reports on an online letter written by a Xinhua employee denouncing China’s increasingly tight media controls, which according to the widely shared (and quickly deleted) post “has triggered tremendous fear and outrage among the public, [who have began to] worry about another Cultural Revolution.” Xi Jinping has done much to strengthen government control over the media. Last month, he paid a visit to leading state media outlets to stress that news must “speak for the Party.” After the president’s Media tour, outspoken Internet commentator and retired property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang found himself banished from social media for suggesting that media should first serve the people who fund it.

“Under the crude rule of the Internet control authorities, online expression has been massively suppressed, and the public’s freedom of expression has been violated to an extreme degree,” said the letter, which spread quickly online in China and was taken down just as swiftly.

[…] The letter was issued in the name of Zhou Fang, who gave his work address as Xinhua News Agency headquarters in Beijing, and included his cellphone number and identity card number. A man who answered the phone at that number said that he was Mr. Zhou, an employee of Xinhua, and that he had written the letter.

“I don’t deny that,” he said. He said that he had been an editor at the news agency and that he now held an administrative job. “I can’t say anything more, because you’re foreign media,” he said.

[…] The new letter criticized the denunciations of Mr. Ren [Zhiqiang] on party-run websites, which called him a traitor and a subversive for taking issue with Mr. Xi’s demand that state-run media unfailingly obey the party.

[…] “The recent Internet security incident of ‘surrounding and attacking Ren Zhiqiang’ in a kind of Cultural Revolution-style mass criticism brought the delinquency of responsibilities and abuses of power by the Internet authorities to an extreme,” said the letter, which was dated Monday but spread widely only on Friday. […] [Source]