This article is more than 7 years old

This article is more than 7 years old

Protestors outside Southern Weekly offices. Photo posted on Twitter by meowdan

Chinese journalists have gone on strike in protest against censorship by the authorities. About 100 staff at the Southern Weekly title in Guangdong province walked out because propaganda officials spiked the paper's new year's day editorial and replaced it with one of their own.

The original editorial called for the protection of individual rights. The one that appeared instead praised the communist party. It prompted outraged journalists to describe it as the "rape of Southern Weekly".

The extremely rare action appears to have garnered considerable support, as the picture above - posted on Twitter - shows. According to a Forbes report, supporters held up signs calling for media freedom and rejecting government censorship.

The staff's anger was directed at the Guangdong province propaganda chief, Tuo Zhen. They claim more than 1,000 of the paper's articles have been censored or scrapped since he took up his post a year ago.

They also accused Tuo of hijacking the newspaper's microblog in order to publish a story that misleadingly blamed the reporters for the editorial.

On a different microblog, journalists issued a statement saying: "The editorial staff will fight against the falsified statement… Until the issue is resolved, we will not do any editorial work."

A detailed analysis of the growing protest can be found here on the Hong Kong-based China Media Project website.

A group of academics who support the journalists wrote a strongly-worded letter to Guangdong's party chief, Hu Chunhua, calling for the removal of Tuo. And the journalism faculty at Nanjing university demanded an investigation into the affair.

Sources: Border Mail/Forbes/South China Morning Post/CMP/Twitter pic