The Southern Weekly began in 1984 as a sister publication of the Nanfang Daily, a mouthpiece of the provincial committee of the CCP in Guangdong, where Zuo worked as an editor.
Despite the Southern Weekly being a state-run paper, it became popular as a liberal-leaning outlet with investigative reports on minorities, like migrants, protesters, and government petitioners.
The rise of the paper occurred during a time of positive reforms that took place in China during the 1990s. However, the Weekly was not fully independent, as it was constrained in its freedom of speech—as are all Chinese publicly or privately-owned media outlets—and did not directly question the regime.
However, in 1999, the CCP began widespread persecution against spiritual beliefs and undermined its own political and judicial reforms.
Censorship increased in late 2012 when Chinese leader Xi Jinping took power and started to campaign for more centralized control over the media.
Even though Southern Weekly had been able to weather political circumstances in the past, it did not manage to resist tightening censorship.
In January 2013, Tuo Zhen, then director of the Propaganda Department of Guangdong Province, changed the New Year’s greeting in the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly from “Chinese Dream, Constitutional Dream” to “We Are Closer to Our Dream Than Ever.”
This incident prompted authorities to suppress public opinion and proceeded to restructure the paper’s management.
Nowadays, the Southern Weekly is mainly operating as a CCP mouthpiece.
