"Please set him free" read the plea in stark black print on the front page of the New Express newspaper based in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
In a bold move, the paper
openly defied Chinese authorities this week by asking for the release
of one its reporters, who has been detained by police in Hunan province.
The move garnered
sympathy online and China's media regulator vowed to protect "lawful
reporting rights," according to the state-run China Press and Publishing
Media group.
Chen Yongzhou was arrested on Saturday, police in the provincial capital Changsha said,
months after the newspaper ran stories by Chen that claimed that a
Hunan-based company Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science & Technology
falsified sales numbers.
The state-run company, which did not respond to a call for comment, makes construction equipment.
China gets tough on foreign television
Reports: China censored newspaper
The police said
he had been arrested for damaging a business' commercial reputation,
without giving further details. A police spokesman in Changsha contacted
by CNN declined to comment.
In May, Zoomlion
temporarily suspended trading in its Hong Kong-listed shares to address
allegations made in one of Chen's articles. In a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange, it said that all allegations relating to fictitious sales were "false, groundless and misleading."
The paper said on
Wednesday that it had verified all of Chen's stories about Zoomlion and
only found one discrepancy: He wrote the company spent 513 million yuan
on advertisements, when that money had been spent on "advertisements and
entertainment."
"If Brother Policeman can
find any evidence of shabby reporting on our part, please make notice
of it and we will gladly doff our hat," the newspaper said according to a
translation published by the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project.
"Because we still believe that — some day, at least — you will have the same full respect for the law that we have."
Open resistance by Chinese media against intimidation by authorities is rare but not unprecedented.
In January this year,
crowds gathered in Guangzhou in support of a protest by journalists
against alleged government censorship. Journalists at the Southern
Weekly paper claimed that an editorial calling for political reform was
rewritten by censors as a tribute to Chinese Communist Party rule.
The New Express released
a statement from Chen's wife, who said that Chen was taken from his
home in a black Mercedes Benz with Hunan license plates. "My... life
stopped at the moment," she said.
On social media site
Weibo, Chen's colleagues described him as a talented and hardworking
business reporter, who ate instant noodles and couldn't afford to take
his wife to Pizza Hut.
"We are very grateful
that the society has given a lot of attention on this," a spokesperson
for the New Express newsroom told CNN.
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