AUG. 21, 2014
Su Yutong was told that her contract with Deutsche Welle, the German public broadcaster, would not be renewed in 2015. Credit Benjamin Kilb for The New York Times
te over the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, a well-known Chinese government critic has been fired from her job at a German public broadcaster.
The activist, Su Yutong, 38, who has been exiled in Germany since 2010, was informed Tuesday that her contract with Deutsche Welle would not be renewed in 2015. In a statement on Wednesday, the broadcaster said the decision had been made because she disclosed information about internal meetings and publicly criticized a co-worker.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with an evaluation of what she wrote,” a Deutsche Welle spokesman, Johannes Hoffmann, said in a telephone interview from Bonn. “It’s just that she tweeted about internal issues about the Deutsche Welle in a way that no company in the world would tolerate. We warned her, and she continued to do it.”
Many commentators on Chinese-language social media, however, see more at work, especially because Ms. Su was one of the most prolific bloggers on Deutsche Welle’s widely read Chinese-language website, and often very critical of Chinese government policy. In recent months, they say, more pro-Beijing voices have been given greater prominence.
“Deutsche Welle seems to need voices like this now,” said the Beijing-based Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser. “As a foreign media outlet, it seems that Deutsche Welle has really deviated from standard news principles and values.”
Ms. Su’s case stemmed from a column published on the Deutsche Welle website on June 4, the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. Written by a regular Deutsche Welle columnist, the Beijing-based media consultant Frank Sieren, the column argued that some Western media outlets were unfairly critical of the Chinese government over the massacre. The article said that critics’ and the government’s points of view were equally valid, and that “1989 remains a one-off in recent Chinese history.”
This ignited a storm of lively debate, with some Chinese writers accusing Deutsche Welle of giving equal weight to viewpoints that many people believe are discredited. A prominent exiled Chinese journalist, Chang Ping, was invited to write a rejoinder, which Deutsche Welle also published. Mr. Sieren then followed with his reply, and Mr. Chang gave his.
Ms. Su soon joined the fray. She, along with dozens of other Chinese intellectuals, signed a petition to Deutsche Welle protesting Mr. Sieren’s articles. She also posted on Twitter an edited photo of Mr. Sieren perched atop tanks driving down the main boulevard in Beijing.
Perhaps most significant, she posted accounts of internal meetings held between Deutsche Welle directors and its Chinese-language staff, in which the staff is said to have been told to tone down its coverage.
