China Targets News Media in Xi Jinping’s Campaign to Expand Communist Party Control

Proposed new restrictions on investment and a former journalist’s detention are part of Beijing’s effort to tighten grip

Beijing is targeting the pop-culture industry as part of an effort to weed out what it sees as unhealthy influences for young people. WSJ looks at what happened after one of China’s highest-profile celebrities, Zhao Wei, disappeared from parts of the Chinese internet. Photo: Xu Nizhi/Zuma Press
By

Liza Lin

SINGAPORE—China’s Communist Party is ratcheting up its control over news media and online commentary, warning away private investors and cracking down on what it describes as misinformation, as it continues a campaign to assert itself more forcefully across the economy and Chinese society.

The country’s central economic planning agency released on Friday a draft regulation that promised to expand restrictions on the involvement of “nonpublic capital” in swaths of the news industry—a warning to news organizations with private funding to step carefully, according to analysts.

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