Guess Hu will not be amused by a caricature

HONG KONG: An illustrator with a progressive southern Chinese newspaper has been rapped on the knuckles for violating a cardinal unwritten rule of journalism in mainland China: never portray top leaders in caricatures and cartoons.

Kuang Biao, 40, a cartoonist with News Express, a Guangzhou newspaper, was on Wednesday suspended for a month from the editorial board of the newspaper. Monday’s edition of the newspaper had published Kuang’s caricature of President Hu Jintao writing a letter, with tears streaming down his face.

It was hardly a politically incorrect cartoon in the Doonesbury mould, much less a satirical caricature: it was just a pictorial accompaniment to an article that reported that Hu had written a letter to the daughter of a Peking University professor who had died of cancer. The caption had said, “President Hu is writing not just to the professor’s daughter but to all hard-working teachers around the country... It shows his concern for teachers…”

Harmless as it was, Kuang’s artistic lines violated the protocol that forbids pictorial depictions of leaders. In a country with a notoriously short tolerance level for breaches of norm, the punishment was not long in coming.

Harsh as it is, the suspension order represents only a “soft penalty”. Kuang has been quoted as saying that he believed that it was a pre-emptive move taken by the newspaper to protect him from even harsher punishment by central authorities. Indicatively, Kuang isn’t forbidden from drawing for other publications during the period of suspension, so long as he uses a pseudonym.

The action against Kuang is also a sign of the times. For instance, it wasn’t the first time that News Express was depicting leaders in caricatures. But the atmosphere of media repression in recent weeks — the jailing of journalists in two high-profile cases, and the recent restrictions on foreign media services in mainland China — perhaps had a chilling effect on the newspaper.

There is increasing speculation that the move might invite a formal ban on all artistic representations of leaders in newspapers. If that comes about, cartooning may well become very serious business in China.