MCLC: Ding Guangen dies

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Ding Guangen dies
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Source: NYT (7/22/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/world/asia/ding-guangen-former-china-prop
aganda-chief-dies-at-83.html

Ding Guangen, Former China Propaganda Chief, Dies at 83
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BEIJING (AP) — Ding Guangen, a former chief of propaganda for the Chinese
Communist Party, died here in Beijing on Sunday. He was 83.

His death was announced by Xinhua, China’s state news agency, which did
not specify the cause.

Mr. Ding stepped down in 2002 after a decade overseeing the Communist
Party’s control of the news media and
the arts in China. He had been minister of railways in the 1980s but was
forced to resign in 1988 after a series of train crashes killed scores of
people.

When 90 people were killed and 66 were injured in a train derailment in
the mountains of southern China in January 1988, Mr. Ding went to the site
of the accident and publicly apologized there. It was the sixth major
transportation accident in China in a month. He resigned shortly afterward.

Mr. Ding returned to prominence in 1992, becoming the party’s chief of
propaganda under President Jiang Zemin. (Some attributed his rise in the
party to the fact that he and the leader Deng Xiaoping were longtime
bridge partners.) In his new post, he affirmed party control of the news
media and called on artists to show political loyalty and adhere to the
party line.

In 1996, Mr. Ding convened a meeting of film industry leaders at which he
told them that spiritual pollution was threatening to undermine the
socialist values of the Chinese, and that they needed to start making more
patriotic films. Directors who tried to avoid censorship or to export
their films without permission, he announced, would have to pay a
substantial fine.