Press Review: The View From Beijing

These are disorientating, exhilarating, worrying times for Chinese newspapers and magazines, buffeted by the sharply changing winds of the government's media policy as they try to keep pace with one of the world's fastest changing nations.

Almost exclusively state-controlled, the media are being told to prepare for the day when the market rules their output. To push them in this direction, the new government of President Hu Jintao recently issued an edict against the compulsory subscriptions that previously provided their main source of income.

Even the People's Daily - the mouthpiece of the Communist party - appears to be feeling the pinch. In an editorial on Wednesday, the paper spoke out against "excessive government regulation" and declared subscriptions to its organ to be "a duty of party leaders and organisations". This followed the government's move to shut down any publication that earns less than half of its revenue through voluntary subscriptions and newsstand sales. Given the turgid content of the People's Daily, it would not survive for a day if it were exposed to true competition.

In the quest for journalistic reform, police have arrested more than a dozen reporters for accepting bribes to hush up scandals. Even so, media freedom remains a long, long way off: editors who dare to cover controversial stories that might embarrass the Communist party risk imprisonment and the closure of their publications.

So it was perhaps not surprising this week that newspapers either completely ignored or quietly downplayed the two stories that would surely have made the biggest splash if the media had the liberty to pick their own agenda.

This weekend, the Communist party leadership will hold its most important meeting since Hu Jintao took power in March. They will draft the first revisions to the country's constitution for four years, possibly opening the way for a limited form of inner-party democracy. Yet barely a word of this has been mentioned in the Chinese media.

Once the meeting is finished, China plans to become only the third nation in the world to put a man in space. With less than a week until the expected launch, coverage has been curiously low-key, thanks to official pressure not to raise expectations until the Shenzhou (divine vessel) returns to earth.

The Xinhua news agency carried a short government statement that preparations are proceeding smoothly; the Hong Kong-based Phoenix news channel dared to report the scheduled blast-off date (October 15); and the Shanghai-based Liberation Daily even got inside the launch site - though they didn't say what it was like.

The only real detail to emerge appeared on the China.com website, which scooped its rivals in reporting that the mission would see the first genuine Chinese meal to be eaten in space: shredded pork with garlic sauce and kungpao chicken washed down with green tea.

In the absence of these two huge stories, China's newspapers have filled their front pages with feel-good stories about the recently passed week-long holiday to celebrate the 1949 foundation of the communist nation. The Beijing Youth Daily - which has the biggest circulation in the capital - and its nearest rival, the Beijing Times, carried big pictures of smiling shoppers and newlyweds with stories describing a nation enjoyed its new wealth.

According to the Youth Daily, 23 supermarkets surveyed in Beijing posted sales of 80m yuan (£6m), an increase of 70% from the last October 1 holiday. There were also bigger traffic jams as more people can afford cars. The Beijing Times reported that the price of a family car has now dropped to 30,000 yuan (£2,000).

As usual, most papers also found plenty of space to attack Japan. Three of Beijing's main papers - the Youth Daily, the Times and the Beijing Daily - carried news of a protest in Tokyo against the damage and death caused by chemical weapons left over from the second world war. The News Weekly magazine also ran an editorial denouncing the behaviour of its neighbour's tourists - a reference to the alleged orgy by 400 Japanese who cavorted for two nights with prostitutes at a luxury hotel in southern China. "The action of the Japanese aroused great public indignation in China," ran the leader. "It is a modern-day equivalent of the old game played by Japanese soldiers who competed with one another to see how many Chinese people they could decapitate."