http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/business/police-in-china-detain-editor-of-business-newspaper.html 2014-09-25 20:00:37 Police in China Detain Editor of Business Newspaper The general manager of The 21st Century Business Herald was also being held after the paper’s site was implicated in an extortion scheme. === HONG KONG — The police in China on Thursday detained the editor in chief and general manager of one of the country’s most widely read business newspapers. The move came within weeks of arrests in and accusations of an extortion The latest detentions were reported in a single-sentence bulletin from Xinhua, the state-run news agency, which did not describe any charges against the two, of The 21st Century Business Herald. Two weeks ago, the police in Shanghai used a television broadcast to parade editors and journalists from the newspaper’s website, 21st Century Net, who they said had confessed to rampant extortion of Chinese companies. The companies could pay and receive glowing coverage, or the website would publish damaging stories that would imperil the companies’ plans to list on stock exchanges or restructure. The companies often paid up, usually in the guise of advertising orders worth 200,000 to 300,000 renminbi, or about $32,600 to nearly $50,000. “Companies preparing to list in I.P.O.s were treated like a fat piece of meat or a cake to be carved up,” Tao Kai, an executive director of one of the two public relations firms also implicated in the charges, said in the report, shown by China Central Television. In the broadcast, the arrested journalists did not appear to be speaking freely. But insiders have said that China’s news media have been The Xinhua report did not say where the editor, Shen Hao, and the manager, Chen Dongyang, had been detained. Calls to the legal affairs office for the newspaper, a broadsheet based in southern China, went unanswered after working hours on Thursday. The expanding investigation could rattle one of China’s biggest, and more adventurous, news and publishing conglomerates. The 21st Century Business Herald is operated under the Nanfang Media Group, a state-controlled company based in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province. Like all other Chinese news outlets, Nanfang Media must enforce censorship even as it competes for advertising and readers. But the group, based far from the Chinese capital, has also nurtured some of the country’s bolder newspapers, including The Southern Weekend and The Southern Metropolis Daily.