Playing a Loser's Game

According to the Central News Agency, the magazine People’s Forum of the People’s Daily group does not have any reporter who fled to Hong Kong. The person Qiu Weiming mentioned in news reports is an operations manager whose labor contract had not been renewed.

According to the agency, the person Qiu Weiming mentioned by the Hong Kong media is not a reporter at either People’s Daily or People’s Forum. He was an operations manager who was employed by the magazine People’s Forum for one year. When his contract came up this April, it was not renewed.

People’s Forum clarified to the China News Agency that Qiu Mingwei was employed by the magazine on April 8, 2008 after a selection process. Qiu signed a labor contract which included certain job goals. He was hired as the deputy director of the currents affairs section of the magazine. This department is responsible for managing advertisement distribution, and Qiu was responsible for managing advertisement distribution.

This one-year contract expired on April 10, 2009 after one year, at which time Qiu Weiming was not rehired. There were two reasons for not rehiring him. First, Qiu did not meet the management goals. As of April 8, 2009, Qiu accomplished less than 20% of the stipulated goals and therefore failed to honor the contract. Secondly, Qiu is not supposed to be part of the news staff, but he went many times to places like Hebei, Liaoning and elsewhere to gather news. This violates the relevant policies on the separation of operations and news functions at the magazine.

People’s Forum pointed out that since this is August 2009 and Qiu has left the magazine for four months already, anything that Qiu did in the interim is his personal activity which does not matter to the magazine.