Revamped Chinese History Journal Welcomes Hard-Line Writers

For most of its 25 years, the Chinese history magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu has been loved by moderate liberals and detested with equal passion by devotees of Mao Zedong, who reviled it as a refuge for heretical criticisms of the Chinese leader and the Communist Party.

But in a sign of how sharply ideological winds have turned under President Xi Jinping, officials who recently took control of the magazinehave wooed Maoist and nationalist writers who long scorned the magazine. Several well-known hard-line polemicists attended a meeting with the new managers on Monday.

The new masters of Yanhuang Chunqiu, which had been one of the few remaining outlets for liberal political opinion in China, appear likely to remake it into an avidly loyal defender of party orthodoxy, said Wu Wei, who has remained in place as executive editor of the magazine but is among those fighting to save its independence.