The Southern Weekend (nanfang zhoumo) is a weekly paper that occasionally gets into trouble for its reporting on the dodgy doings of corrupt officials. Despite a recent purge of its most aggressive editors, the paper retains a whiff of contraversy about it. This is the Southern Weekend’s front page from November 6. The lead story is about Sun Dawu, with the headline ‘Billionaire Sun Dawu’s dreams and tribulations’.
The red bar at the top of the page summarizes the story thusly:
– He’s a billionaire but he lives an ordinary life. He’s a CEO, but he still helps workers clean out the toilets.
– Profit should be his most important goal, but he opens free technical schools for peasants and money-losing middle schools. He doesn’t care how much money he loses.
– He completely understands the unwritten rules of the market and of the corridors of power. Although he has no political resources to back him up, he sticks to his guns with stubborn integrity.
– At the height of his career, he summed up himself like this: “What looks like happiness and joy is in fact tragic and sad”. His words were almost prophetic.
Here is a previous post about newspaper coverage of Sun Dawu.