In an interview, Wang said publication of his collected works had been halted under orders from party propaganda officials. Two of his most recent film projects, including "Relations Between Men and Women," a movie about adultery, also have been banned by officials, he said.
Alarmed that China's rapid economic development has been accompanied by a parallel moral decline, the party launched the first stages of its "spiritual civilization" cleanup campaign earlier this year. The campaign was formally endorsed at the plenary meeting of senior party officials in Beijing last week and detailed in a giant 15,000-character manifesto calling for increased political control of virtually all aspects of cultural life, including publishing, film, television and the press.
PARIS - French journalists laid down their notebooks and cameras yesterday and took to the streets on behalf of the greater good: theirs.
The extraordinary media protest was provoked by a government threat to repeal a 30 percent tax exemption for journalists, a professional perk dating from the 1930s.
The strike, punctuated by a rally outside the French National Assembly, shut down most of the French state-owned broadcasters and French-language wire services. The presses stopped too. Today's editions of many French newspapers will not appear.
The atmosphere at the demonstration was light-hearted and chain-smoking. Around a placard that warned French government leaders to "Look out - the dogs are unleashed," a group of striking journalists barked ironically.
Coverage of the journalists' plaint has been restrained until yesterday, possibly because the cause engenders little sympathy. The defense of a sweet tax exemption is not likely to win widespread public support in France, where news gatherers are held in low esteem.
Editorial employees of Le Monde, France's most influential paper, refused to walk out, suggesting darkly they would be walking in to a government "trap" to make journalists look like another pampered elite.
The strike comes at a sensitive moment for the French government and its embattled prime minister, Alain Juppe.
Massive strikes are planned for tomorrow by French civil servants, teachers, and transportation and transit workers in protest of government cutbacks and unemployment. Nearly a year ago, such broad-based strikes paralyzed Paris and forced the French government to retreat from deficit-cutting targets.
The Juppe budget for 1997 takes a new tack - tax cuts, although apparently not for journalists.
Juppe met with a delegation from the unaffiliated National Journalists' Union Monday, and late Monday issued a statement that appeared to backtrack.
He said he had asked Jean Arthuis, the finance minister, to make sure the repeal does not "disadvantage" those benefiting most from the tax exemption. The exemption has a $10,000 ceiling, which means journalists hardest hit would be those earning the least.
The average monthly wage for the French news media is $2,500-$3,000 a month, about on a par with an American counterpart. But there is one French journalist for about every 2,000 French citizens, to one for every 5,000 people in the United States.
The 30 percent exemption on declared earnings would be phased out over five years, and might be tempered by new tax benefits for journalists implied in Juppe's statement. Formal debate on next year's budget, including these tax measures, began yesterday in the National Assemblye.
French journalists have enjoyed the tax exemption since 1934, except for during the wartime years of Nazi hegemony. It has made it possible for news organizations to pay journalists below market rates. It has also amounted to a special subsidy for the news media financed by the French people.
That is why some journalists do not belong to the union or voted against the strike. "We're constantly criticizing the archaism of the French fiscal system, but apparently not when it affects us," said a reporter from Le Figaro.
As news of the doomed tax exemption circulated, legislators who refused to denounce it were given the "invisible man" treatment: a selective boycott of news makers. That is, their names and pictures suddenly stopped appearing on the air and in the papers.
Le Monde denounced the boycott. "A journalist worthy of the name shouldn't become a censor," Jean-Marie Colombani wrote in an editorial yesterday.
Other journalists suggested turnabout was fair play, delighting in indignant politicians brought to their knees by the deliberately unexercised power of the press. At the height of tempers, the governing party's parliamentary floor leader, Michel Pericard, talked menacingly of "lists" being kept and threatened vaguely to sue journalists who withheld coverage.
Yesterday he called for a cease-fire in the rhetoric, including his own. "Journalists need politicians, and politicians need journalists," Pericard declared.