The message, in a small article at the bottom of page 32, said it was "fundamental that the party regulates the press" in communist-run China. But the paper said that the party's method of regulation "needs to be advanced to keep pace with the times."
Reforms "need the protection and support of a moderate, rational and constructive media," the paper said.
That paper did not demand a full end to censorship, as many of the its public supporters have advocated. Instead, it asked for something more limited: A freer rein to help the government advance promised reforms.
Meanwhile, after a week of allowing anti-censorship protests outside the newspaper's Guangzhou headquarters, police Thursday began taking a tougher line. Uniformed officers dragged away screaming protesters, with one man in a red jacket caught on video shouting "This is a kidnapping!" and "You can't kidnap!" as he was being hauled off by his outstretched arms and legs.
Photographs and video quickly appeared on Twitter and other social media sites.
In Beijing, where the anti-censorship movement had penetrated the newsroom of the government-owned Beijing News, Thursday's edition of the paper contained a protest even more cryptic than the one in the Southern Weekly: an ode to the popular Southern Chinese porridge dish known as "congee," published in the lifestyle section.
The name for Southern congee in Chinese, "nanfang de zhou," sounds like the name of Southern Weekly, "Nanfang Zhou Mo," and the newspaper used the ode to deliver a thinly veiled show of solidarity with Southern Weekly.
"Hot porridge in an earthen pot hails from the southland," the story said, according to a translation posted on the Web site of the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project, which monitors media-related issues in China. "Perhaps it has a heart of courage. . . . In this bitter winter, we all gather around this bowl of porridge to warm ourselves."
There was confusion over whether the Beijing News publisher, Dai Zigeng, resigned Tuesday night, after the paper was forced to reprint an editorial from another newspaper, the Communist Party-owned Global Times, that defended Chinese government control of the media.
In tweets and off-record interviews, journalists described a tense and tearful scene in the newsroom, with a government propaganda official demanding that the Beijing News reprint the editorial or see the entire paper dissolved. Dai said he would quit, according to those accounts.
But Thursday, the Beijing city propaganda office said everything was "normal" at the Beijing News, and it was unclear whether Dai's verbal resignation had been accepted. Journalists at the Beijing News would not comment, saying the situation was too tense to speak with foreign reporters.
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