The founder of China’s Southern Weekly, a Guangdong province-based paper known for its investigative journalism on social issues and its refusal to be a mere echo of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda, passed away earlier this month. Zuo Fang died of illness at the age of 86 on Nov. 3, in Guangzhou City, according to Southern Weekly, where he was a former editor-in-chief. Though Zuo was a member of the CCP, he believed that journalism should present readers with ideas like democracy and science, reported the New York Times on Nov. 11. Before the Southern Weekly, Chinese newspapers merely parroted the regime’s line, ever since the CCP took the country over through violent revolution in 1949. The Southern Weekly began in 1984 as a sister publication of the Nanfang Daily, a mouthpiece of the provincial committee of the CCP in Guangdong, where Zuo worked as an editor. Despite the Southern …