On the afternoon of May 9, hundreds of journalists went to the All-China Journalists Association (ACJA) for a sit-in. They submitted a petition signed by 1,013 Beijing journalists from more than 30 capital news organizations, including the "People's Daily", Xinhua News Agency, "Economic Daily", "China Youth Daily", "Beijing Daily", and "Beijing Evening News". The petition called for a dialog with the central leadership in charge of propaganda, and outlined a list of three items to be discussed as part of the dialog:
- The Shanghai "World Economic Herald"'s reorganization, and the suspension of the newspaper's Editor-In-Chief, Qin Benli.
- News organizations' inability to report objectively, impartially, and comprehensively on the student protests, and how this greatly exacerbates the development of the situation and directly violates the principle that "the people must be made to know about major situations" put forward at the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 13th National Congress.
- Yuan Mu’s statement on April 29 that "the press in our country is free, and newspapers implement a system of editor-in-chief responsibility" in his dialog in the capital with the students, and this statement's inconsistency with the facts — this problem being precisely the primary problem to be solved by news reforms.
That same day, Yang Ling and Pang Fei, secretaries of the ACJA Secretariat, received the petition. They emphasized that they would try their best to meet everyone's demands, and jointly promote news reform and development of the news industry.
References: "The Big Bang of History: A Complete Record of the June 4th Incident"; "The Memoirs of Wang Dan — From June 4th to Exile"; "A Tiananmen Journal"; "The Critical Moment – Li Peng Diaries"; "The Tiananmen Papers"