Members of news agency suspended after typo suggests Xi Jinping's resignation
News agency's typographical error saying Xi quit results in suspensions
Four editorial staff at a Chinese news agency have been suspended from duty after a typographical error in a report accidentally referred to President Xi Jinping's speech at a China-Africa summit in Johannesburg as his resignation.
The originally version of a report filed on Friday by the China News Service - an official service that has a status similar to that of Xinhua - referred to Xi saying in his "resignation" that China and Africa had a shared destiny in their histories.
Some news websites failed to notice the mistake and published the report with the error. But by yesterday most of the online reports had corrected the mistake.
The error happened only two days after Xinhua misspelled US President Barack Obama's name in its Chinese translation as "Ao Ma Ba" in a report about him meeting Xi.
Many newspapers left the error referring to Obama uncorrected and published the report unchanged.
In accordance with an order issued by the Communist Party's propaganda department, major news reports, especially stories involving state leaders, should always be published using official news-agency reports.
"Resignation" is pronounced and spelled in pinyin, Putonghua's phonics system, while "speech" is pronounced as .
