The sacking of the editor of a feisty Beijing tabloid has prompted an angry reaction from staff and online readers that underscores simmering resentment against China’s media censorship.

Some editors and reporters at the Beijing News refused to work on Thursday, a day after the surprise dismissal of editor Yang Bin and other senior staff, people at the two-year-old newspaper said.

Staff were given no reason for Mr Yang’s departure, but Beijing News had attracted attention for its bold reporting of sensitive subjects such as the killing in June of protesting farmers by officials in northern China’s Hebei Province. Chinese authorities have frequently ordered the sacking – and even jailing – of journalists judged to have defied official controls on coverage.

The Beijing News was able to publish a full 116-page edition on Friday, but the refusal of some staff to work was reflected on a number of pages by the absence of the newspaper’s usual editorial credits.

Some staff posted angry messages about the dismissal on the internet prompting calls from online readers for a boycott of the newspaper and the return of subscription fees already paid.

Online censors quickly deleted such postings on major sites, but the internet reaction highlighted underlying resentment at Beijing’s efforts to control the country’s news.

Such resentments have been heightened over the last year as the administration of President Hu Jintao seeks to tighten control over a media sector that has become increasingly commercialised.

Papers such as the Beijing News have sought to win readers by downplaying propaganda in favour of more lively and honest reporting. The tabloid is itself a joint venture between a staid Beijing-based Communist party paper for intellectuals, the Guangming Daily, and a more business-oriented and bolder Southern Metropolitan media group in Guangdong Province.

In 2004, Cheng Yizhong, then Beijing News editor, was detained for five months in a case that was widely seen as prompted by his daring journalism during an earlier tenure at the Southern Metropolitan Daily.

Analysts say purges of the southern newspaper’s editors have tamed its reporting, a fate some fear the Beijing News is likely to share.

Pu Zhiqiang, an associate of Mr Yang, said he was concerned that the Beijing News editorial pages – a forum for relatively independent discussion of social and political issues – would be closed.

However, a photograph of silhouetted birds flying against a grey sky published on the weather page of the Beijing News yesterday struck an oblique note of defiance. Taken on Thursday from the newspaper’s headquarters, the caption read: “A bird leading its flock flies across the sky. Although the sky is not so clear, they fly far away, carrying their goals in their hearts.”