The future of one of China's best-selling investigative magazines is at stake in an increasingly public battle for control that pits its envelope-pushing editor against the Chinese government, Reuters reported Tuesday. Caijing magazine, the mainland's most influential and profitable business publication, has experienced a mass exodus of reporters and editors, according to the China Economic Review.

It speculated that the exodus may be part of a negotiation strategy by Caijing's founder and managing editor, Hu Shuli, in seeking to wrest economic control of the publication from the Stock Exchange Executive Council, a quasi-independent publicity organ of the Communist-party government whose shares are traded as that of a media investment group on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Hu has an enviable reputation in journalism, winning the Louis Lyons Award from Harvard University's Nieman Foundation in 2007, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

Caijing itself also has been a story in its own right because of investigative reporting and commentary that have tested the boundaries of free expression in China, the South China Morning Post observed Tuesday.

By breaking news on issues thought to be forbidden by the country's strict censors, the 11-year-old magazine had paved the way for bolder reporting by other mainland publications, The Associated Press observed Tuesday in a story published by CBS.

The Beijing-based publication, whose title translates as "Finance & Economics" in English, promises its readers that it will abide the following three pillars across the pages of its online presence: "independent standpoint, exclusive coverage and unique perspective."