President Xi Jinping's inspirational speech at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) is being overshadowed by controversy over the suspension of four editorial staff of the China News Service who allegedly committed typo errors in filing it.

The typo errors in question, which were apparently overlooked by two reporters who filed it and two editors who sub-edited it, accidentally replaced "zhici" with "cizhi". Zhici is the Chinese word for "speech" while Cizhi means "resignation".

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China News Service's South Africa bureau reporter Ouyang Kaiyu and bureau chief Song Fangcan covered the president's speech that was delivered at the FOCAC forum in Johannesburg on Friday.

The original report by the state-run news service was subsequently carried by other news entities, including some 20 state-run media that ran it on Saturday.

The agencies corrected the typographical errors on their website version of the story about an hour and 20 minutes after it was published. But not before the editorial fallout came.

China News Service has yet to confirm news of the suspension of four of its editorial staff that worked on the article, but the mistake has prompted Beijing to issue an order that all news involving state leaders must be sourced from the official news agency, Xinhua.

China News Service has the same status as Xinhua in that it also has the backing of the Communist Party.

Interestingly, Xinhua has had its share of "typo errors", including a recent incident when it misspelled U.S. President Barack Obama's name in its Chinese translation of the story on Xi and Obama's meeting. It translated Obama's name as "Ao Ma Ba", and many newspapers also published the Xinhua report as is.

TagsChina-South Africa, Xinhua News Agency, Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) Johannesburg