Chinese media, once again, have become the news. After a spate of recent news coverage highlighting poor food safety standards in China, an undercover story from Beijing TV showing steamed bun vendors in the country’s capital using cardboard as a meat substitute came as little surprise — that story, which over the last several days […]
CMP reported yesterday that a face-off was shaping up in the case of the beating death of China Trade News reporter Lan Chengzhang (兰成长) — between local party officials in Datong, Shanxi Province (where the reporter was killed), who insist Lan was a “fake” reporter out to extort money from local coalmines, and representatives from […]
Just two days after a Xinhua bulletin exposing acts of “news extortion” by four Chinese reporters, Chun Cheng Wanbao (春城晚报), a commercial spin-off of Yunnan Daily, ran an editorial attacking the practice. What sets this piece apart from other expressions of outrage in the Chinese media is its thinly-veiled reference to public interest and its […]
According to a report by Beijing Youth Daily, the first session of this year’s traveling “Three-Points Study and Education Campaign” (三项学习教育活动), an indoctrination drive designed to “educate” journalists in their obligations as well-behaved members of China’s state-controlled news industry, went off swimmingly in Beijing on May 13. As it only could, of course. The training […]
As the campaign for the “civilized” kicked into full gear in China, an April 24 editorial in Market News, published by the official People’s Daily, talked about the need for self-censorship for a more “civilized” Internet — a goal to be accomplished by pacts of good behavior between Internet companies in China, including Yahoo!. Clearly, […]
In this 2004 essay, Lu Ye explores what has become a recurring question in the age of commercialized media in China: who should watch the media? The question is given urgency by such phenomena as fake news, paid-for news and news extortion, but also complicated by China’s ongoing legacy of censorship. Lu Ye seeks the […]
