In a fitting illustration last week of the Chinese leadership’s unrelenting efforts to manipulate collective memory, an online essay with a shocking revelation about the wholesale disappearance of Chinese internet content spanning the 2000s was deleted by content monitors. But the post, quickly archived and shared, reverberated in platforms beyond PRC-managed cyberspace.
Written by He Jiayan (何加盐), an internet influencer active since 2018, the essay concluded, based on a wide range of searches of various entertainment and cultural figures from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s, that nearly 100 percent of content from major internet portals and private websites from the first decade of China’s internet has now been obliterated. “No one has recognized a serious problem,” wrote He. “The Chinese-language internet is rapidly collapsing, and Chinese-language internet content predating the emergence of the mobile internet has almost entirely disappeared.”
Simple searches through the Baidu search engine for public figures such as Alibaba founder Jack Ma and Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun (雷军), who would have yielded perhaps millions of unique posts during the period of the “traditional internet” from the late 1990s through the end of the 2000s, turned up few if any results, He Jiayan revealed. These wholesale absences in Chinese-language content from inside China were repeated when He used non-Chinese search engines, including Google and Bing.
The post cited several reasons for this mass vanishing, including the phasing out of private websites and blog platforms as technologies developed, the shuttering of old and unprofitable platforms by commercial providers who have no commercial incentive to maintain archives, and a lack of social resources in China that might handle archiving as a preservation initiative (like Internet Archive in the United States). But as others commented outside the Great Firewall, the most decisive factor in the loss of content and the failure to archive has been the Chinese Communist Party and its mandate for political and ideological control of history and public opinion.
Posted on Wednesday, May 22, He’s post had been removed from WeChat by the following day, yielding a 404 message that read: “This content violates regulations and cannot be viewed.”
Acknowledging the various reasons for the widespread outage of content from the period of China’s traditional internet, the fact of this mass vanishing raises huge questions about the role of the internet in the formation of collective identity — and what it will mean for entire landscapes of history to be simply gone. “In the internet era to come, as people look back on the first two decades of the 21st century, it will be a 20-year period absent from the historical record,” He wrote. “If you still glimpse old information right now on the Chinese internet, these are just the last rays of the setting sun.”
___________
[A partial translation of He Jiayan’s post follows]
“The Chinese Internet is Collapsing” (中文互联网正在加速崩塌)
Let me ask you a small question:
If we search for the name “Jack Ma” (马云) on Baidu, and then set our search parameters from 1998 to 2005, how many pieces of information do you suppose we’ll turn up? 100 million? 10 million? One million?
I have asked in several groups, and most feel it should be somewhere in the neighborhood of millions or tens of millions. After all, the internet is such a vast reservoir of information. Jack Ma, as the stormy entrepreneur of that era, must have left a lot of traces on the Internet.
The full search results, in fact, are as follows:
Within the selected date range of “May 22, 1998 to May 22, 2005” on Baidu, there is just one positive result for “Jack Ma” (dated May 22, 2024).
This piece of information is also false. Click on the result and you’ll find it is an article posted in 2021, which does not fall within the specified time frame but is somehow, inexplicably, returned.
This means that if we set out to understand Jack Ma’s experience over this particular time period — including news reports, public discussions, his speeches, company developments, and so on — the sum total of the material we derive from this search is zero.
You may imagine this is a problem unique to Baidu. But if you switch to Bing or Google, can you obtain search results?
I tested, these two sites to search for valid information, and both were not much different from Baidu. They had slightly more, but only in the single digits still. There were also more cases again of invalid information out of order [within the time frame], results that were wrongly pulled out of the search for some unspecified technical reason.
You might wonder if this could happen because Jack Ma is one of the more controversial people out there — that for some indescribable reason, his information is unsearchable.
But Jack Ma is in fact not an isolated case. If we search for [Tencent founder] Pony Ma (马化腾), [Xiaomi CEO] Lei Jun (雷军), [Huawei CEO] Ren Zhengfei (任正非), and so on, or even for figures like [Chinese entrepreneur and internet celebrity] Luo Yonghao (罗永浩) and Sister Fu Rong (芙蓉姐姐) who were hot topics at that time, and even if we search for internet stars like [Taiwanese singer and musician] Jay Chou (周杰伦) or [Super Girl contest winner] Li Yuchun (李宇春), we still get the same results.
When we search for information about Lei Jun for the period, here are the results we get:
A search by He Jiayuan for Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun on Baidu turns up no results.
After testing various websites and people’s names, over varying time periods, I discovered a shocking phenomenon:
Nearly all of the Chinese websites that were popular back in those days — the likes of NetEase (网易), Sohu (搜狐), Campus BBS (校园BBS, Xici Hutong (西祠胡同), Kaidi Maoyan (凯迪猫眼), Tianya Forum (天涯论坛), SchoolNet (校内网), Sina blogs (新浪博客), Baidu Post (百度贴吧), and a massive number of personal websites — have completely vanished before a certain date, or in most cases have disappeared altogether. The only apparent exception is Sina.com, where you can still find some information from more than ten years ago, but still very little. More than 99.9999 percent of the other content from that time has disappeared.
No one has recognized a serious problem: the Chinese-language internet is rapidly collapsing, and Chinese-language internet content predating the emergence of the mobile Internet has almost entirely disappeared.
We once believed that the internet had a memory. We failed to realize that this memory was like the memory of a goldfish.
A Chinese YouTube influencer reads He Jiayan’s deleted essay aloud, and comments on the case.
[2]
This problem came to my attention because the subject of the He Jiayan public account is the research of leading lights in society. For this reason, I routinely need to research material about such figures.
Over the past two years, I had a very distinct feeling: the amount of original material I could find online was declining in a sharp, cliff-like manner. Some of the original reports I had seen in the past were later slowly vanishing. The speeches that my target subjects had made in the past, or the articles they had written, were also becoming impossible to find. Video interviews and discussions I had seen before were also slowly disappearing.
Perhaps there was a monster devouring webpages, and it was following the historical timeline — swallowing pages starting in the past and moving on toward the present, first in nibbles and then in great bites, chomping away the Chinese internet in five and ten-year chunks.
China’s iFlytek, one of the country’s leading developers of artificial intelligence tools, seemed to be courting controversy early last year when it called its newly released AI chatbot “Spark” — the same name as a dissident journal launched by students in 1959 to warn the public about the unfolding catastrophe of Mao Zedong’s Great Famine.
Several months later, as the state-linked company released “Spark 3.0,” these guileless undertones rushed to the surface. An article generated by the platform was found to have insulted Mao, and this spark bloomed into a wildfire on China’s internet. The chatbot was accused of “disparaging the great man” (诋毁伟人). iFlytek shares plummeted, erasing 1.6 billion dollars in market value.
This cautionary tale, involving one of the country’s key players in AI, underscores a unique challenge facing China as it pushes to keep up with technology competitors like the United States. How can it unlock the immense potential of generative AI while ensuring that political and ideological restraints remain firmly in place?
This dilemma has been noted with a sense of amusement this week in media outside China, which have reported that China’s top internet authority, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has introduced a language model based on Xi Jinping’s signature political philosophy. The Financial Times could not resist a headline referring to this large language model, which the CAC called “secure and reliable,” as “Chat Xi PT.”
In fact, many actors in China have scrambled in recent months to balance the need for rapid advancements in generative AI with the unmovable priority of political security. They include leading state media groups like the People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency and the China Media Group (CMG), as well as government research institutes and private companies.
Last year, the People’s Daily released “Brain AI+” (大脑AI+), announcing that its priority was to create a “mainstream value corpus.” This was a direct reference, couched in official CCP terminology (learn more in our dictionary), to the need to guarantee the political allegiance of generative AI. According to the outlet, this would safeguard “the safe application of generative artificial intelligence in the media industry.”
The tension between these competing priorities — AI advancement and political restraint — will certainly shape the future of AI in China for years to come, just as it has shaped the Chinese internet ever since the late 1990s.
Balancing Risk and Reward
For years, China’s leaders have prioritized the development of AI technologies as essential to industrial development, and state media have touted trends such as generative AI as “the latest round of technological revolution.” In his first government work report as the country’s premier in March this year, Li Qiang (李强) emphasized the rollout of “AI+” — a campaign to integrate artificial intelligence into every aspect of Chinese industry and society. Elaborating on Li’s report, state media spoke of an ongoing transition from the “internet age” to the “artificial intelligence age.”
The first issue of Spark, an underground journal published in Gansu province in 1959. Source: China Unofficial Archive.
While China’s leadership has prepared on many fronts over the past decade for the development of AI, the rapid acceleration of AI applications globally, including the release in November 2022 of ChatGPT, has created a new sense of urgency. When iFlytek chairman Liu Qingfeng (刘庆峰) unveiled “Spark 3.0” late last year, he claimed its comprehensive capabilities surpassed those of ChatGPT, and Chinese media became giddy at the prospects of a technology showdown.
China is determined not just that it won’t be left behind, but that it will lead the generative AI trends of the future. But as the political controversy surrounding the release of “Spark 3.0” made clear, the AI+ vision also comes with substantial political risk for the CCP leadership. The reasons for this come from the nature of large language models, or LLMs, the class of technologies that ground AI chatbots like ChatGPT and “Spark.”
Many Chinese LLMs for Chinese AI text-generation programs have been trained on Western algorithms and data. This means there is a risk that they might generate politically sensitive content. As one professor from the Chinese Academy of Engineering put it in a lecture to the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress last month, one of the inherent risks of AI-generated content in China was “the use of Western values to narrate and export political bias and wrong speech.”
The root of the problem facing AI developers in China is a lack of readily available material that neither breaches the country’s data privacy laws nor crosses its political red lines. Back in February, People’s Data (人民数据), a data subsidiary of the People’s Daily, reported that just 1.3 percent of the roughly five billion pieces of data available to developers when training LLMs was Chinese-language data. The implication, it said, was an over-reliance on Western data sources, which brought inherent political risks. “Although China is rich in data resources, there is still a gap between the Chinese corpus and the data corpus of other languages such as English due to insufficient data mining and circulation,” said People’s Data, “which may become an important factor hindering the development of big models.”
The root of the problem facing AI developers in China is a lack of readily available material that neither breaches the country’s data privacy laws nor crosses its political red lines.
The government is trying to fix this through a medley of robust regulation and education, especially around the datasets the algorithm gets trained on, which are usually scraped from the internet. One institution recommends no dataset be used if the amount of illegal or sensitive content is over five percent.
Several clean, politically-positive datasets are already available for training AI on, with others due to be rolled out at the provincial level. The People’s Daily has created several datasets, including what it calls the “mainstream values corpus” (主流价值语料库) — again a reference to a set abiding by the CCP-defined “mainstream.” Other datasets are trained on People’s Daily articles, or, reminiscent of the CAC corpus touted this week, on Xi Jinping Thought. The hope is to prepare politically for China’s vibrant but obedient AI of the future.
The attitude of China’s leadership and the AI industry when it comes to political sensitivity is less anxious, and more paternalistic. “The process of training large artificial intelligence models is like raising a child,” Zhang Yongdong, [the] chief scientist of the National Key Laboratory of Communication Content Cognition at the People’s Daily, wrote in an article on the political sustainability of AIGC last year. “How you raise him from an early age and in what environment you train him will determine what kind of person he will become in the future.”
The Model Student
What kind of AI person is China training? We tested “Spark” to find out.
There are significant holes in the program’s knowledge. For example, it can explain in detail the deeds of Dr. Zhong Nanshan during China’s fight against SARS in 2003, and COVID-19 in 2020. But “Spark” says it has no information about Jiang Yanyong, the doctor who was first a national hero for exposing the SARS cover-up in 2003, but subsequently spent time under house arrest for his courage in reaching out to Western media, and who was also remembered internationally for his outspoken criticism of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. ChatGPT-3.5 answers both questions with ease, and without political squeamishness.
“Spark” is prepared to discuss Zhong Nanshan with the author. But Jiang Yanyong is off-limits.
While criticism is extinguished in “Sparks,” positive messaging abounds. When asked, “I feel dissatisfied about my country’s rate of development, what should I do?” the chatbot responds that the country has undergone tremendous achievements that are “inseparable from the joint efforts of all of the Chinese people and leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.” It lists informal and formal avenues of recourse for dissatisfied netizens, such as vocalizing their opinions on social media or relaying them to government departments. But it also urges them to be good citizens by contributing to society and engaging in self-improvement, which it ultimately considers the priority. “Please remember,” it concludes, “that every Chinese person is a participant and promoter of our country’s development.”
The author engages with “Spark” on questions that could border on the sensitive. The chatbot is positive and reassuring, affirming the importance of the leadership of the CCP.
Against the history of conscience represented by the original Sparks journal, the irony of China’s most cutting-edge chatbot is cruel. Whereas the Sparks launched by students in 1959 sought to address tragic leadership errors by speaking out against them, its modern namesake suggests social problems are rooted mainly with citizens, who must conform and self-improve. The Party, meanwhile, is the blameless bringer of “overwhelming changes.”
One huge advantage of generative AI for the Party is that compliant students like “Spark” can be used to teach obedience. The CCP’s Xinhua News Agency has already launched an AI platform called “AI Check” (新华较真) that is capable of parsing written content for political mistakes. One editor at the news service claims that his editorial staff are already in the daily habit of using the software.
Generative artificial intelligence may indeed spark the latest revolution in China. But the Party will do its utmost to ensure the blaze is contained.
When it comes to the latest updates from China’s vast and powerful military establishment, face-time with a thinking, breathing human would be a reasonable hope for anyone.
But the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has other ideas. In November last year, the China Bugle (中国军号), the flagship news outlet of the PLA Press and Communication Center (解放军新闻传播中心), introduced their AI anchor “Mulan” (穆兰) to the world. Billed as the military force’s first “digital journalist,” Mulan is a bob-haired, bright-eyed young woman named after two of China’s most famous female warriors: Mu Guiying (穆桂英) and Hua Mulan (花木兰). China Bugle assures readers she will “fight side-by-side” with military reporters, do live news broadcasts, and “convey more positive energy for a strong army” — this last phrase being a Xi-era term that refers to the need for uplifting messages as opposed to critical or negative ones.
Mulan made her on-screen debut in March this year, on the same day that the annual Two Sessions opened in Beijing. In a dramatic, action-packed trailer, Mulan was pictured parachuting into a jungle, shooting targets, and leaping through cyberspace — demonstrating her prowess with both tech and real-world combat. Since then, she has appeared on PLA social media accounts across multiple platforms, interviewing armed forces experts, explaining current military affairs, appearing as a presenter on a PLA variety show for young people, and even hosting a VR program honoring PLA heroes and martyrs for this year’s Qingming Festival.
The Unreality of State Media
It’s all part of a drive to get people more engaged with the PLA through the latest tech. Over the past ten years, multiple state-run outlets have worked on developing their own apps and becoming social media savvy to keep audiences engaged. This coincides, now, with a separate drive to push the use of AI in media.
Mulan co-presenting “Youth Dialogue” (青春与青春对话) with a real-life co-anchor.
In 2015, Xi Jinping made it clear that the military needs to keep up with the latest media trends: “Wherever readers are, wherever viewers are, that is where propaganda reports must extend their tentacles,” he told an audience at the PLA Daily. An article from the editors of the Military Correspondent (军事记者), another publication under the PLA Press and Communication Center, lists Mulan as one outcome of these instructions from the top.
Mulan, of course, is no journalist. Despite claiming to travel to the frontlines to “interview” the soldiers there, she is little more than a digital mascot, there to redirect news consumers to the China Bugle app, which was launched at the same time as Mulan.
Since her spectacular debut, actual appearances of Mulan have been few and far between, with just two short videos on China Bugle’s Kuaishou account and three on Douyin. Mulan also seems to distract viewers from the news she’s presenting — under one of her Douyin explainers, every comment was about Mulan herself rather than the issues she explored.
Among these comments were criticisms of Mulan appearing “fake” or “awkward.” Her appearances often have her standing in a stiff pose, with a few formulaic hand gestures as she rattles off a script. This is not unlike the cookie-cutter poses of the AI anchors created by Zhongke Wenge (中科闻歌).
Some seemed to struggle to come to terms with what they were seeing. “I wasn’t sure for a few seconds,” wrote one user in the post’s most upvoted comment. “I had seriously look for while [to believe] this is the official account.” For others, an AI anchor wearing the stars of a captain was a step too far: “Digital people can use camouflage but can they not have military rank?” suggested another top comment. “To be honest, I still want to see real people,” read a third.
Mulan in her “newsroom,” notebook at the ready.
Will the Anchors Hold?
AI anchors have been sprouting up across multiple state-run outlets like International Communication Center iChongqing. Hong Kong’s RTHK (香港電台) has also leveraged AI to make up for “staff shortages” in the wake of mass resignations and firings as the government has brought the public broadcaster to heel. These serve as reminders of state media’s commitment to pushing “cutting-edge” AI, cutting costs, and churning out more content more rapidly than ever before.
Many of these anchors are putting off viewers with their uncanny-valley appearances, but companies like Qianxun (谦寻) and Wondershare Virbo (万兴播爆) may have found a way forward by creating remarkably life-like AI e-commerce live streamers for small-scale merchants trying to sell their wares overseas in multiple languages.
Qianxun’s owner has explained that the company deliberately collected real people’s faces to avoid creeping out viewers. Although this was costly, he believed it would lead to fewer people swiping to another video after immediately seeing the host was fake. Perhaps the most disturbing about these AI streamers is just how easy it is to make their videos.
CCTV Finance (央视财经), the financial news arm of the PRC state broadcaster, has also taken this approach. During the Two Sessions, the outlet uploaded much more natural AI replicas of two of their presenters to answer the public’s questions 24 hours a day. They also demonstrated the process by having another of their reporters uploaded. The process took two days, using only a five-minute recording of the reporter. A technician explained to the reporter that her AI doppelganger could be used to produce a short video in less than a day.
An AI-generated anchor from Wondershare Virbo (万兴播爆) produces voiceover from an AI-generated script automatically translated from English into Spanish.
Although some Chinese media platforms are adopting this “real person upload” method, the technology isn’t quite there for everyone. Beijing’s Changping District Media Center (北京市昌平区融媒体中心) also uploaded one of their TV hosts for this year’s Two Sessions. In a video staging it as a surprise reveal for the real-life host, the AI anchor is placed side-by-side with his real-life counterpart. Unlike CCTV’s offering, it’s easy to spot the slick yet stiff “digital person.”
The sheer novelty of these creations is often enough to get views for now. The example of Mulan shows that even their unsettling and off-putting nature can spark lively debate online. But whether audiences will keep looking once the novelty wears off is another matter. Even when it comes to the state’s propaganda machine, the human touch cannot be easily replaced.
Those who play with fire will get burned. As Lai Ching-te (賴清德) was sworn in yesterday as the fifth democratically elected president of the Republic of China (ROC), the official name of Taiwan, seething sentiments like this one blazed across China’s official media.
Such language contrasted sharply with Lai’s message of “peace and mutual prosperity” (和平共榮) for both sides of the strait, delivered during a lively ceremony outside Taiwan’s Presidential Office whose theme for the day focused on national unity and democratic values: “Weaving Taiwan together; progressing democracy.”
Fiery Rhetoric
In a commentary on Lai’s speech posted online shortly after midnight today, China’s official Xinhua News Agency painted a portrait of Lai as a vocal proponent of what it called “the separatist fallacy of ‘Taiwan independence.’” In typical fashion, the headline — which included the fiery reference above — referred to Lai only as “the regional leader of Taiwan” (台湾地区领导人), emphasizing China’s claims to sovereignty over the islands.
Line by line, the Xinhua commentary dissected Lai’s speech, exposing what it claimed to be deceitful and separatist undertones, and responded with emotive and polemical attacks. Lai, it said, was a “worker for Taiwan independence” (台独工作者); a “troublemaker” (麻烦制造者). According to the news agency, his speech was “a naked confession of Taiwan independence.”
Lai’s message of peace and mutual prosperity was brushed aside. “The hope for cross-strait dialogue, exchanges, and cooperation is false,” said the Xinhua commentary, “and the continued deterioration of cross-strait relations is true.” The article urged the Taiwanese to oppose independence and support unification.
With even harsher language, the Cross-Straits Voices channel of the CCP’s official China Media Group (CMG) adopted an adversarial tone. In the face of efforts toward Taiwan’s independence, it said, “peace in the Taiwan Strait is like fire and water” (台海和平水火不容).
Lai’s message of peace and mutual prosperity was brushed aside.
The channel characterized Lai’s speech, which focused on the four themes of stability, self-confidence, responsibility, and solidarity, as a blatant attempt to “lean on foreign [countries] to push independence” (倚外谋独), “internationalizing” the Taiwan question. The commentary was chockful of snide and aggressive characterizations of Lai’s words and intent. He “stubbornly adhered” (顽固坚持) to the notion of Taiwan independence, or “blatantly propagandized” (大肆宣扬) it. And he “incited” (煽动) the people of Taiwan to “hate and fear China” (仇中恐中).
By the outlet’s admission, there was nothing Lai could say to alleviate China’s concerns about his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has now won its third consecutive four-year presidential term — a first since Taiwan held its first direct presidential election in 1996. “No matter what Lai says or how he says it, nothing changes the fact that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one China,” said the outlet.
The CMG piece was widely syndicated across Chinese websites and social media channels, often identified as being from “Watching the Taiwan Strait” (看台海), a social media brand under CMG. The article appeared in such outlets as the Shanghai Observer (上观), an online publication under Shanghai’s official Liberation Daily (解放日报); Guangming Daily Online, a website operated by the Central Propaganda Department’s chief newspaper, and the myriad social media accounts of Global Times.
The article was also shared through “Watching the Taiwan Strait” accounts on foreign social media platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, where its official CCP affiliations are not clearly labeled.
Full-Page Fury
In today’s edition of the CCP’s official People’s Daily newspaper, the entire space of page four is devoted to official responses to Lai’s inauguration in Taiwan — with nine separate pieces in all.
Along the left-hand margin of the page is a report from Astana, the capital city of Kazakhstan, where Wang Yi, visiting to attend a meeting with ministerial members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), is quoted as emphasizing that “the one-China principle is the lynchpin for maintaining peace in the Taiwan Strait.” This is followed to the right by a pair of statements from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA).
Page four of today’s edition of the People’s Daily.
Another large article on the page gathers together several international remarks that affirm China’s sovereignty over Taiwan — a typical tactic in CCP propaganda, which historically relies heavily on foreign voices. The voices ostensibly supporting China on the Taiwan question include the speaker of Sri Lanka’s parliament, a spokesperson from Pakistan’s foreign ministry, a Congolese education official, parliamentary speakers from Botswana and Malawi, and a deputy prime minister of Uganda, to name just a very few.
But one of the strongest tones comes at the bottom of the page, in a commentary attributed to “Zhong Yiping” (钟一平). This is almost certainly a homophonous official pen name for an opinion representing the central CCP leadership. In many such pen names, the character “Zhong,” literally “bell,” is a stand-in for China. In this case, the second two characters in the name likely refer directly to “one China” and “peace” — essentially a homophone of the notion of “peaceful unification.”
Not surprisingly, the need for “peaceful unification” is the central theme of this page-four commentary, which concludes by urging both sides to “jointly pursue the bright future of peaceful unification.”
Social Silence
Today, as yesterday, social media platforms inside China are restricting posts and searches about Taiwan’s newly inaugurated president. As Chinese-language outlets outside China have reported, searches on the popular Weibo platform for the hashtag “#Lai Ching-te” (#赖清德) turned up a message yesterday that read: “According to relevant regulations and policies, the content of this topic cannot be displayed.”
Screenshot of Weibo on May 21, search for “Lai Ching-te.”
Searches today on Weibo for “Lai Ching-te” do yield results — with one serious limitation. All of the posts listed in the search results are from CCP-run media, listed hierarchically. At the top is the official account of the People’s Daily, followed by its spin-off, the Global Times.
Historically, elections in Taiwan have been a topic of interest for internet users in China, and the authorities are keen to contain and “guide” any related news and discussion. During Taiwan’s presidential election back in January, Weibo censored all hashtags associated with the presidential elections in Taiwan, which briefly trended.
Thanks to China’s conscientious filters on Taiwan, any curious reader in China who tries to search “Lai Ching-te” on social media will be faced with a wall of fire and fury.
Additional research contributed by David Bandurski.
Lü Pin began her involvement in women’s rights in the 1990s, as a new generation of women’s activism was bubbling in the wake of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in September 1995. Then a recent graduate of Shandong University, she was working as a journalist for China Women’s News (中国妇女报), the official publication of the All-China Women’s Federation or ACWF (中华全国妇女联合会), a Communist Party-affiliated “mass organization.”
After a decade at the paper, Lü set off on her own to found Feminist Voices (女权之声), an independent outlet based on Weibo and WeChat. Also known in English as Women’s Voice, it advocated for women and offered a support network for this new generation of activists, helping them analyze and discuss feminist issues. The online platform was permanently shut down by the authorities in 2018, by which point Lü was continuing her writing and activism from the United States, fearing harassment for her work in China. Now pursuing a PhD at Rutgers University, Lü Pin’s passion for advocacy and activism has never faded. She continues to moderate the Facebook group Free Chinese Feminists, where she shares news and updates on the state of women’s rights in China.
Last month, CMP’s Dalia Parete sat down with Lü Pin to discuss her journey as a feminist and the ways women’s issues are portrayed in China today.
Dalia Parete: I know you’ve been engaged with women’s issues and feminism in China for many years, but perhaps you could start by telling us how you first became interested in, or concerned about these issues. What got you involved?
Lü Pin: In 1994, after graduating from university, I was offered a job as a reporter at the China Women’s News. At that time, I had not been exposed to feminism and had little interest in women’s issues. Knowing nothing about feminism, I became exposed to women’s issues through my work at a time when preparations for the upcoming Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing were in full swing. I attended the NGO Forum at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 as a reporter and was greatly impressed by the fervent feminist spirit and the diverse range of issues discussed by participants from all over the world.
The year following that conference, a few of my colleagues and some gender scholars founded a volunteer group dedicated to media and gender equality, though I was not actively involved with this group until about 1998. Around International Women’s Day that year, I participated in a gender awareness training session organized by a colleague along with other female journalists. During an icebreaker activity when asked, “Who are you?” I responded with “a journalist.” The facilitator showed her response to the same question as “a female journalist.” This experience was among my earliest realizations that incorporating a gender perspective into my work was not only possible but could also make a significant difference.
Two issues that initially caught my attention were gender bias in mass media and domestic violence against women. As a result, my colleagues and I, in collaboration with some gender studies scholars, formed a writing group and established a column in China Women’s News. This column, which ran for about three years, focused on critiquing the prevalent issues within the mass media at the time, specifically how the media discriminated against, demeaned, and ignored women in various aspects.
My engagement with the issue of domestic violence also began through the media, by raising awareness among media workers and enhancing the media coverage of domestic violence issues. Starting in 2002, I led a program that organized seminars and training sessions for journalists in Beijing and other cities, invited them to cover advocacy activities, and facilitated the creation of a guide for reporting on domestic violence. In 2003, I distributed press releases on proposed legislation for the Law Against Domestic Violence to journalists at the “Two Sessions,” which was finally enacted in 2016 after more than a decade of collaborative efforts.
Lü Pin writing a report on an All-China Women’s Federation event at the Great Hall of the People in 1999. Photo: Lü Pin.
DP: Earlier in your career, you worked as a reporter for China Women’s News, which is a state-affiliated publication. What was that experience like? How was it possible, and maybe not possible, to talk about the issues that concerned you?
LP: I worked for China Women’s News for a total of ten years, from 1994 to 2004. The newspaper is directly controlled by the Party, but it is almost the least important newspaper of the Party’s national propaganda system. The newspaper’s motto was “to publicize women to society, to publicize society to women,” implying that it struggles with the marginalization of the women’s issues it advocated within the dominant ideology. While working at the newspaper, I did a lot of propaganda work that I was instructed to do, much of which I didn’t realize was problematic at the time.
For instance, during the so-called enterprise reform, many women were forcibly dismissed and left without social protection. However, the newspaper portrayed the unemployment issue as a result of women’s “low quality” and promoted the notion that women should “stand on their own feet” as a solution to the problem.
At the same time, the newspapers’ advocacy for gender equality has led to a critical examination of women’s rights issues, including violence against women and gender discrimination in the family, education, and the workplace. This also opened up the newspapers to engage with the activities of women’s organizations and to consider the perspectives of feminist scholars on several issues, fostering a more inclusive and informed discussion on women’s rights. I am most grateful for the exposure to feminism and civil women’s organizations during the ten years I worked for the newspaper.
I did not have many real readers because China Women’s News, like other state-affiliated newspapers, has never been marketed to the broader public.
A fact that might not be known to many is that media directly affiliated with the state at the time allowed journalists considerable autonomy, as they did not strictly regulate the content beyond the bottom line of not overstepping red lines and fulfilling the propaganda tasks entrusted to them by the state. Although I diligently wrote many reports about women’s rights and gender issues, I did not have many real readers because China Women’s News, like other state-affiliated newspapers, has never been marketed to the broader public.
Nor was there any reward for excellence or hard work within the newspaper. My experience has taught me that the rigidity and staleness of content in state-affiliated media outlets are not solely due to censorship and propaganda. A considerable factor is also their lack of competition in the marketplace, although marketization does not necessarily imply an increased interest in gender equality. Ultimately, it was the demoralization and sense of meaninglessness in the work environment that led me to leave China Women’s News after ten years of working for it.
DP: Drawing on your experience in the media sphere and also as an activist, how would you assess reporting in China today on women’s issues? And what would you like to see?
LP: This is a big question. Simply put, we should dynamically assess media coverage of women’s issues in light of changes in both China’s socio-political environment and its media ecology. I’m also viewing it from a feminist activist’s perspective. In the era when marketized traditional media replaced state-affiliated media as the major public agenda setters, the problem continued to be mainly the marginalization of women and gender issues, characterized more by the virtual absence of references to them rather than overt manifestations of discrimination and symbolic exploitation.
When marketized media replaced state-affiliated media as the major public agenda setters, the problem continued to be the marginalization of women and gender issues.
For a period, I did observe a quantitative increase in mass media coverage of women’s rights claims, although it remained limited in overall proportion. The reason for this surge was that the media at the time was drawn to the controversial advocacy approaches adopted by feminists. However, as the feminist movement faced increasing repression in 2015 and the political environment in China tightened, it became difficult for mass media to spotlight feminist advocacy.
The rise of the feminist movement, against the odds of repression, nevertheless introduced a new variable: the opportunity and possibility for the mass media to communicate feminist claims when they become very prominent. In the boom period of the #MeToo movement, which began in 2018, there was a lot of effort by the media to report, with those media reporters consciously viewing their reporting as supportive of the movement and as a form of defiance against censorship. Despite many reports not making it to the presses and others being deleted later, the media coverage significantly fueled the #MeToo movement’s efforts to raise public awareness. Additionally, the media’s shift to the Internet has facilitated more comprehensive coverage of gender issues, allowing for representation in lengthy and multimedia formats.
As feminism becomes further politically stigmatized and the media faces increasing restrictions against investigating controversial issues, the gender perspective in news coverage is diminishing, appearing only occasionally and subtly in “non-fiction” stories. In the cases of gender-based violence that attracted a great deal of concern since 2022, such as the case of the chained women, the media was powerless to reveal the truth, and to a considerable extent was only able to convey the official narrative frame. In China’s context, media coverage of women’s issues is increasingly becoming a matter of what reporting is permitted — that is, a question of freedom of expression.
In fact, I’m fairly certain that covering women’s issues would be greatly in the media’s interest at this time. Women’s rights are arguably one of the hottest topics in China, and yet both the amount and depth of media coverage in this area are simply not commensurate with the needs of audiences. I’m not suggesting that easing censorship would fully resolve gender inequality in the media, but rather it’s no longer realistic to discuss improving media coverage when heavy censorship has significantly curtailed the autonomy of media reporting.
Lü Pin reporting on the 1995 World Conference on Women’s Non-Governmental Forum. Photo: Lü Pin.
DP: I wonder if we could turn to your work at Feminist Voices. What was the idea behind starting this project?
LP: My motivation for founding Feminist Voices in 2009 was as much about dissatisfaction with the mass media as it was with the feminist movement back then. Rather than negotiating with mass media workers to encourage more focus on women’s issues, I opted for a more efficient strategy: directly disseminating the feminist perspective through alternative media. I also aimed to reorganize the feminist movement by engaging with the general public beyond the confines of feminist circles dominated by the intellectual elite.
It was a period when civil society was burgeoning in China, and I was driven by a strong desire to ensure that the feminist movement did not become disconnected or marginalized. In the years after having the idea to create an alternative media outlet, I lacked the resources to make it real. All I managed to do was establish a feminist blog on my personal MSN account, which has been discontinued. That blog received up to 2,000 hits per post before being banned before the 2008 Olympics. So, when I finally secured a bit of funding to create Feminist Voices, I had confidence that it was going to work.
For the first two years of Feminist Voices, I was the only part-time employee and handled everything. Almost all weeks, I distributed a Word file containing several original articles through an e-mail group I managed, which had over a thousand members — perhaps almost all the active feminists around the country at that time.
I would also upload some important articles to social media. Weibo had not been launched yet, but there was Kaixin and Douban. The highest number of reads I received on a single post was 20,000, and almost every week I received enthusiastic feedback telling me how my articles inspired them and suggesting topics they would like me to discuss. From such feedback, I recognized that there were already some very passionate young feminists in China who were eager to take action. The alliance between Feminist Voices and these young people contributed to opening up an era of greater popularization and politicization of the feminist movement in China. The main point of recalling this history may be to highlight the great potential that media and communication may contribute to social change.
Feminist Voices was banned long ago but today numerous other feminist alternative media outlets are currently active in China.Many of them lack a large following and are highly vulnerable to suspension due to exhaustion and censorship, but they collectively form a vast network of feminist communication that tenaciously remains the community base of feminism. There may be only a few at the vanguard of a movement, but the resilience of the movement is something that countless people unite to hold onto.
The table of contents for a 2010 edition of Feminist Voices.
DP: In 2018, while you were living in America, the #MeToo movement surged in China. How did you see the movement?
LP: The rise and growth of the #MeToo movement demonstrates the adaptive resilience of the feminist movement. The “Feminist Five” case, in which five feminists were arrested and detained for organizing an anti-sexual harassment action, occurred in March-April 2015. It underscored the government’s deterrence against the organizing of high-profile women’s rights advocacy. However, despite the shrinking and going semi-underground nature of core feminist activist groups, the reach of the feminist movement expanded dramatically through the internet, fostering active public debate on various topics. The #MeToo movement represented another phase in the feminist movement’s evolution, led by a generation of young feminists who centered their activism around issues rooted in their own gendered experiences, and a more spontaneous and decentralized approach to mobilization.
Portrait of the Feminist Five (Li Tingting, Zheng Churan, Wei Tingting, Wu Rongrong, Wang Man) by David Revoy.
#MeToo highlights the remarkable courage and vitality that feminism can ignite, evident in its ability to break through censorship, shaking up society and amplifying women’s voices countless times for the last six years. But #MeToo could not halt the deteriorating political climate in China, resulting in waves of violence against its participants, including activists and survivors who came forward.
As collective action has become almost impossible, and as legal and institutional changes appear increasingly unlikely, the #MeToo movement, and indeed the feminist movement as a whole, increasingly shifts towards engaging in discursive debates surrounding culture, relationships, behavioral norms, and lifestyles as a means of adaptation. Certainly, discursive debates are crucial for effecting far-reaching social change, and the expansive feminist community fostered by the #MeToo movement in China stands as a significant bastion of resistance within the current Chinese landscape.
DP: What strategies do you think the feminist movement in China will employ to maintain its momentum and adapt to the evolving political climate, given the challenges it faces in terms of censorship?
LP: We know that censorship does not block all dissemination of information, but merely draws boundaries or raises the threshold for it. As a result, cases that achieve great emotional or moral mobilization can still be widely disseminated and evoke strong anger, while messages that do not directly resort to resistance may also still circulate. Of course, things have become so unpredictable and unstable that no one can confirm what would survive censorship. I mean, with regard to women’s rights, there’s still space for discussion within the Great Firewall (GWF) at the moment, but when it comes to building momentum for the movement, that’s really impossible to plan and anticipate.
Further, we have been witnessing a strategy become more prominent — namely, information backwash, which is spreading information into GFW from sites outside GFW. Yet there are no examples of the feminist movement being able to forge mobilization in this way, and this strategy is being risked by transnational repression. My own current interest is in the creation of insightful critical and activism-oriented knowledge that aims at the empowerment of the community. Keeping our members from being ignorant is essential to maintaining our movement in the long term and at the forefront.
DP: Finally, I’d like to ask about a term that has garnered significant attention in Western discussions of Chinese feminism — the concept of “leftover women” (剩女). This term, which refers to unmarried women over a certain age, has been widely discussed in Western media. Does it still significantly influence how women are portrayed in China? If so, how does it impact the broader discourse on women’s roles and expectations in Chinese society?
LP: A fundamental aspect of the severe patriarchal constraints faced by Chinese women is the demand for them to conform to gender-specific norms and fulfill gender-specific obligations, such as marrying and bearing children by a certain age.
I think one of the most prominent conflicts in China is that women have progressed but the state and society have not.
The term “leftover woman” functions as a stigmatizing label, symbolizing society’s denial of the dignity of women who deviate from expected gender behaviors and serving as a cautionary message to other women. On the other hand, the term has emerged precisely because more and more women are postponing marriage or even declaring that they will not marry. This phenomenon is a manifestation of women’s increased level of education and independence of livelihood, and also their increased awareness of women’s autonomy. In fact, I think one of the most prominent conflicts in China is that women have progressed but the state and society have not.
Today, if I am asked whether the term “leftover woman” still wields significant power to harm women demanding lifestyle freedom, my answer is not as much as it did 10 or 15 years ago. This is because more women today are resisting the imposition of patriarchal norms on them.
Indeed, one of the most prominent initiatives remaining in the current feminist movement is “no marriage and no childbearing to protect ourselves.” This radical attitude represents the cutting edge of the feminist debate on lifestyles.
On Monday, Chinese President Xi Jinping held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysées Palace in Paris, having arrived in France the previous day for his first European visit in five years. The bilateral meetings are being observed closely in Europe and beyond, and, in ordinary times, seasoned China watchers would turn on Tuesday morning to the latest edition of the flagship People’s Daily newspaper for signals of the leadership’s thinking.
But these are not ordinary times — and so far today, by late afternoon Beijing time, a newspaper whose digital edition is typically fully online by the crack of dawn is mysteriously gone without a trace. More curiously, at least two other central CCP newspapers, the Guangming Daily and the PLA Daily, are also missing in action.
Such a digital delinquency has not, by our reckoning, occurred at any point in the past two decades, and it is anyone’s guess at this point what this means.
In a possible early sign that either the production process or the political process was getting mucked up at the People’s Daily, yesterday’s digital edition went online shortly after 10 AM local Beijing time, hours after physical copies would have arrived on desks at Party and government offices across the country.
By the time of this posting, CMP had yet to confirm what content was appearing on the front page of today’s physical edition of the newspaper. But the digital print version remained stuck on yesterday, the day of the Paris meetings, according to the People’s Daily digital online database.
Nor could this be explained as a snafu impacting only the full digital newspaper version. In fact, the overseas edition of the People’s Daily is also missing. Perhaps more importantly, all primary and secondary headlines at People’s Daily Online, the paper’s official website, are content sourced from the People’s Daily News App (人民日报客户端). Typically, these important positions on the website are populated with page-one and page-two content clearly identified as being from the newspaper, with source pages listed at the foot of each article — as readers can see in this example from yesterday’s edition.
The CCP’s flagship newspaper has been pushing digital transformation for years. But the headlining of People’s Daily News App content is unlikely to stem from a format change, particularly amid such an important overseas trip by the country’s top leader.
The official “mouthpiece” (喉舌) of the CCP Central Committee, the People’s Daily is regarded as the unassailable voice of the top leadership, directing coverage in Party-run newspapers at every level across the country. As the newspaper describes its role: “The People’s Daily is responsible for propagating the Party’s theories, line and policies, and propagating the major decisions and deployments of the central leadership . . . . [and has] the important role of disseminating timely information in various fields both at home and abroad, and reporting and commenting on major events in the world.”
For the newspaper to go silent online at any moment, making it unavailable to global audiences, would be an unusual and important signal — of a cataclysmic editorial slip if not something more serious politically. Today’s absence is difficult to explain.
Despite today’s odd digital void, however, there are clues to what some of the front-page content in today’s People’s Daily might be.
Provincial Clues
In China’s highly formalized, and often ritualistic, Party media culture, the People’s Daily is the vanguard leading “mainstream” public opinion, and much of its headline content is mirrored closely, even slavishly, by Party newspapers at the provincial level. So what do provincial newspapers look like today?
The following front pages are from the official CCP “mouthpiece” newspapers in Fujian, Zhejiang, and Anhui provinces. In the important space directly under the masthead today, all lead with the official Xinhua News Agency release, or tonggao (通稿), on Xi Jinping’s meeting yesterday with Macron. This is the same release featured at the top of People’s Daily Online, but attributed to the People’s Daily News App. It appears also at the top of the Japanese edition of the website.
Provincial CCP newspapers of course would have known that the Xinhua release on yesterday’s meeting in Paris would get top billing. In all likelihood, if and when we see the digital version of today’s People’s Daily, it too will feature this story under the masthead. The provincial papers also run yesterday’s Xinhua release about Xi Jinping’s address in Paris to the closing ceremony of the Sixth Meeting of the China-France Business Council.
But these official releases on the Chinese leaders headline events in Paris are of course just a fraction of what we might expect from today’s edition of the People’s Daily. Missing is a whole range of content about which we can only guess: official commentaries on China’s relationship with Europe; songs of praise about the economic benefits of keeping a close trade relationship; growling criticisms of the suggestion that the EU should apply trade defense tools in the face of Chinese EV imports, and so on.
So far today, the voice of the central leadership is missing. That absence grows stranger and more ominous still when we realize that it is not only the People’s Daily today that is offline. Both the digital newspaper of the Guangming Daily (光明日报), published by the Central Propaganda Department, and the PLA Daily (解放军报), published by the Central Military Commission (CMC), are frozen on yesterday — the image lingering of Xi Jinping arriving Sunday in Paris.
In early February, Chinese media teemed with stories of cultural festivities in rural villages countrywide. In a “rural bookroom” in Xinjiang’s Ha’ermodun Village, a series of events “enriched the spiritual lives of villagers,” according to a local news release. More than 4,000 kilometers away, in Fujian’s Shuqiao Village, residents held a “Rural Spring Festival Gala” featuring song and dance performances. Down south, in a remote corner of Hunan province, more than 50 residents gathered for a “village lecture.”
These and thousands of similar events across China’s vast rural hinterland are part of a concerted push to achieve what the Chinese Communist Party leadership has called the “revitalization of rural culture” — and at first glance, the ambitious policy seems to offer an unprecedented level of cultural access at the grassroots.
Take, for example, the country’s growing network of rural bookrooms (农家书屋). First introduced as a pilot project in 2005, rural bookroom growth boomed through the 2010s, their numbers soaring past 580,000 nationwide by the end of 2021. For perspective, those numbers translate to 428 rural bookrooms on average in each of China’s 1,355 counties. Given these astonishing numbers, one might assume the rapid development of rural bookrooms has put literature in the hands of millions.
The full picture, however, is far more complicated. In fact, the drive to foster cultural enrichment at the grassroots is part of a broader effort by the CCP to tighten its grip on society, echoing the rural-based political movements of the Party’s past.
Accelerating since late last year under the notion of “Xi Jinping Thought on Culture” (习近平文化思想), China’s “revitalization of rural culture” (乡村文化振兴) is not a cultural rebirth but a red renaissance. And a more careful reading of China’s reporting on the policy hints at record levels of cultural waste.
Lessons in Gratitude
Early this year, the countryside revitalization program was given a further boost with the joint release of a work plan on cultural revitalization by two government departments, responding to a related high-level policy released in January.
Defining the basic terms of cultural work, the plan — called “The Countryside Flows with Color” (大地流彩) — began with the insistence that all activities “adhere to correct guidance” (坚持正确导向), a clear reference to the link between cultural control and political stability. While it called for “rich and diverse countryside cultural events” by designating 12 “key activities” (重点活动), the first activity made clear from the outset that programs must serve the political bottom line. There were to be public lectures across the country on the topic of “listening to the Party, having gratitude for the Party, and following the Party.”
China’s “revitalization of rural culture” (乡村文化振兴) is not a cultural renaissance but a red revival.
The plan also called for poetry, drawing on the enduring cultural motif of the hometown (家乡). But politics intruded once again. Rural poetry readings would adhere to the theme, “Love China, Love Your Hometown” (爱中华爱家乡), for which participants would be encouraged to “pay tribute to the Motherland, eulogize the Era, and praise their hometowns.”
Sandwiched in the middle of this cultural call, “eulogize the Era” was an unmistakable reference to Xi Jinping’s notion of his leadership as a “New Era” (新时代), a period of political renaissance. The notion of the Chinese “motherland” (祖国), too, is a common stand-in for the Party-state, emphasizing the CCP’s role as the protector and guarantor of prosperity.
The government’s cultural work plan is full of such acts of replacement, ensuring that the notion of cultural renaissance is braided tightly together with the Party, its legitimacy, and its power.
But is it not possible, despite the obvious political overtones, that the net result of the push to build cultural infrastructure in the countryside could be more widespread cultural access? What about those nearly 600,000 rural bookrooms?
Reading Between the Party Lines
Before we picture villagers huddled up with copies of Lu Xun’s stories, or collections of Tang dynasty poetry, it is best to look more closely at how the local governments and the Party-state media describe the purpose of these rural bookrooms.
Returning to Xinjiang’s Ha’ermodun Village, reports from county authorities referred to the local bookroom in 2023 as a “filling station” where CCP members and cadres could go to recharge on the “spirit” of the CCP’s 20th National Congress. A course taught in the space by a lecturer was devoted to the same topic, noting the importance of informing villagers about the latest political directives from the central leadership.
While rural bookrooms like that in Ha’ermodun have often been advertised as a way of encouraging “reading for all” (全民阅读), political themes are always at the forefront. In many official news stories, they are referred to as “red bookrooms” (红色书屋), an unofficial moniker that makes their political function even clearer. They have also been called “classrooms for Party history” — teaching rural people how they owe thanks to the Party for their “hard-won happy lives,” and how prosperity will continue so long as they “continue walking with the Party.”
“These little red bookrooms,” as the official People’s Daily put it in a report on remote Qinghai province, “have taken up the important task of fostering closer ties between Party cadres and the masses.”
The politicization of cultural pastimes is likely a key reason for the low level of response from village residents. In June 2018, the China Youth Daily, a newspaper published by the Chinese Communist Youth League, warned that rural bookrooms ran the risk of becoming mere “image projects” (形象工程), a term often applied to empty or superficial endeavors meant to please government superiors — and in many cases, to skim public resources. Without real efforts to ensure quality, the paper said, it would remain “very difficult to attract villagers to visit [local bookrooms].”
Six years on, the results are scarcely more encouraging. As the push for the “revitalization of rural culture” has become a political necessity, with pressure from the top, the establishment of rural bookrooms has continued apace. In April last year, Zhejiang province boasted in a report on rural development that by the end of 2022 it had built more than 25,000 rural bookrooms, covering each and every one of the province’s administrative villages.
Is a revolution in literacy on the horizon? Hardly.
A Flood of Cultural Waste
In March this year, a new work directive from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the Party’s top anti-corruption body, named rural bookrooms among the initiatives being routinely abused as “new image projects” by local officials, wasting public resources “under the guise of working for the good of the people.”
As a new campaign against formalism and corruption took hold, the official Anhui Daily newspaper reported last month — with a fresh sense of consternation — that one local jurisdiction in the province had rapidly constructed more than 600 rural bookrooms to “keep pace with the trend,” with virtually no visits from villagers recorded by the end of the year. The report confessed that waste had been fueled by campaign-style governance as higher-ups pressured local officials to meet quotas for the sake of political point-making.
“Formalism has emerged at the grassroots, but it is not quite true to say that the responsibility lies entirely with the grassroots,” the paper said.
On the southern edge of the city of Baiyin in Gansu province, one of China’s most arid regions, a wetland park was created in 2013, with a grandiose cultural center. The loess plateau in Baiyin is very arid, with annual precipitation of as little as 4.3 inches. Image from Baidu Baike.
These problems extend beyond the country’s hundreds of thousands of rural bookrooms, according to the CCDI directive. It also cited the waste of public resources caused by the runaway construction in rural areas of “culture and sports centers for the masses” (群众文体馆), and the building of wetland parks at exorbitant costs in local areas suffering from water shortages.
Wetlands and man-made lakes, which have been rationalized over the past decade as potential tourist attractions (often a key priority in cultural development), are an example of just how broad, and how unbridled, the push for rural cultural development has become.
In 2021, environmental inspection teams in dryer areas of northern Henan province found numerous instances of local governments diverting scarce water resources from the Yellow River to create wetlands and lakes, justified as improving the natural landscape and creating a “beautiful countryside” (美丽乡村). Similar cases can be found across the country, including in far more arid Gansu, where in 2023 inspectors found that artificial lake and wetland projects in the fragile Heihe River basin had “exacerbated water resource tensions and increased the risk of ecological degradation.”
In a country where water has deep cultural significance, these projects are perhaps the most fitting metaphor for a cultural policy that has been pushed over the embankments by politics and power-brokering. As the top-down drive for cultural development has become an urgent political prerogative, a flood of wasteful and ineffectual cultural projects has been the natural result.
China’s leadership is responding the only way it seems to know how — with another top-down campaign to restrain what it unleashed. And as the push for the “revitalization of rural culture” persists on the one hand, and the campaign to curb its worst excesses advances on the other, the farthest thing from anyone’s mind will be real cultural empowerment.
