Every morning at 8 o’clock, as she steps through the television station’s doors, the previous day’s ratings for all programs across the entire network appear before Chen Jiaqi’s eyes. The numbers are displayed more prominently even than the time clock. 

“The gargantuan screen is impossible to avoid,” says Chen. “Apart from occasionally displaying banners welcoming visits from certain leaders and promoting some self-produced programs, its daily function is to broadcast the ratings rankings.” Each time she sees this screen, she says, pressure mixed with anxiety surges within her. “My heart rate also accelerates, a constant pounding.” 

Why is this? Because once ratings falter, the corresponding program production team could face budget cuts, and could have difficulty getting approval for projects down the line, be forced to accept salary downgrades — or even be fired.

Chen Jiaqi works at a well-known provincial broadcasting and television group in China. Since 2023, the company has undergone several rounds of layoffs. Those who managed to hang on to their jobs had their wages cut by at least one-third. The official explanation from television station leadership went: “Times have changed, and broadcasting and television units also have to reduce costs and increase efficiency.” 

Times have indeed changed. 

In China today, there are 389 broadcasting and television stations at the prefecture-level and above, according to early 2024 data from China’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA), . There are 2,099 county-level television stations, and 33 educational television stations. Each television station broadcasts across several channels, and some operate 10 or more. But in 2024, as rumors circulated on social platforms that “nearly 2,000 local television stations are on the verge of collapse” (有近2000家地方電視台行將倒閉), the veneer of viability seemed to slip. 

Regarding this figure, an individual working in a propaganda management department of a central government institution told Initium Media that while the above statement may to some extent be exaggerated, the fact that numerous local television stations face financial difficulties is undeniable. “Everyone is living like beggars, including China Central Television and leading provincial satellite TV stations,” they said. 

The source shared an internal document showing that several institutions, including several provincial television stations, have shut down channels under their jurisdiction to cope with the financial crisis. This includes music broadcasting, public channels, livelihood channels, and foreign language channels — and the result has been a wave of unemployment across the industry. 

Those fortunate enough to keep their jobs during this downturn are hardly less miserable. Li Ming was formerly a reporter at a county-level city television station. In 2022, responding to a reform plan from relevant departments, the television station completed a merger with party media and new media under the supervision of the municipal propaganda department. The result was a new type of media unit called an “integrated media center” (融媒體中心). Created across the country by the thousands, these are multimedia hubs that the leadership has pushed actively in the Xi Jinping era in a bid, it says, to modernize content production and maintain the party’s public opinion dominance. Currently, this integrated media center format covers almost all radio and television channels in China except for China Central Television (CCTV) and provincial satellite TV stations. 

As a reporter for an integrated media center, Li Ming must, in addition to filming, write articles and coordinate with local government propaganda priorities. At the same time, he must fulfill his formal job description, supplying materials to provincial satellite TV stations. In his view, however, all these tasks are supplementary to the true overriding priority: “My primary job seems more like that of a salesperson,” he says.  

The gradual “salesification” (銷售化) of reporters has become a trend for television station workers in China, including at major state-run outfits like China Central Television (CCTV). To alleviate financial pressure, many television stations assign business tasks to their staff, meaning that directors, editors, and reporters must actively solicit advertisements. This, in fact, has become the primary standard for assessment when it comes to key performance indicators, or KPIs. 

“This is why many local television stations occupy large amounts of airtime repeatedly broadcasting advertisements for liquor, fake medicines, and health supplements,” Li Ming says. “These are among their few remaining ways to make money.”

In stark contrast to the threadbare and constantly distressed situation of local television stations in China, CCTV, the country’s central-level broadcasting behemoth, appears more sophisticated and at ease as it leverages its inherent national influence to sell credibility. “At the end of the day, we have so many professional producers, editors, and reporters,” says one producer who has worked for the broadcasting for two decades told Initium Media. “We know how to package content so viewers can’t even tell it’s an advertisement.” 

However, unlike this producer who calmly accepted the identity transformation, when initially being “salesified,” Wang Mengkai chose eventually to resign from the city-level television station where he worked. “If a reporter can no longer do news but instead shamelessly sings praises under the banner of the ‘reporter’ or the ‘media professional’ while feeling self-gratified, this is something ultimately shameful,” he says. “I feel sorrowful for having once been part of this. I will forever feel a debt to my former readers and viewers.”

Aware of Wang Mengkai’s experiences and sense of self-blame, one media scholar who spoke to Initium Media took a consoling tone: “This is not his fault,” they said. “All of us, including him, are victims of the disappearance of news. The fundamental problem in the Chinese media has always been the lack of freedom; all other problems are byproducts of this absence of freedom.” 

CCTV Sells Political Endorsement

A source close to current CCTV Director Shen Haixiong (慎海雄), who is also a deputy director of the Central Propaganda Department, revealed to Initium Media that at the end of 2024, Shen announced at an internal meeting with operational and advertising executives that he was willing to attend drinking and dining functions to help attract advertisements and commercial sponsorships.  

The fundamental problem of Chinese media has always been the lack of freedom; all other problems are byproducts of this absence of freedom.

This information was confirmed by a senior program producer at CCTV, who said Shen’s personal engagement with advertising solicitation as station director becoming a hotly discussed topic in private among top management at the state-run broadcaster. 

Another source familiar with the situation [at CCTV] revealed that after production costs, the broadcaster “had almost nothing left” in 2024, the urgent situation that had become the catalyst for Shen’s direct personal involvement in revenue generation. 

The launch of the “CCTV Good Products” (央央好物) live e-commerce platform program on November 18, 2024, was a further sign of the direction things are heading. CCTV hosts are now involved in live-streaming sales to generate revenue for the network. Additionally, CCTV has created a variety show called “CCTV Good Products Happy Shopping Party” (央央好物嗨購派), for which 10-12 products are selected per episode. The show started broadcasting on CCTV’s Finance Channel earlier this year. 

Hosts participating in CCTV’s live-streaming sales lineup includes not just Benny Sa (撒貝寧) and Neghmet Rakhman (尼格買提·熱合曼), long-time CCTV anchors who have hosted the annual Spring Festival Gala, but also such “national faces” (國臉) — a term in China for prominent public figures such as the hosts of the nightly official news show “Xinwen Lianbo” (新闻联播) — such as Lu Jian (魯健), Yang Fan (楊帆), Zhu Guangquan (朱廣權), and also the internet celebrity host Wang Bingbing (王冰冰), who has been actively promoted by CCTV in recent years. 

In the eyes of outsiders, this is a commercial fall from grace for hosts at CCTV who represent an elevated national image and generally have high social status. A reporter from one of CCTV’s channels, however, tells Initium Media that the network has resorted to this practice out of necessity. 

“Reporters for some channels now receive a basic monthly salary of just 7,000 yuan, less than what’s needed to live normally in Beijing,” they said. The same position 10 years ago would have earned up to 20,000 yuan a month. 

When did this change occur? 

As the CCTV reporter explains, the changes had to do with broader political changes at the network during Xi Jinping’s second term in office. “When the director [Shen Haixiong] first arrived at CCTV [in 2018], actually, everyone’s salaries generally increased. Later, however, as everyone witnessed, CCTV became increasingly ‘red’ and increasingly ‘specialized’ [on political programming]. Almost all programs became ‘CCTV News-ified,’ and the network was thoroughly transformed into a propaganda institution.”

“Once the level of valuable information reported [by CCTV] was ‘reset to zero,’ naturally no one was willing to pay anymore to appear alongside official propaganda. Meanwhile, the financial support provided by the government was insufficient to maintain the operation of such a massive team.” 

Multiple CCTV employees interviewed by Initium Media all agreed that these changes are the primary reason CCTV has fallen into its current financial predicament — to the extent that almost all on-screen opportunities have become commodities with a price tag. 

According to a producer who has worked at CCTV for more than two decades, there are many tactics now used to conceal these acts of selling out. “For example, if an entrepreneur wants screen time to advertise their business, we’ll put them on air by packaging them with another title, like as the director of some association, which blurs the lines,” said the producer. “And if the entrepreneur happens to sit on a local political advisory committee, that’s even better.” This sort of implantation, they say, is the highest form of public relations and advertising. It achieves what is now called in Chinese “soundless saturation” (润物无声) — which can refer to clever ways to communicate CCP agendas, but in this case means weaving together political and commercial messaging. 

According to another CCTV employee who wished to remain anonymous, the quoted price for such acts of soft implantation is more than 4 million yuan. 

“Almost all programs became ‘CCTV News-ified,’ and the network was thoroughly transformed into a propaganda institution.”

CCTV reporter

For a company, what is the value of spending more than four million yuan to appear on a state-run network that has become more intensely political? The CCTV producer mentioned above says that the greatest value of appearing on CCTV for an entrepreneur is to receive political endorsement — and commercial benefits generally do not come into their calculations. “Spending a few million to purchase a certain degree of security is absolutely worth it,” the producer says, “especially in the current environment.” 

“Given this kind of situation, it’s easy to understand why program quality would suffer,” said the previously aforementioned CCTV reporter. 

Within CCTV, these developments are an open secret — readily seen but never openly discussed. Department leaders will still criticize the young teams underneath them, chastising them for the network’s continuously declining ratings and poor revenue, which they say are due to the lack of “internet appeal” in what they produce.  

What exactly is “internet appeal”? Even leaders at CCTV are unable to define it clearly. 

Trying Wages to Traffic 

Chen Jiaqi too is accustomed to being criticized for work “lacking internet appeal.” In most cases, however, the real cause of the network’s backwardness is its inherent [political] attributes and self-censorship.

A decade ago, as online video was in the midst of rapid expansion, the outlet where Chen worked created a streaming program platform that targeted audiences on iQiyi, the on-demand streaming service, and Tencent Video. While the program tried to differentiate its programs from traditional satellite TV productions, it was still linked to a state-owned provincial, broadcasting and television group. This meant, ultimately, that the internal logic was different from that at the privately owned iQiyi and Tencent.

Reached by Initium Media, staff at iQiyi and Tencent Video explained that their basic operational logic is to create programming on the basis of market research and market feedback data before introducing external investment funds. 

Such an internal process is impossible at Chen Jiaqi’s platform, owing to its official background and longstanding internal culture. “Our foundation as a state-run institution means that nearly all our leaders are very traditional to begin with,” she said. “Plus, two years ago the station began implementing a ‘responsibility-to-the-individual system’ (責任到人), meaning that any time an error occurred when broadcasting, the person directly responsible would face dismissal.”

“[in such a system] everyone becomes more conservative and even actively self-limits, closely following the guidance documents of the propaganda department,” she says, adding a rhetorical question: “Under such an environment, how could these people from the old era, completely constrained, find the energy needed to command new territory?”

Therefore, as ratings continue to decline and soliciting advertising has become difficult, many television stations have become addicted to traffic games — trying their utmost to drive up numbers. 

At Beijing Television, the state-run broadcaster under the capital city’s municipal-level CCP committee, the editor-in-chief used an internal employee chat group back in January to issue instructions that everyone promote the network’s Spring Festival Gala through their personal social media, according to one staff member interviewed by Initium Media. The instructions demanded that everyone make no fewer than 10 posts per day, and compliance was verified randomly by people within the station’s “communication center” (傳播中心), who reported back to the editor-in-chief. For some time, Beijing Television has been rumored to be going tottering on the edge of bankruptcy.  

“Ratings numbers don’t lie. This so-called flooding of social media circles didn’t help the gala ‘break through,’” the staff member said.  “This promotional effort was more like an internal self-celebration for the entire station.” 

At other local television stations, the single-minded pursuit of traffic is even more flagrant.

According to Li Ming, performance evaluation standards for reporters at his integrated media center include — beyond soliciting advertisements — publishing 21 original short videos each month on the media center’s video social platform, producing four news pieces for broadcast on the TV channel, and at least one news clip submitted and accepted by the provincial platform (省級平台).

These are hard requirements, and if reporters fail to complete their required work tasks, deductions are made from their wages — 20 yuan for each for the first four original short videos they fail to post, and 40 for each one beyond that. If none of the news clips submitted that month to the provincial platform are accepted for re-broadcasting, this can mean an instant deduction of 800 yuan.

“Many of our reporters receive a fixed salary of at most 3,500 yuan per month,” says Li Ming. “So [this can mean] some people have their wages reduced by half.” 

In some cases, avoiding deductions in wages pushes reporters to rack their brains and throw content together. For example, a short video about the opening of a new pancake shop in a residential area can be hyped as an original story about local food innovation simply because the shop uses a slightly novel ingredient. 

Of course, pancake videos cannot offset wage costs, so last year the leadership at the station modified the performance evaluation and wage standards. Now employees are paid only a basic monthly salary of 800 yuan, or about 110 dollars, with performance-based pay issued according to the view count they receive for their short videos. Posts with more than 5,000 views are considered effective work output, with a performance bonus of 200 yuan per unit (video post). Reporters who manage to secure advertisements for liquor, pharmaceuticals, and health products are eligible for additional commission.

In smaller cities, where resources are more scarce, such practices can lead to a situation Li Ming describes as “more wolves than meat” (狼多肉少). Not every reporter has the ability to connect with liquor merchants. To earn more money, therefore, reporters may resort to purchasing traffic online. “On RedBook, for example, five yuan can buy you 2,000 views for your videos,” Li Ming explains. “Some colleagues with a bit more guts may even cooperate longer-term with public relations companies, and be able to boost view counts on some videos into the tens of thousands.”

Where there are measures, there are countermeasures. Leaders at Li Ming’s network now require more than 100,000 views across all platforms as the basic standard for short videos. In Li Ming’s view, this is wishful thinking — or perhaps a disguised method for network leadership to justify dismissing reporters.

Videos at local integrated media centers are generally of two types. Either they are broadcasts of speeches by local party or government leaders, or they are stories of the pancake variety — dealing with local novelties. But here there is a disconnect with local audiences, who comprise mostly small-time vendors, service industry workers, and farmers. This audience, on the one hand, is uninterested in broadcast content that is dry and highly propagandistic. On the other hand, if their appetite is for novelty, they will tend to seek it through popular apps like Douyin and Kuaishou.

Reporters who manage to secure advertisements for liquor, pharmaceuticals, and health products are eligible for additional commission.

As Li Ming explains the result of this odd arrangement: “An extremely absurd scene emerges in which everyone buys traffic with their left hand, then collects wages with their right hand. It’s a bit like we’re using our own money to pay ourselves.”

On top of these bogus games to manufacture traffic, television stations, especially at the local level, have seen strict performance management and enforced attendance as a lifeline. Last year, the network where Chen Jiaqi works began carrying out attendance checks. All employees were required to clock in on time — regardless of whether or not theft had location shoots or need to travel for work. The net result of these overbearing measures was to further sap everyone’s creative enthusiasm. It became normal to clock in on time but then slack off (摸魚). 

In this sort of environment, says the young CCTV reporter mentioned above, as the propaganda tones of the network saturate all other functional attributes, everyone’s mindset undergoes a radical change. “When shopping around for topics these days, I find that what can be done, what meets CCTV’s [political] requirements, is very limited,” they say. “I automatically write off a large amount of information as sensitive content, and what can be done is just an endless recycling of past information. So I’m constantly feeling that I’m caught between information overload and information scarcity.” 

The culture and its restrictions are a recipe for institutionalized deception. “Under orders from the leadership to clock in and out on time, the most I can do is pretend to be creating news from old news — that is, pretend to be working.” 

Regarding subordinates “pretending to be busy,” the senior producer at CCTV said that everyone at the TV station, from top to bottom, actually understands what is needed for rating to improve. The recipe is simple. Stop restricting creative freedom. Use higher quality original scripts rather than an endless stream of serials about sent-down youth (知青), imperial palace dramas, and other red dramas set in the pre-reform era. Bring in foreign-produced animations. Produce programs that respond to the demands of common people. And even allow news programs that can criticize the government. 

“But none of these things are possible,” the producer says. “So just let them have their way.”  

Retreating In the Face the Era

In this environment, those who still have the heart to chase after program quality are suffocated by the network’s radical pursuit of “safety.” 

Wang Rui (王瑞) and Wang Mengkai (王夢凱), who resigned from the network, both graduated from a well-known professional journalism school in southern China. The school has always adhered to a dual-mentor system comprising both academic and professional mentors, with professional mentors generally being senior business leaders from two well-known provincial TV stations. In most cases, graduates from this program with related majors are picked up by these two provincial TV stations, and Wang Rui was fortunate enough to join one of them.

But Wang Rui quickly felt the gap between her ideals and reality. “The producer of the project team I joined after starting my job was actually my industry mentor during school. While we were studying, he never limited our ideas and always encouraged us to observe society more and be more innovative,” she recalls. “But when the actual work started, everything was different.” 

Wang Rui’s graduation project had been a short film documenting the “lying flat” (躺平) phenomenon among young people in China today. Her father invested more than 150,000 yuan, about 20,000 dollars, to support her creation, and her short film received unanimous praise from both her academic and her professional mentors. After joining the TV station, she hoped to continue filming a sister piece on this theme — telling the stories of college graduates who couldn’t find jobs.

Wang’s idea was rejected on the spot by the producer, however. The topic was not positive enough and didn’t align with the mainstream values advocated by the TV station — mainstream in this context meaning the political line of the leadership. 

How were these mainstream values to be reflected in broadcast content? This, Wang explains, should be about young people enthusiastically working, making friends, nurturing the next generation, buying property, buying cars, and energetically supporting the country’s development. “That is how the producer explained the standard for a film production to me at the time,” Wang Rui recalls.

Of course, such content is obviously disconnected from the reality facing most Chinese. “This is a major reason,” Wang Mengkai says, “why audiences are increasingly unwilling to watch TV. 

According to the “2024 China Smart TV Interactive New Trend Report,” a research report on television consumption by the Chinese consulting firm Analysys (易观分析), China’s TV turn-on rate has dropped from 70 percent to less than 30 percent since 2016.

As program content becomes increasingly detached from reality, it not only reduces viewership but also subjects TV station staff to considerable public criticism.

Chen Jiaqi has experienced this firsthand. Her parents, both veteran television professionals, commanded great respect among family and friends. “But in my generation, online references to our TV station are frequently paired with negative remarks like ‘bad habits,’ ‘two-faced,’ and ‘moral character’ [a sarcastic slur]. Sometimes people directly attack us with comments like ‘Are the XX station editors’ heads filled with garbage?'”

But Chen Jiaqi believes the root of the problem is that TV stations are now subject to too many constraints.

Take Hunan Satellite TV as an example. As the leader of provincial satellite TV in mainland China, Hunan Satellite TV has long occupied the top spot in national satellite TV ratings and was the first to try transforming from traditional TV to digital media, becoming one of the three streaming giants alongside Tencent Video and iQiyi.

At the same time, Hunan Satellite TV has been derided by some netizens as the “toilet station” (馬桶台) for producing a large number of “tacky and cringe-worthy” (又土又雷) idol dramas, asserting that Hunan Satellite TV staff have no taste or culture.

In fact, Hunan Satellite TV has also exclusively broadcast many quality TV dramas. For example, “Ming Dynasty 1566” (大明王朝1566) which scored 9.8 out of 10 on Douban, the popular Chinese social networking service and recommendation website, tells the story of how large-scale land annexation implemented by the state during the Jiajing Emperor’s reign in the Ming Dynasty caused millions of farmers to lose their land, while the autocratic rule of powerful ministers plunged the civil official system into a bloodbath. After its initial broadcast, the drama was immediately banned.

Another drama, “In the Name of the People” (人民的名義), triggered an unprecedented ratings frenzy that to this day remains unsurpassed. Regarding this drama’s successful “passing of review” (過審), a Hunan Satellite TV staff member who participated in the decision-making told Initium Media that this was the first TV drama in recent years in China with the theme of official government corruption. “The drama involves many official rules, and some villains even have a certain coloring of the tragic hero,” they say. “Some leaders were worried about causing displeasure up above. But after much consideration, we still broadcast it. Because audiences have always been eager to understand more details behind the anti-corruption campaign, even if this drama’s portrayal of officialdom is somewhat one-sided, it’s better than nothing. As for the potential price of broadcasting, we calculated that we could bear it.”

“TV stations gather China’s most outstanding media elites,” Chen Jiaqi says. “We know what is good and what is bad, and we also know what you, the audience, want — but we are being constrained more and more tightly.”

Chen Jiaqi’s classmate Zhang Xiang (張響) previously took part in the production of a music program. According to the program’s setup, the staff planned to invite singers from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China to sing their classic songs together. Part of the team’s motivation for planning this program was because they received a united front task from the propaganda department, meaning that they serve a role in fostering unity among the various Chinese-language communities. But setting aside the political mission, Zhang Xiang also had his own personal motivation — to use this program to help Chinese audiences regain an international perspective and tell them that Hong Kong and Taiwan people are not their enemies; that on the contrary, they share common cultural memories.

During implementation, however, the project encountered unexpected complications. “First, we needed to analyze the ‘quality’ of the Hong Kong and Taiwan artists we wanted to invite, to see if they were troublemakers for Hong Kong or suspected of supporting Taiwan independence,” Chen explains. “Then we had to thoroughly investigate all their past statements, including content they posted on social media platforms outside China — and even whether their social media contacts had any political issues. After all this was done, the leadership actually required us to guarantee that the Hong Kong and Taiwan artists we wanted to invite would absolutely never express any pro-Hong Kong independence or Taiwan independence views in the future.” 

“Who can guarantee things about the future?'” Zhang Xiang sighed. 

In the end, the program team abandoned Hong Kong and Taiwan artists and had mainland Chinese singers cover the Hong Kong and Taiwan songs needed for the program.

Zhang Xiang had quite a few misgivings about this: “The program was turned into an awkward hybrid,” he says, “so of course the ratings wouldn’t be good.”

But in the current environment where ratings determine everything, the team’s project leader devised alternative solutions—diverting part of the production budget to purchase trending topics on Sina Weibo for the program, and promptly submitting screenshots of these trending topics to higher-level leadership.

“So, everyone is just deceiving themselves and others,” Zhang Xiang says.

A Destined End

Despite the continuous decline in ratings and TV station revenue, most interviewees said they “would not leave.”

Chen Jiaqi became an officially hired employee at her station a few years ago through an examination process. Compared to other colleagues who signed labor contracts, she has public institution status (编制), enjoyed by just one-tenth of all employees. Under the protection of this status, no matter the economic situation of her platform, she cannot be dismissed. 

She once thought this status was constraining, but due to pressure from her parents, she didn’t dare relinquish it so easily. And later she just made peace with it. “After all, it became clear to me that colleagues who left aren’t doing any better than when they were at the station,” she says. 

The colleague she had in mind had been the director of a hit television program a few years back, but felt that restrictions at the station would only worsen. So they resigned and joined a streaming platform. But the completely different creative environment and rules, combined with the market cooling caused by the economic downturn in recent years, led platforms including iQiyi and Tencent Video to cut a large number of projects. In the end, Chen’s former colleague was forced to abandon what they had once thought would be a great opportunity to showcase their talents.

This cautionary tale reinforced Chen Jiaqi’s determination to remain at the station. Li Ming similarly decided to hold on to his position. Beyond wages, he explained, the additional benefits provided by the media center’s reputation are unimaginable to those on the outside.

“Having the identity of a media center reporter is very effective in small places,” he explains. “People will unconsciously respect you. In our small city, identity determines resources. So even if salaries haven’t been paid for several months, I haven’t seen any colleagues voluntarily leave.” 

Colleagues mostly have their own ways of making money. For example, Li Ming, while being on close terms with liquor merchants, also established a wedding planning company with friends. Leveraging his identity as a TV station reporter, his company is extremely competitive in the local wedding planning industry. “I charge 2,000 yuan to host a wedding. In addition, our wedding company also provides wedding car rentals. For one wedding, I personally can earn at least 3,000 yuan, so the TV station’s salary doesn’t mean much to me,” says Li.

His direct supervisor at the TV station has openly established an advertising company. As Li Ming explains: “Those unscrupulous merchants who want to place fake drug advertisements on TV will directly give the business to my supervisor’s company. My supervisor can earn probably hundreds of thousands a year. Looking at it this way, even if the TV station’s ratings are zero, it doesn’t have much impact on us.”

Like Li Ming, the CCTV reporter and director interviewed by Initium Media also said they have no plans to leave the TV station anytime soon. They joined the station over a decade ago when CCTV still had its celebrated in-depth program “News Probe” (新聞調查) — modeled after the American “60 Minutes.” They had benefited from CCTV’s prosperity at that time, and had converted these gains into real estate before Beijing property prices soared. “So we don’t have too many financial concerns. If things really don’t work out, we can use the connections accumulated at CCTV to do some freelance work. We definitely won’t starve,” the director says.

The CCTV director refused to disclose his side business, but gave examples of those operated by others. “The simplest is to establish PR companies and advertising companies, and then to accept CCTV’s business through these companies, so the money naturally enters one’s own pockets,” he explains. 

Rui Chenggang, a former well-known host of one of CCTV’s most powerful channels, the financial channel CCTV-2, had partnered with an executive from Edelman, the world’s top-ranked international PR company in China at the time, to establish a PR company. This was before Rui was arrested and imprisoned for his involvement in corruption cases related to the financial channel’s deputy director and some senior officials. This sort of situation, the director said, is extremely common at CCTV.

Aside from establishing their own companies, hosts also accept commercial hosting activities for large enterprises like Alibaba, Tencent Group, and China Merchants Bank. It is reported that, with the backing of their identities as CCTV hosts, these television celebrities can command fees of between 20,000 to 40,000 yuan per hour, or 2,500-5,000 dollars. 

Ordinary reporters and directors at CCTV, those who did not enjoy the benefits of the network’s heyday, have found their own ways of making a living. The head of a media center at a well-known state-owned enterprise is particularly frustrated by one such practice. “Our company has developed five-star resort hotels in many tourist cities and scenic spots. CCTV reporters often contact us during holidays like May Day and National Day Golden Week saying they want to bring their families for vacation and ask our enterprise to provide rooms for them in our five-star hotels. These reporters sometimes actually stay with their families, but sometimes resell the rooms at high prices. The hotel expenses for a holiday are about 20,000 yuan,” he says.

A PR head of another well-known financial institution also revealed a similar experience of being squeezed by CCTV employees selling on their state media privilege: “It’s hard for outsiders to imagine that when we invite CCTV to interview our company’s executives, CCTV reporters will sometimes storm off with angry expressions because we didn’t provide each of them with a few thousand yuan in ‘channel fees’ in advance, leaving our scheduled interviewees stranded.”

To remedy the situation, this PR head transferred 4,000 yuan, about 550 dollars, to each CCTV reporter via WeChat as “compensation for hardship” (辛苦費). 

“Enterprises simply don’t dare to offend CCTV reporters,” the abovementioned head of the media center says. “Once we make them unhappy and they write negative reports about a company, we in our role as PR personnel will face severe consequences, and the company itself will find it difficult to bear the political stigma.”

“This is one of the main reasons why some TV professionals remain loyal to their television stations,” says the young CCTV reporter.

In the long run, where will journalism in China go? Wang Mengkai is very concerned.

His closest university classmate, a reporter who continues to “endure” employment at the TV station due to financial pressures, offers him this consolation. Times are different now, he says, and the medium of communication has already changed. Nowadays, platforms like Kuaishou and Douyin are the main channels for dissemination of information, and ordinary people can express their own voices this way. 

The aforementioned source working in the propaganda office of a central institution, shares this rosy view. In internal discussions in the past, he has advocated for maintaining a strong connection between video platform traffic and monetary rewards in order to preserve the lifeline for short video platform users. “If there is no financial incentive, many people might not create Douyin and Kuaishou videos,” he says, “and once the platform loses traffic, the voices of ordinary people at the grassroots level will go silent. They will become groups completely invisible to the outside world.” 

As for the fate of television in China and its practitioners, his view is that the core function of television is to serve the public. Once it deviates from this founding idea, it essentially becomes self-destructive. He says that “the current remedies,” in the long run, are “all like arrows at the end of their flight.” 

“Under the current atmosphere of high-pressure control and political prioritization, television will gradually die out,” he adds. “This is an inevitable end.”

(At the interviewees’ request, Chen Jiaqi, Wang Mengkai, Li Ming, Zhang Xiang, and Wang Rui are pseudonyms. The original Chinese version of this report can be found at Initium Media.)