Author: David Bandurski

Now Executive Director of the China Media Project, leading the project’s research and partnerships, David originally joined the project in Hong Kong in 2004. He is the author of Dragons in Diamond Village (Penguin), a book of reportage about urbanization and social activism in China, and co-editor of Investigative Journalism in China (HKU Press).

Angels and Demons

Written by David Bandurski on . Posted in Interviews.

In the spring of 2013, just months after Xi Jinping came to power, reports emerged that the Chinese Communist Party had released a high-level document warning against “infiltration” of the country by dangerous ideas from the outside. When the document was published in full later that year by the US-based Mingjing Magazine, it detailed a range of perceived ideological threats, including the notion of civil society. Document 9, as the text came to be known, portrayed civil society as a threat to CCP rule: “Advocates of civil society want to squeeze the Party out of the leadership of the masses at the local level,” it said ominously, “even setting the Party against the masses, to the point that their advocacy is becoming a serious form of political opposition.”

Document 9 marked a more dramatic expression of the anxieties of China’s leadership toward global civil society. But it was also a reflection of tensions that had been at the heart of China’s relationship with civil society since its development in China in the early post-Mao era. To discuss the history of these tensions, and their relevance today, CMP sat down with Anthony Spires, an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies, whose research on China has encompassed civil society, political sociology, organizational development, and philanthropy. Released in April this year, Spires’ most recent work, Global Civil Society and China, looks at the country’s conflicted relationship with global civil society.  

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David Bandurski: In your monograph, you write about China’s unstable relationship with the idea of “civil society” — how it totters between the hope of enlightenment and the threat of national security. Maybe you could start by bringing us up to speed on the history of civil society development in China, and how it has grappled with this relationship.

Anthony Spires: There’s a long history of community association in dynastic times, of course, but the most recent introduction of “civil society” started in the 1980s, when there was much anticipation – and expectation in and outside China – that Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms would also lead to political reform. The violent crackdown on the protests of 1989, though, put an end to speculation about political reform, especially the hope that the government might tolerate community-based groups outside its control.

The protests also led to the birth of what we now call government-organized nongovernmental organizations or GONGOs. The basic idea there is that with the 1989 protests the government suddenly became aware of deep problems within a rapidly changing society, so it mobilized party members and state agencies to ‘go into’ society, find out what the problems were, then report back with policy suggestions. GONGOs were originally meant to be a kind of ‘transmission belt’, figuring out what problems people were encountering in society, reporting up to policymakers, then sending new policies back down into society to fix the problems. So, GONGOs are one part of the story of associational life in China.

But then, with the UN Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995, the government was required to also allow an international NGO Forum to be held at the same time. That forum is widely credited with introducing the idea of independent, bottom-up civil society organizations into post-Mao China. Although it was focused on women – including women’s rights, education for girls, and other related issues – the forum also legitimated community-based activity on a whole range of issues, from the environment to ethnic minority concerns to labor rights.

Bandurski: That time, in the late 1990s, was also when a new era of commercialized media took off in China, not to mention the birth of the Chinese internet. Did that help to spread this idea even further?

It took a few years for the idea of an NGO to spread beyond Beijing and a couple of other major cities, but the rise of the internet in the early 2000’s helped usher in a wave of grassroots NGOs in the Hu-Wen era. So, by the time I started researching these issues in 2004, there were a range of groups operating on all kinds of ‘new’ social issues, everything from HIV to autism and LGBTQ+ rights, and rural educational inequality to environmental protection. Even groups supporting sex workers – although sex work was and remains illegal in China – emerged during this period.

The rise of the internet in the early 2000’s helped usher in a wave of grassroots NGOs.

All of this happened, to be sure, alongside an influx of global civil society actors. The Women’s Conference in 1995 was a massive, attention-getting event, but prior to that, in the 1980s, the PRC government itself had begun inviting INGOs, international NGOs, to come in. Groups like the Ford Foundation, Oxfam, and a lot of others began advising and eventually running programs on everything from disaster relief to – in the case of Ford – the re-establishment of sociology as an academic discipline at universities.

Bandurski: That’s an interesting case of the benefits of global civil society engagement. What other issues were a focus then? We often hear about the environment as a can-go issue.

Spires: Yes, a number of groups went into Yunnan, in the southwest, to work on a range of environmental protection issues, which eventually grew to include work with ethnic minority groups, women’s economic empowerment, education, drug addiction treatment facilities, and other issues.

With assistance from the Panyu Workers Center, a civil society organizations, workers from Guangdong’s Liansheng Moulding Factory successfully won about five million yuan in compensation in 2013. SOURCE: China Labour Bulletin.

Guangdong, in particular, became a hotspot for labor rights activism, in no small part due to direct influences from NGOs based across the border in Hong Kong.

Although the PRC state had itself invited INGOs and actively lobbied to host the UN Women’s Conference, by around 2005 at least parts of the party had become worried that the ‘Color Revolutions’ of Europe and Central Asia might spread to its own territories. Claims that domestic and international NGOs were working as agents of foreign governments, supported by foreign money, began circulating in elite circles and, eventually, within academia and the official press.

Bandurski: In your book you use this concept, or contrast, of angels and demons.

That’s right. It was in this context that Zhao Liqing, a professor at the Central Party School, penned a short analysis asking whether INGOs – and, by extension, global civil society – were ‘angels’ helping China or ‘demons’ out to bring down the CCP and overthrow the state.

Zhao summarized the arguments of the conservative critics of INGOs, but he also noted the positive contributions they had made to China, including funding, new ideas, and new methods for addressing social problems. On balance, he concluded, INGOs were a net positive, although the country still needed to be on guard against potential negative impacts.

Bandurski: National security thinking seems always to be in the foreground in China in these days. Having observed Chinese civil society over the past couple of decades, how do you think this security mindset has impacted groups and activities on the ground?

Spires: National security concerns have grown since Zhao Liqing published his article in 2006, and they remain a constant concern not just for the state but also for Chinese civil society groups. NGOs, activists, and scholar-activists (of which there are a few at Chinese universities) have learned they need to be aware of the political wrangling over the desirability of international influences. Leading up to the 2014 Occupy Central and Umbrella Movement protests in Hong Kong, many Chinese NGOs were visited by authorities coming to check their financial records, demanding they disclose any and all contact with overseas NGOs, including those from Hong Kong.

Just a couple of years later, with the development of the INGO Law in 2016, another wide-ranging discussion of foreign influences took place within domestic NGOs, as well as within academic institutions. There were many academics at universities and at government think tanks who had been beneficiaries of foreign foundation monies, of course, taking overseas trips or being sponsored for short exchanges or periods of study at overseas universities. In short, the overall level of attention, and suspicion of any overseas connections, has just grown in the past 10 years.

With the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, of course, Hong Kong connections were thrust into the limelight again, so that nowadays many groups have to be much more circumspect and cautious when considering working with foreign NGOs, even those with approved operations and offices in the Chinese mainland.

Bandurski: Are there other factors, aside from national security, that have shaped civil society development in China?

Spires: I think national security is a common thread running through the last 20 years of civil society development, for sure. But another big change is the rise of domestic philanthropy. As Chinese entrepreneurs have gotten richer – some very, very rich – there’s been a push from the government to have them contribute to government-approved causes like education. And, of course, many entrepreneurs are also keen to ‘give back’ to society, working on government priority issues like education but also health care, the environment, and other issues they personally care about.

The overall level of attention, and suspicion of any overseas connections, has just grown in the past 10 years.

And the rise of social media – where people can put out calls for help – and offer help to others – has also changed the civil society scene quite dramatically. These are developments that can largely be seen as a result of economic growth, but I’d say their impacts on civil society are things we’re only just beginning to make sense of. Overall, it means there’s more money going towards ‘charitable causes’, and while the government would like to direct those funds where it wants them, it also opens up space to talk about the things grassroots actors are doing and the values and goals that underpin their efforts. That, in turn, means there’s increased awareness of civil society, again expanding the realm of what’s possible and the conversations people can have about what different groups in society need.

Bandurski: That growing awareness is a good segue into the question of shared values. A key point you make in your exploration of rhetoric and reality is that the idea of “universal values,” including broader notions of human rights and democracy, has gained currency. Many observers of China will have a knee-jerk response to this. How is this possible, they might say, when we know that even a high-level CCP document right at the start of Xi’s first term more than a decade ago explicitly rejected the idea of civil society, freedom of speech, constitutionalism and so on. . . My question is getting long. But could you tease out this question of rhetoric and reality? How is the Party leadership deploying its own rhetoric, how is civil society responding, and where do you see this gain in currency you write about?

Spires: Many groups that may appear as ‘non-governmental’ to people outside China are in reality PRC government creations. I wouldn’t see this as a trend, though, but rather as long-standing standard operating practice. In the book I recall meeting a civil servant in Guangdong almost twenty years ago who had multiple cards – or ‘hats’, as he called them. He normally wore his government hat in his day-to-day life, but when heading overseas he and his colleagues put on their GONGO hats so that they could get permission to leave the country more easily – there are lots of restrictions on government officials traveling overseas (even more nowadays, actually). But, as he said, wearing that GONGO hat also makes it easier to talk with foreigners.

Granted, what ‘easier’ means is up for debate, but clearly in part it means that Chinese officials have worked out that NGOs are here to stay, globally, and that GONGOs offer access to doing things overseas that may not be so easy in their PRC government official role. This is a fair assessment, I’d say. Whether foreigners should be surprised or especially concerned, however, is probably up to the context and what’s at stake morally or practically. But, inside China itself, the context is very clear – no organization with ‘China’ in its official name is going to be anything but state-approved and state-controlled.

That doesn’t mean GONGO representatives have no room to take their own initiative at times, but it does mean that, ultimately, they will be held accountable by the party-state. So, in the realm of human rights, for example, although Chinese GONGOs can utilize the language of international human rights when testifying at UN hearings, they must be careful to do so in ways that do not contradict the stated goals or policies of Beijing.

Bandurski: Given the situation in China today, what role do you think there still is for global civil society in China?

Spires: Global civil society continues to have an interest in China. It’s scaled down from before, to be sure, as there’s a sense – both inside and outside the country – that China doesn’t need so much foreign ‘charitable’ aid anymore. But the changed political climate has also meant that activities deemed potentially threatening to the state – like rights-based advocacy – are much less likely to feature centrally in the work that INGOs can do there.

Some groups have just left altogether, but the ones that have stayed have had to adapt to what the state prefers. In some ways, the situation of INGOs isn’t so different from that of China’s home-grown grassroots groups. In the early 1990s and ‘00s, there was a lot more free-wheeling dynamism in civil society activities, more experimentation, and even pushing right up against political boundaries. But today, if you’re an INGO that wants to be on the ground and make a difference on whatever issue you care about the most, you have to play by the government’s rules.

Olá Panda!

Written by David Bandurski on . Posted in Going Global.

China’s foreign diplomacy often seems to rest on the ironclad premise that the world can never have enough of the country’s soft and cuddly pandas. For Sichuan, which the Giant Panda calls home, the fuzzy creature is at the heart of its latest media diplomacy push — in Portuguese.

The Sichuan International Communication Center (四川国际传播中心), or SICC, an office directly under the provincial propaganda office of Sichuan, announced the launch yesterday of a branch center in São Paulo in cooperation with the popular mobile short video sharing app Kuaishou (快手). The center’s signature outreach brand will be called “PandaNotícias.”

“Hey everyone in Brazil,” read the message from the center, “a ‘panda’ has arrived in São Paulo!” According to a promotional poster for PandaNotícias and the new SICC branch, the center’s nickname will be: “Brazil Panda Living Room” (巴西熊猫客厅). “Olá Mundo!” it said — “Hello, World!”

According to a report from Sichuan Online, the province’s government portal site, the new center aims to “create a bridgehead to boost humanistic exchanges and economic and trade cooperation between Sichuan and Brazil.” The report noted that this year marks the 50th anniversary of establishing diplomatic relations between China and Brazil and that Brazil recently opened its third diplomatic mission in China — the Consulate General of Brazil in Chengdu.

The Sichuan International Communication Center (SICC), which was included in the province’s 14th Five-Year Development Plan in February 2021, is part of a nationwide push by China’s CCP leadership since around 2018-2019 to intensify and diversify the work of external propaganda by drawing on the resources of provincial media groups.

For more on ICCs, refer to our previous posts on the trend:

Top Propaganda Official Faces Investigation

Written by David Bandurski on . Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

In just the second case since late 2022 of a graft probe against a standing official at the provincial level, Zhang Jianchun (张建春), a deputy minister at the CCP’s powerful Central Propaganda Department, was accused on Friday of “severe violations of discipline and law” — a signal that a corruption investigation is underway.

The decision was announced through the website of China’s top anti-corruption body, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, but no details of the alleged crimes were given. The news was reported widely across Chinese-language outlets overseas, including Taiwan’s United Daily News and RFI.

Zhang, 59, had a lengthy career in the CCP’s Organization Department, the body that essentially serves as the human resources heart of the Party, arranging for official appointments and personnel assignments. In November 2018, he was briefly promoted to deputy minister in the department, before being transferred in 2020 to the Central Propaganda Department (CPD). 

According to official sources, a meeting was held in the Central Propaganda Department on Friday evening, during which Minister of Propaganda Li Shulei (李書磊) conveyed the seriousness of the allegations against Zhang. A brief release on the gathering stated only that “comrades at the meeting unanimously expressed their support for the decision of the CCP Central Committee to conduct the disciplinary examination and supervisory investigation into the suspected serious disciplinary violations of Zhang Jianchun.”

Since Xi Jinping came to power in late 2012, two senior propaganda officials have faced investigation for corruption. At left, Liu Jianchun; at right, Lu Wei, former head of the Cyberspace Administration of China.

As a deputy minister responsible largely for the news and publishing sector, Zhang appeared publicly in a largely ceremonial capacity. In the wake of the 2022 CCP congress he presided over a gathering of publishing houses to stress the importance of releasing published teaching materials about Xi Jinping’s political report. The month before he had officiated at a gathering of Party-run newspaper publishers, where he blandly emphasized the importance of adhering to the leadership of “comrade Xi Jinping as the core.” 

Prior to the news of his downfall, Zhang Jianchun had not made a public appearance in two months. On April 17, he met with the visiting director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Kathi Vidal. His last appearance was on April 23, when he attended a youth reading forum.

Zhang is just the second provincial-ranked, or shengbuji (省部级), official to “fall off his horse” (落马) — list being the colorful phrase in Chinese for being sacked for corruption — since the 20th National Congress of the CCP in October 2022. He is the first senior official from within China’s propaganda system to fall from grace since the arrest in 2017 of Lu Wei (鲁炜), China’s colorful first czar of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). Like Zhang a deputy minister in the CPD, Lu was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2019. 

More Local Centers for Global Propaganda

Written by David Bandurski on . Posted in Going Global.

On June 7, the municipality of Tianjin became the latest provincial-level jurisdiction in China to launch a central office for disseminating foreign propaganda. According to coverage in Tianjin’s flagship CCP-run newspaper, the Tianjin Daily, the center will focus on television, radio and multimedia products for foreign distribution, as well as “major international events,” all to “present a true, multidimensional, and lively image of Tianjin.” 

The formation of the Tianjin ICC follows closely on the heels of the set up on May 31 of Zhejiang International Communication Center (浙江国际传播中心), or ZICC. A release from provincial media in Zhejiang called ZICC “an all-in-one communication platform.” The center, which consolidates state media resources at the provincial-level, comprises websites, dedicated news channels, and an “overseas social media platform account matrix” with a total follower base of over 8 million.

With the addition of the Tianjin and Zhejiang centers, the number of provincial-level ICCs in China now stands at 23.

China’s provincial and city-level international communication centers, or ICCs, are spearheading efforts promoted by the leadership since 2018, and accelerating over the past two years, to “innovate” foreign-directed propaganda under a new province-focused strategy. In June 2023, provincial and city-level ICCs in China created a mutual association to better coordinate work nationwide. The process of integrating the ICCs both horizontally and vertically, including with central state media, has begun to emerge as a core strategy in the CCP’s remaking of its overall propaganda matrix.

Goldfish Memories

Written by David Bandurski on . Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

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.”

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[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 Mouthpieces Go Quiet

Written by David Bandurski on . Posted in China Newspeak.

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.

Red Renaissance

Written by David Bandurski on . Posted in Tracking Control.

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.

A public poetry event on the “Love China, Love Your Hometown” theme is held in Anhui province’s Almond Village (杏花村) on March 31, 2024.

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.

Shades of Yellow

Written by David Bandurski on . Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

Another day, another campaign. On Tuesday, China’s top internet control body announced that it was launching a two-month crackdown on “self-media” (自媒体), referring to social media accounts that are generally operated by members of the public. The action focuses on five categories of self-media content and calls on social media platforms to strengthen controls across the board.

At the top of the list of violations released by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is “self-directed fakery” (自导自演式造假), an unmistakable reference to an online scandal that unfolded earlier this month when an internet influencer was found to have fabricated a video claiming to have located the homework book of a Chinese student that had been lost on winter vacation in Paris. The emotional story had gone viral across the country before its exposure, and the authorities followed by banning the influencer’s account, which they said had “damaged the online ecosystem and wasted public resources.”

Next on the CAC’s list of no-noes is the “no-holds-barred hyping of social hot points” (不择手段蹭炒社会热点), which points broadly to the use of spurious techniques such as fictionalizing events or spreading conspiracy theories to take advantage of trending topics. The CAC reiterates the point that such online stories result in the “waste of public resources” (浪费公共资源).

The hyping of hot points is followed on the CAC list by the “use of generalizations to set the topic” (以偏概全设置话题). This includes the use of controversial or negative terms to create attention-grabbing headlines, and exaggerating negative narratives or making “extreme statements” (偏激言论), which the CAC says is damaging to social consensus.

The latest CAC campaign also targets “new yellow journalism,” but state medai are among the worst culprits. Above, a 2022 story published as part of the “GT Investigates” series at the state-run Global Times sensationalizes the horrors of America’s response to Covid.

Continuing its list of ambiguous no-noes, the CAC next singles out the “generating of personas that go against public order and morals” (违背公序良俗制造人设). Thrown into this grab bag of offenses is the soliciting of public sympathies — as well as charitable donations — by exaggerating one’s miserable situation. At the other end of the spectrum, it also includes accounts that peddle images of extravagant wealth as a means of attracting fans.

Finally, the CAC says its two-month “clear and bright” (清朗) campaign will target the “indiscriminate dissemination of ‘new yellow journalism’” (滥发”新黄色新闻”). A distant reference to the strain of 19th-century American journalism that prioritized sensationalism over factual reporting, this category of violation points to the distribution of content making sensational claims of investigative revelation, with extreme headlines and images meant to draw attention.

The Sensational State

The problem of “new yellow journalism” in Chinese cyberspace, which thrives on and profits from sensationalism, is a serious problem that is not limited to self-media. And yet, the issue has received only a smattering of attention. In many cases, state media are among the worst violators, exaggerating social and political ills in the United States and the West to support the idea of the superiority of China’s system. Examples include “GT Investigates,” a series from the Global Times, a spin-off of the CCP’s flagship People’s Daily, that regularly depicts the US and Western media as false and hypocritical; and “Media Unlocked” (起底), a brand under the state-run China Daily that frequently resorts to sensational attacks on the West.

Earlier this month, CMP ran a feature story in cooperation with Initium Media that looked at the racist phenomenon of “zero-dollar shopping” (零元购) videos that depict Black Americans as criminals, and America as a lawless hellscape. Such videos have been viral on China’s internet for years, and state media have joined and encouraged the trend.

A 2022 report from the digital division of the state-run China Daily exaggerates chaos in the US under the theme of “Zero-dollar shopping.” Even the headlines are yellow.

The “clear and bright” campaigns of the CAC are a regular feature of internet control in China. They are also a symptom of China’s movement-style governance under the Chinese Communist Party, which prioritizes the top-down steamrolling through of agendas from superordinate powers — as opposed to the considered and rational implementation of rules and laws.

The CAC’s last “clear and bright” campaign was announced in December last year, and targeted three broad types of content, including “fake information” (虚假信息), “misconduct” (不当行为), and “incorrect concepts” (错误观念). The campaign was at points dizzying vague in its definition of problem content. It militated not only against “soft pornography” (软色情), but also against content that was “pallid yellow” (泛黄), referring to some unknown shade of a color that in China is synonymous with indecency.

Fingertip Formalism

Written by David Bandurski on . Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

Last month, as Xi Jinping addressed a group of party cadres in the sunshine outside a remote village service center in Hunan province, stressing the importance of poverty alleviation work, one village official rejoiced that they now had fewer government group chats to monitor on the social media platform WeChat — which meant, at long last, that they had time to go out into the real world and meet with struggling residents.

For a ruling party that has actively pushed mobile technology as an efficient solution, the local cadre’s remarks point to an unexpected peril for local governance: mobile phones can be a total time suck.

The inefficiencies that have come with technologies meant to streamline governance are sufficiently serious that they have now become a top priority for the leadership, with the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) issuing a related policy back in December, and top-billing in today’s official People’s Daily newspaper, right under the masthead, for the problem of “fingertip formalism” (指尖上的形式主义).

Wiring the Grassroots

For years in China, “government affairs digitalization” (政务数字化) has been a calling card for local governments across the country, encouraged from the highest levels with the conviction that it can build in greater efficiencies and put solutions right at the fingertips of citizens and government officials alike, lowering the cost of addressing the sorts of problems — like poverty — that can create knock-on pressures for local governance.

The digital transformation of local, regional and national governance, a priority since at least 2019 — responding in part to global trends and the UN’s 2018 e-government survey — has essentially meant the use of the internet, big data, cloud solutions, and artificial intelligence (AI) to allow greater openness and responsiveness, and to enable more efficient collaboration across government departments and administrative lines. In its 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025), drafted in October 2020, China singled out the strengthening of basic digital infrastructure to improve government and public services, social management, and economic governance.

Tencent introduces its “digital countryside” solutions on WeChat at the Big Data Expo 2021.

Major Chinese tech companies have jumped onto the trend, recognizing the immense profit potential of urban and rural areas underserved by technology. Huawei’s “One Stop for Government Affairs” (政务一网通), advertised on its Huawei Cloud platform, says it is focused on “assisting government affairs and the digital transformation of cities.”

Shenzhen-based Tencent offers “Enterprise WeChat” (企业微信), a specialized service interoperable with Tencent’s all-encompassing social media ecosystem that offers extras like the “smart countryside” (智慧乡村) and “smart urban grassroots governance” (智慧城市基层治理) services — and which won an innovation award in 2021.

At China’s Big Data Expo in May 2021, Tencent actively marketed its “Enterprise WeChat” and its built-in “digital countryside” (数字乡村) option as laying down a “fast lane” for escaping poverty and striving for rural wealth. Tencent has continued to market its village-level solutions under the brand “Cun Wei” (村微), a clever Chinese mash-up of the words for “village committee” (村委) and WeChat. The online entry portal offers mobile office functions that promise to “enhance the efficiency of the grassroots work of village cadres.”

But by all accounts, grassroots village cadres across China have been swamped by efficiency.

Death By Notification

By the time the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, otherwise known as the CAC, issued Certain Opinions on Preventing and Combating ‘Fingertip Formalism’ (关於防治“指尖上的形式主义”的若干意见) in December last year, it was already clear to local officials that efficient solutions were demanding too much of their time.

“With the rapid development of e-government, much daily work is done at our fingertips rather than on paper,” one writer remarked in a commentary for a lesser-known CCP-run journal shortly after the opinion came out. “But modern governance technology that should enhance work efficiency has become an ‘added burden’ on grassroots cadres, depleting administrative resources and eroding the efficiency of grassroots work.”

A graphic special from the CAC explaining its December 2024 policy to combat “fingertip formalism.”

Examples of time-suck included government affairs apps that worked at cross purposes (变味走样的政务APP), the over-involvement of different departments through the sin of convenience (各个部门的系统录入), repetition of online and offline procedures (网上网下重复走程序), the uploading of mobile photos to log attendance or task completion (截图上报) — and of course, work-related WeChat groups that dinged incessantly with notifications (响个不停的微信群).

For nearly a century, the Chinese Communist Party, even though it has emphasized the imperative of rule-abiding, has fought and fulminated against the scourge of what it calls “formalism” (形式主义). This is the enduring concern — raised by Mao Zedong as early as the 1930s — that real action toward a specific government function or policy objective is replaced with the almost ritualistic practice of formalities for the sake of formalities. Officials may ceaselessly attend ostensibly work-related banquet dinners, dart from this to that political meeting, or regurgitate the official-speak of superiors.

The government is busy, yet nothing gets done.

“Fingertip formalism” is the 21st-century manifestation, or augmentation, of this scourge on real productivity and public service. In many cases, it is a direct result of the drive to use technology to work around formalism in its classic sense — to design the killer algorithm that might send formalism to its grave.

The government is busy, yet nothing gets done.

Not mentioned in any of the official coverage of “fingertip formalism,” for example, is the Xi Jinping study app rolled out by the Central Propaganda Department in 2019 to re-enforce obedience through the regular practice of ideology. The app was seen early on as a tool to fight back against formalism, but much to the chagrin of its creators (and here), its use rapidly became an exercise in formalism, with users (or their children) working out cheats by which they could earn the requisite amount of points without allowing the app to consume them.

Governing the Efficiency Tools

In a strong indication of the burden such technologies have placed on officials at the local level, the CAC announcement of December last year said, “‘fingertip formalism’ is a mutation and variation of formalism in the context of digitalization, and is one of the main manifestations of the increased burden on the grassroots.”

Among the stipulations laid out in the policy was the need to strengthen integrated planning (加强统一规划) of government apps, chats, and other tools — which was tantamount to an admission that efficiency technologies were pushed from the start without sufficient government guidance. In fact, such sloppy policy rollouts are frightfully common under China’s political system, which often works by the mechanism of “campaign-style governance” (运动式治理), with measures urged through slogans from on high that are simply repeated, and variously and inconsistently enacted.

The CAC policy called for greater oversight of apps and other technology for governance moving forward and for the wholesale elimination of apps with low utility or overlapping functionality. It also prevented the forced use of government apps, as well as the use of apps or other systems with ranking functions.

The next few months will almost certainly bring a spate of closures and integration among government service apps. A report on “fingertip formalism” running prominently under the masthead of today’s edition of the CCP’s official People’s Daily newspaper noted that the city of Shanghai ceased operation on April 1 of its standalone “Shanghai Transport Police” (上海交警) app, moving the related services under a separate city app.

The “Shanghai Transport Police” app, one of many casualties of the push to bring efficiency to the technologies that promised efficiency.

Another focus of the blood-letting, now happening across the country under local “burden reduction” (减负) measures following the CAC opinion, has been governmental public accounts as well as work-related group chats on platforms like WeChat.

According to the People’s Daily report, these efforts have already been deeply appreciated by local officials who have been overburdened by the push for digital engagement. “We now have more time to communicate face-to-face with village residents, and can also organize offline activities more often,” one cadre from Zhejiang’s Zunlin Township was quoted as saying. “Working together, we’ve tossed out a lot of ‘golden ideas’ on how to promote the revitalization of the countryside,” he added gleefully.

The People’s Daily report finished with a feel-good line about how “unloading the burden of the fingertip” and “reducing the unnecessary labor of grassroots cadres in the digital age” could result in a better system of digital government, more effectively serving the needs of the masses. But one question lingered that no one was bound to ask, at least not openly.

To what extent has the push for digital efficiency up to this point been a massive waste of public resources?

Golden Opportunities

Written by David Bandurski on . Posted in Going Global.

Last week, the Star Media Group (SMG), one of Malaysia’s largest integrated media conglomerates, announced a partnership with China’s Contemporary World magazine, an outlet directly under the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. In a press release on the cooperation that made no mention of the magazine’s government ties, SMG said that “both media companies agreed to collaborate on news sources and explore further cooperation opportunities.”

The tie-up is just the latest example of China’s determined push to enhance its influence across Southeast Asia through media diplomacy, partnerships, journalism outreach programs, and state-led external propaganda initiatives — in many cases without any public transparency whatsoever about the Chinese entities involved.

SMG’s Chan Seng Fatt (陳成發), who stepped into the CEO spot at the group only last month, called the partnership a “golden opportunity” to bridge divides between China and Southeast Asia through what he called “concerted media collaboration.” He also hinted at the complexities in a region where views of China remain mixed. “In the context of China’s efforts in Southeast Asia, we see challenges and opportunities,” he said. “Language barriers, cultural misunderstandings and differing political landscapes pose significant challenges.”

“Contemporary World: Cultural Exchange” roundtable discussion at Asian International Arbitration Centre, Kuala Lumpur. — FAIHAN GHANI/The Star.

While the event was about cooperation between two media companies, including one of Malaysia’s largest listed media groups, the diplomatic role of the partnership — and its larger framing around China’s official state discourse on information — was the elephant in the room.

For China, media diplomacy is a crucial vehicle through which to influence public perceptions abroad and lay the groundwork for productive bilateral friendships — a goal distinct from the core media business of informing audiences. Betraying this primary interest in his speech to the event in Kuala Lumpur, Contemporary World (当代世界) editor-in-chief Lu Xuejun (吕学军) emphasized Xi Jinping’s meeting last year with Malaysia’s prime minister, suggesting to his audience that the goal of the media was to “implement the consensus advocated by our leaders.”

That consensus focused on the need, highlighted by Chan in his remarks, to amplify the voices of developing nations in the international community. “The need to enhance the representation and the voice of Global South countries has never been more critical,” said the CEO.

This position perfectly dovetails with China’s official stance under Xi Jinping, who has argued that China suffers from a deficit of soft power on the world stage, and therefore must work to “tell China’s story well.” Despite its apparent fore-fronting of Chinese narratives, which might seem to empower individual Chinese voices, Xi’s notion of China’s story is more singular than pluralistic — emphasizing the need for state control, and happening against the backdrop of increased domestic repression.

Know Your Partner

Who exactly is Contemporary World, the magazine SMG has partnered with?

Launched in 1981, the magazine is operated by the International Liaison Department (ILD) of the CCP’s Central Committee (中共中央对外联络), the agency responsible for maintaining relations with foreign organizations and political parties, a key aspect of what the Party calls “united front work.” The ILD’s importance as a tool of China’s foreign policy has grown over the past decade under Xi Jinping.

Beijing company registration files show that Contemporary World magazine’s publisher, Contemporary World Publishing Co., Ltd., has one shareholder: China’s State Council.

In its coverage of the new SMG cooperation, The Star, an online outlet under the Malaysian media group, refers to Contemporary World only as a magazine, and as a “media company.” Inside China, however, the role of Contemporary World as an instrument of Chinese foreign policy is completely unambiguous. The publication’s chief role of late is to propagate the notion of “Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy” (习近平外交思想).

If SMG’s cooperation agreement was indeed signed with the publishing company immediately behind Contemporary World, its contract partner would be Contemporary World Publishing Co., Ltd. Business reporters at The Star might start by pulling the company’s registration records in Beijing. They will quickly find that the company has but one shareholder — China’s State Council.

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