Earlier this month, Li Shanglong (李尚龙), an author and influencer who in recent years has gained a strong following in China for his books and videos in the self-help genre, revealed on Weibo that he had received eight rule violation notices in a single day from the short video hosting platform Douyin, each resulting in the interruption of his live streams.

Li’s post was a complex tale of warnings and explanations over several unacceptable word choices. But it offered a fascinating glimpse into how popular platforms like Douyin, the Chinese domestic version of TikTok, seem to be applying keyword restrictions for commercial as well as political and regulatory reasons – leaving content creators caught in a whirlwind of workarounds.

“Making Rice” and “Bo-Bo Rooms”?

According to Li, Douyin’s warnings cited “suspected backflow,” or shexian daoliu (倒流), as the reason for interrupting his live streams. The term “backflow” suggests in this case that Li might have been redirecting traffic to rival platforms such as WeChat by mentioning the platforms in his live streams.

As a veteran live streamer, Li said, he was well aware of “the commercial battle for traffic between these two companies, Tencent and Bytedance.” Generally, he said, he was careful not to say words such as “WeChat” (微信) or “friend circle” (朋友圈) – a well-known WeChat feature – during live streams to avoid violating this commercial rule.

The violations in Li’s case this month, however, seemed to be about more than the naming of rival companies and services.  

When Li mentioned the term “limited-time offer,” or miaosha (秒杀), during his live stream, for example, he says he was slapped with a Douyin warning. He changed tack, using instead the innocuous utterance “miao miao” (秒秒). When, later in his live stream, he mentioned the phrase “money making,” or zhuan qian (赚钱), the axe came down again. The phrase was apparently unacceptable, but he could use “making rice,” or zhuan mi (赚米), a colloquialism for making money. “Pandemic situation,” or yiqing (疫情) was another no-no, and Li said he had gotten around the restriction by referring to “facemasks” (口罩) instead.  

For Li Shanglong, the biggest surprise among all of the allegedly unsayable things on Douyin was the term “live-stream studio,” or zhibojian (直播间), of obvious relevance to live streamers. At the suggestion of a friend, he used the term “bo-bo room” (啵啵间), changing the word “live stream” out for the onomatopoetic word for the sound of bubbling water.

Finally, Li revealed that the word “country,” or guojia (国家), was unsayable in live streams. As a content creator, he found the endless rules and restrictions exhausting. He finished his post with a tongue-in-cheek echo of the final words of Lu Xun’s seminal 1918 short story A Madman’s Diary, suggesting that the knot of restrictions facing online content creators and internet users might profoundly impact the way youth in China used language.

“Save the children,” Li wrote.

Normalizing Verbal Shortcuts

Other users on Weibo, including content creators, responded favorably to Li Shanglong’s tell-all about sensitive and restrictive words. A discussion ensued about what impact such restrictions might have, and what should be done.

For some, the post explained oddities they had already noted in Chinese live streams. “No wonder all of these program hosts say these really strange words,” wrote one user in a comment that received more than 30,000 likes. For others, the word restrictions exposed what seemed entirely futile policies that went against human nature. “Why can’t we say these totally normal words?” one user asked. “We all know the meaning, so changing the word is just self-deception. And no one can stop saying them anyway.”

Could such online language obstacles, which forced users into constant creative detours such as the use of homonyms and intentional misspellings, have a real impact on language development?

“As a working language teacher, I couldn’t agree more,” said one user who received nearly 10,000 likes for their comment under Li’s post. “Some students in class write essays chockfull of internet jargon, and most terrifying is that words like this appear in their papers too.” Even when she corrected the papers, the teacher said, students often failed to understand what was wrong – suggesting that linguistic workarounds and intentional errors online, often necessitated by restrictions, were becoming “normalized.”

And for many, Li’s bold revelations demanded a real response from the authorities. “I hope Brother Long’s courage in telling the truth can call on relevant [government] departments to clean up [this problem], and avoid harm to our children,” one user wrote in a comment that received more than 26,000 likes.

Douyin Responds

Responding several hours after Li Shanglong’s Weibo post, Douyin sought to refute the content creator’s allegations. In a post to its official account, the platform alleged that many of Li’s reported problems were false.

It was not true, the post said, that the word “WeChat” could not be spoken on live streams. But it said that it would issue “safety warnings” (安全提示) when live streams invited users over to WeChat to make transactions, “to avoid loss of security in subsequent transactions.” On the language around “limited-time offers” (秒杀), Douyin said that the allegation that the phrase was restricted was false, though once again Douyin implemented “clear standards” (明确规范) to “safeguard the interests of consumers.” Content creators, it said, could use the phrase so long as they met these standards.  

As for restrictions on mentions of the “pandemic situation” (疫情), Douyin explained that “standardized expressions” (规范表述) were necessary to prevent content creators from exploiting emotions around the pandemic to “sell on the back of misery” (卖惨).

Douyin said that it never obligated content creators to use special terms, intentional misspellings, homophones, and other internet slang during live streams. Rather, this was a choice made independently by content creators themselves.

Passing on the Blame

Responding on social media to the Douyin statement, which was reported widely by Chinese media, many Chinese found the platform’s arguments unconvincing. “Anyone who’s used Douyin knows that what the original author was saying is true,” one user commented under a related post from Caijing magazine, referring to Li Shanglong’s post.

“This is the truth,” a user said in a comment under a post by IT Home. “And so many content creators [who are saying the same thing] aren’t idiots.”

Certain terms could technically be spoken, said another, but would limit engagement owing to platform restrictions. “Well, you can say whatever words you want, but using certain words will limit the traffic and views you get on your video,” they said, “which basically means you’re not allowed to use them.”

Further down in the comments, another user said that practices like those used by Douyin were commonplace, and suggested the video platform was shifting the blame. “Many platforms have different restrictions [on content wording], and this forces content creators to use word variations. But now the use of such words becomes the users’ fault. How funny is that.”

Rectifying Words

The wave of online discontent toward streaming policies at Douyin comes as there are moves from Chinese authorities to target the use of what they call “incorrect characters” (错别字). While “incorrect characters” have been on the radar for years, and have prompted official statements from time to time, they have more recently become a focus in the broader push to “create a clear online space” (营造清朗的网络空间).

On July 13, “Weibo Regulator” (微博管理员), an official account used to advertise policies on the Weibo platform, announced its latest measures to combat “incorrect characters,” including words incorporating pinyin romanization (谐音字) and “distorted characters” (变体字). The Weibo platform said the measures would set out to “create a clear online space, and maintain a civilized and healthy community ecological order.”

For many years in China, creatively “incorrect” wordplay has been one of the chief means internet users have used to communicate in the face of myriad online restrictions. Chinese have sometimes called this process “hitting lines balls” (打擦边球), referring to word use that in some way pushes the bounds but remains fair game.

Learning to Speak

In a subsequent post as the discussion over word use continued on China’s internet, Li Shanglong said he had received a response directly from Douyin after numerous attempts to reach the platform with his complaints. A customer service representative, he said, had tried to educate him about how to live stream and avoid problems. But for Li, this was exactly the point. Why should it be necessary to teach content creators how to speak?

As Li also pointed out, there are numerous courses available online in China that offer to teach content creators how to live stream on Douyin, and one of the main focal points in training courses deals with language regulation and how alternative words can be used to dodge censorship and work around platform standards.

 “It’s hilarious,” said Li. “I was born with a mouth, so why does Douyin think it needs to teach me how to use my mouth all over again?”

Additional reporting by David Bandurski.

When China’s top internet control agency announced late last month that it would launch a security review of the country’s leading academic research database, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), citing the need to protect “important data,” the reactions online were broadly of two types. While some wished to know exactly what kind of content concerned the authorities, many others cheered the action, noting how CNKI had drawn ire for many months over its skyrocketing subscription fees and its monopoly hold on the sector.

Both reactions were largely missing the point. The most recent action against CNKI is not about the sensitivity of certain types of data. Nor is it about the fair price for access to data. The issue for China’s authorities is about the abundant public access the CNKI database provides to an astonishing range of information. On the face of it, most of the information available through CNKI, drawn from thousands of periodical titles, is non-sensitive. Once made widely available to researchers, however, and once contextualized and interpreted, it can be revealing in ways that unsettle China’s leadership.

How Much is “Too Much”?

CNKI’s most recent troubles were announced on June 24 by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), which said it had met the previous day with management at Tongfang Knowledge Network Technology Co., Ltd., the company operating the CNKI site. The CAC notice said the company had been informed it would be subject to a “security review” (安全审查) on the grounds that its database service, which has been widely used for academic research in China and abroad, “contains large amounts of personal information as well as important data concerning national defense, industry, telecommunications, transportation, natural resources, health and sanitation, finance and other key industry sectors.”  

The sheer breadth involved suggested that article and source removals on the site could be extensive to address these concerns. The haziness of the matter was captured nicely in the news headlines, such as in a report from the tech-related public account “Leitech” (雷科技), shared at popular portals like Netease, which said simply that CNKI “holds too much sensitive information” (掌握太多敏感信息).

What did this mean?

How, for starters, would the CAC define “personal information”? Academic articles in CNKI, for example, frequently include the e-mail addresses of authors. Would these addresses be regarded as personal information and redacted along with other “important data”? Would entire articles be removed?

Another key question is how sensitive information, “important data,” or unwarranted levels of personal information could have gotten through in the first place, given the fact that CNKI simply aggregates issues from Chinese periodicals across the country, which must already have passed muster prior to publication with the party-state organs supervising them.

For a taste of what CNKI has on offer, consider the Journal of Intelligence (情报杂志), one of the more than 8,500 periodical titles in the database. The publication sounds riveting if intelligence is your game. And fear of intelligence exposures, prompted by media coverage of the CAC notice, certainly motivated the comments of many internet users. “More investigations like this should be imposed on other institutions,” read one comment under a related post by foreign relations expert Jin Canrong (金灿荣) on Weibo. “I don’t want to see our education system infiltrated like this [by foreign threats].”

But the journal, published by the Science and Technology Department of Shaanxi Province (陕西省科学技术厅), an office under the provincial government, is not exactly a leaking tap. Most of the academic articles at the Journal of Intelligence deal with issues of cyber strategy that are common knowledge to those in China or studying it from the outside, such as efforts to gauge “public opinion risk” following sudden-breaking incidents, how influencers are formed online, or simply how to conduct content analysis.

This is where the question of volume and accessibility come in as the primary point of sensitivity. Even if the trivial details discussed in publications like the Journal of Intelligence are prima facie non-sensitive, they can, taken collectively, help researchers piece together various aspects of Chinese politics, governance, society, industrial strategies and so on.

When, for example, CMP recently investigated how journalists for Chinese state media were using personal accounts on platforms like Twitter to amplify government talking points, this phenomenon could be connected to explicit strategies at outlets like Xinhua elucidated in studies available in the Chinese academic literature, which spoke of the use of “personal brands” of “individual netizens” (trusted personal account holders with Party-state affiliation) as an effective strategy for external propaganda.

The sensitivity here lies not in the information or data itself, but rather in the research that broad access to this information makes possible. And the volume of information available in CNKI is astonishing. As the largest aggregator of academic electronic resources in China, CNKI covers more than 95 percent of published academic resources. As of January this year, CNKI included more than 8,540 journals in total, with more than 60 million full-text documents.

The issue, then, is not that CNKI “holds too much sensitive information,” but that it simply holds too much information at a single access point, period. The breadth and volume of information potentially available to the public through the platform – all held, moreover, under a single state-owned software company linked to China’s Tsinghua University – has become a source of sensitivity for the leadership.

Losing Trust

This is where the issues of pricing and monopoly that have trailed CNKI in recent years intersect with the question of national security.

CNKI came under renewed scrutiny in April after local media reported that the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the country’s top academy for the natural sciences, said it would suspend its use of CNKI, citing high subscription fees. An internal email circulated to CAS members outlining the decision explained that the academy’s subscription fees to CNKI had topped 10 million yuan in 2021.

Such complaints are by no means new. A number of universities in recent years have either discontinued use of CNKI or let their grievance be known. In January 2016, the Wuhan University of Technology announced that it would end its subscription to the service, its library noting that the price quoted by CNKI had risen above 10 percent each year since 2000. From 2010 to 2016, the university said, the price for use of CNKI had increased by more than 132 percent.

Two months later, Peking University also announced through its school website that it would discontinue use. Accusations of plagiarism and price gouging have plagued CNKI ever since. In 2019, a law student a Suzhou University sued the service over unfair pricing that deprived consumers of the right to choose.

The announcement by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in April this year that it would discontinue use of CNKI was just the latest sign of discontentment within academia. Finally, on May 13, China’s State Administration for Market Regulation announced an anti-trust investigation into the company. The announcement brought praise and sighs of relief from many.

A report from the China Youth Daily newspaper quoted Zhu Jian (朱剑), the former editor-in-chief of the official school journal at Nanjing University, as saying that CNKI had grown into something far more powerful than an information business, giving it a central role in regulating relationships among writers, publications and readers. Another journal editor told the paper that CNKI had become “like the air,” and no one could do without air.

Why Now?

Breaking CNKI’s monopoly should have addressed the range of issues plaguing the platform and its relationship to academia. But then came the June bombshell. Not only was CNKI far too dominant, “like the air.” The authorities now seemed to be saying that there was something foul about the air itself.

If there were real national security issues at stake with CNKI content, why was this coming to light only now?

Part of the answer, overlooked in much coverage, is that the security-related action comes amidst a series of cybersecurity reviews for major tech companies, such as that for Didi Chuxing Technology Co., the ride-hailing company, which was recently completed after a full year. There have also been security reviews for US-listed companies, including the digital freight platform Full Truck Alliance – China’s “Uber for trucks” – and the online recruitment platform Kanzhun.

But CNKI’s case is also different. It is the first company to be targeted since the revision in February this year of China’s Cybersecurity Review Measures (网络安全审查办法), which the CAC said in a release would be the “cornerstone of strengthening national data security.”

According to a report from the 21st Century Business Herald (21世纪经济报道) last month, CNKI is likely to face a very different form of security review from those that faced the likes of Didi. According to Wu Shenguo (吴沈括), the deputy director of the Internet Society of China Research Center, this is because the platform is an immense ecosystem for the flow of intellectual products, or zhishi chanpin (知识产品). This, said the report, made the matter “more complex.”

As the CAC has made clear, one key distinction in the revised Cybersecurity Review Measures is that they require network platform operators, a designation that would include CNKI, to carry out “data handling activities” (数据处理活动) based on the “impact or possible impact on national security.” This essentially provides the basis for a full review of CNKI content on national security grounds.

“Law enforcement may systematically review the cybersecurity status of CNKI,” the 21st Century Business Herald report concluded, “and assess the risk of theft, leakage, destruction, and illegal use of data.”

Understanding that the content shared through CNKI has already been subjected to various levels of official scrutiny prior to publication, the periodicals themselves being controlled through a strict licensing system, the criterion of potential “illegal use” should be considered to have broader implications – recalling recent restrictions placed on other platforms providing general information to the public. These include the likes of business data search firm Tianyancha – which researchers at MIT were able to use, for example, to identify “active firms based in China producing facial recognition AI” – and China Judgements Online (中国裁判文书网), a collection of judgments and decisions from Chinese courts.

The fact that many databases, like Tianyancha, are not made accessible outside of China except by use of a VPN, is a further sign of the general sensitivity of public data access points for the Chinese authorities. Access itself, in other words, is a point of sensitivity, and something over which the government intends to exercise much greater control. Sure, there may be real needles of national security concern hidden somewhere in the haystack of CNKI. But the larger point is that the whole haystack, to the extent that it allows the broader public to root around, is a growing problem.

As one source in Shanghai told Radio Free Asia, “The real reason that CNKI is being investigated is not that it holds sensitive information as the reports suggest, but because search platforms for public information, just like China Judgements Online and Tianyancha, enable ordinary people to know how in the past, present and future the government will violate citizens’ personal rights, with power and money deals, academic corruption and so on.”

Imagine a stretch of brick village houses in the Chinese countryside, their outer walls painted with bright red propaganda posters. It’s early morning and a loudspeaker blares out local government announcements, along with the latest slogans from the top leader in Beijing.

This may sound like a scene from the height of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. But that’s the catch. This is the Chinese village in the second decade of the 21^st century, where an old communication technology is making a comeback alongside the latest digital tools.    

The shrill call of the loudspeaker, once a staple of political and economic life in pre-reform China, is a sound now returning to the countryside.

On May 6, the China Press Publication Radio Film and Television Journal (中国新闻出版广电报), the official publication of the National Press and Publication Association (NPPA), reported that more than 600 loudspeakers had been installed in a district on the outskirts of Tianjin. Promoted by the local propaganda department in Tianjin, the installation in Wuqing District (武清区) was coordinated with “Xuexi Qiangguo” (学习强国), an interactive app designed to propagate the thought of Xi Jinping along with the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party.  

Each morning audio content from “Xuexi Qiangguo” is broadcast from the local integrated media center (融媒体中心) in Wuqing District, reaching across a digitalized “loudspeaker network” (大喇叭系统) that encompasses 611 administrative villages. The content varies every day, according to the NPPA report, and can include the theories of the Party, propaganda content hyping the upcoming 20th National Congress of the CCP – and of course quotes from Xi Jinping.

“The loudspeaker has turned into an ‘announcer’ that promotes the light of thought into the hearts of people,” the NPPA report said. The “light of thought” (思想之光) in this case was an unmistakable reference to Xi’s banner term, which this year could be shortened to the potent “Xi Jinping Thought.”

Turning Up the Volume

The loudspeaker project is not exclusive to Tianjin. According to China National Radio, the “New Rural Loudspeaker Project” (新农村大喇叭工程) has been rolled out to more than 200 cities and counties across China since it was first piloted in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province, in 2019. By the end of 2020, the project had reached an estimated 300,000 administrative villages in 14 provinces, according to a report in the official Hebei Daily newspaper.  

According to state media, the project, which involves three daily broadcasts morning, noon and night, employs “internet + loudspeaker” cloud broadcasting technology. The model is pretty straightforward. The government broadcasts the messages, combining agricultural and policy content with Party propaganda, and the villagers listen.

It is a model familiar to many millions of older Chinese who lived through political movements from the 1950s through to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1978. During those decades, loudspeakers were one of the main tools used to deliver government announcements and mobilize the population for various campaigns or movements. In 1959, in the midst of the Great Leap Forward (大跃进), a campaign to create a communist society through the formation of people’s communes, loudspeakers were used to announce quotas for grain and steel production.

A report published in the People’s Daily on February 6, 1959, related how a steel furnace in Anshan (鞍山), Liaoning province, was pressed to ever higher production levels. In the article, a worker’s representative seeks out the local Party branch chief and pledges heroically: “We guarantee that our steel furnace will generate new records, and we ask that the Party branch chief supports us!” The article then reads:

All of the loudspeakers through the factory immediately blared out: “Flat Stove No. 16 has pledged that tonight it will break its own record, breaking through yesterday’s top result! We hope all work sections will cooperate!”

During the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, loudspeakers became a blunt yet effective propaganda tool to blare out revolutionary songs praising Mao Zedong’s leadership of the Party and bolstering his personality cult.

A 1965 article in the People’s Daily’s acknowledged the importance of installing loudspeakers in the countryside in order to carry out mass mobilization. But the vexing question was where to place the loudspeakers. “Where should the loudspeakers be placed in order to be more effective and have the broadest propagation result?” the article asked.

Some communes had installed several high-volume loudspeakers, but they were so cacophonous – rousing the dogs and chickens – that the masses did not welcome them. “Loudspeakers are tools for propaganda and for the education of the peasants,” the newspaper said, “and their proper placement enables members to hear the voice of Chairman Mao and the development of our country.”

Reform and Opening

As economic reforms took hold in China in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the use of loudspeakers as tools of political mobilization largely faded. But there could still at times be a use for loudspeakers in spreading knowledge of government policies relevant to residents in the countryside, particularly up to the early 2000s, before internet access was more widespread, and years before smartphones became ubiquitous.

In 2004, as then-President Hu Jintao emphasized the need for agricultural reforms to improve the lives of China’s farmers, a priority encompassed by the so-called “Three Rural Issues” (三农问题), the People’s Daily reported about one rural village where the Party committee had decided to bring loudspeakers, “already silent for many years,” back into use in order to better advertise government policies. Twenty-five loudspeakers were installed around the village, and broadcasts were made in the morning, at noon and at night.

According to the People’s Daily report, local farmers had welcomed the installation of the loudspeakers because the broadcasts included daily announcements of the market prices of agricultural products, which helped them strike better deals with buyers.

­Back to Ideology

While ideology had gradually faded in importance in China through the reform and opening period from 1978 to the 2000s in favor of Dengian pragmatism, Xi Jinping’s rise to the position of general secretary of the CCP in November 2012 brought the steady return of ideology to the center of politics. This became clear with the introduction of the hardline Document 9 in the spring of 2013, outlining “prominent problems in the present ideological sphere,” and calls in August 2013 for a re-invigoration of Marxist ideology.

Under Xi’s leadership, the loudspeaker has regained its old function, strengthening propaganda and ideology at grass-roots units – meaning at the lowest levels of the Party-state bureaucracy. In 2015, the People’s Daily reported on the mobilization in Dandong (丹东), a city in China’s northeastern Liaoning province, of a “Volunteer Army for Theory Propagation” (理论宣传志愿军). The “army” consisted of more than 10,000 members tasked with “propagating theory among the masses and arming the masses with theory” (群众宣传理论, 理论武装群众) at the village and township level.

The idea was to find innovative ways to transmit the voice of the Party – and increasingly, of its powerful leader. Alongside lecture events, digital message boards and public service announcements, wireless loudspeakers (无线大喇叭) offered a distinct advantage that was likely remembered by many Party officials of Xi Jinping’s generation; a way of integrating the theory of the Party with the daily lives and rhythms of the people.

The 2019 “New Rural Loudspeaker Project” (新农村大喇叭工程), introduced first in Shijiazhuang, was one of a number of initiatives across the country that integrated loudspeakers with the once-again central work of propaganda and ideology. This was happening at the same time that the “Xuexi Qiangguo” app, which Party officials and government officials across the country were often obliged to install and regularly use, was gamifying the work of ideological indoctrination – a “little red phone” for the 21^st century.

When the CCP’s central leading group for study and education on the history of the Party (党史学习教育领导小组办公室) held a conference in in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, two years ago in May 2021, officials introduced a plan to further spread the ideological lessons compiled through “Xuexi Qiangguo” by producing more than 200 audio sessions that could then be broadcast through a network of nearly 100,000 village loudspeakers. This would enable Xi Jinping’s voice, and the Party’s mainstream view of history in the year of its centennial, to reach a vast number of rural areas.

And what about that vexing question the People’s Daily had addressed on the eve of the Cultural Revolution in 1965, about the impact of the loudspeakers on quiet lives in the countryside?

In a Weibo post back in September last year, one official publication asked the public whether they felt “countryside megaphones in the New Era” (新时代的农村大喇叭​​​) were effective or not. Some expressed support, saying they worked better than mobile phones, and that they had been key to transmitting information about Covid-19 policies. Still, there was skepticism – not just about loudspeakers, but about the comments expressing support for them.

“These comments in support must have been promoted!” one user responded. “Loudspeakers are a serious public nuisance. Loudspeakers blare out right at 7 in the morning, the decibels ridiculously high, and their advertisements are eating away at our eardrums and our hearts.”

And then there was that vexing 21^st century question of legality. “But as legal citizens each of us should have the right to freely allocate our personal time, including sleep time, and we should have the right to choose what we listen to!”

Tucked away in south-central Gansu province, rural Zhang County (漳县) could scarcely be more remote from China’s media centers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The only claim to fame in the thinly populated county, which has been designated as a priority area for poverty alleviation, is to have been called the country’s “home of the fava bean” (中国蚕豆之乡).

But Zhang County is nonetheless an important piece in the national puzzle of “media convergence,” or rongmeiti (融媒体), a process by which the Chinese Communist Party aims to consolidate its hold on information throughout society.

Earlier this month, the official publication of the All-China Journalists Association (ACJA), the government-led official organization for media workers in the country, profiled efforts in Zhang County to build a “county-level media convergence center” (县级融媒体中心), which it said would lend “strong public opinion support” to economic initiatives in the area and “effectively enhance the focus in guiding and serving the masses” – this second objective a clear nod to the policy of media control to maintain social and political stability.

A search for the keyword “county-level media convergence center” turns up tens of thousands of results in recent years, from both Party-run media and government agencies, with headlines like: “Building and Properly Using County-Level Media Convergence Centers.” How did these centers originate, and what are they all about?  

Old Priorities, New Technologies

The CCP has long prioritized what it calls “propaganda and ideological work” (宣传思想工作), which is essentially about the Party’s dominance of media and culture as a means of ensuring that its values and priorities remain central in the lives of people at all levels of society. Since the 18th National Congress of the CCP in 2012, Xi Jinping has made many statements intended to direct the work of the press and the public opinion field more broadly. Since Xi’s first Work Conference on Propaganda and Ideology, held on August 19, 2013, media convergence has been an important component of the Party’s long-term media strategy, resulting in the introduction one year later of Guidance on the Promotion and Development of the Integration of Traditional Media and Emerging Media (关于推动传统媒体与新兴媒体融合发展的指导意见).

That formative document dealt chiefly with two aspects. The first was Xi’s insistence that traditional media and “emerging media” (digital platforms, video streaming et al) “develop as one” (一体发展). This was largely meant to ensure that Party-run media, which played a key role in “public opinion guidance,” setting the tone for media coverage favorable to the CCP, could modernize and not be left behind, which might imperil the Party’s agenda. Secondly, it was about moving converged media under the Party’s leadership to a more user-centered frame of thinking, recognizing that effective propaganda, and effective “guidance,” could only happen if new platforms could effectively “follow the laws of news dissemination and the development principles of emerging media.”

These principles were linked quite early on to Xi’s vision of strengthening China’s “international discourse power” (国际话语权), transforming the global “discourse system” (话语体系) and “telling China’s story well” (讲好中国故事). How could China speak loudly and with confidence in the 21^st century if it did not do so through attractive and interactive platforms?

In the digital age, therefore, the task of “propaganda and ideological work” has become far more complex for the CCP, in the same way that media development generally has diversified and been innovated. Under the precondition of Party control of public opinion, the process of “media convergence” – which in other environments globally refers simply to the merging of different types of traditional mass media with the internet and interactive digital technologies – has become an important means by which the leadership asserts control over the creation and flow of information.

In 2014, He Dongping (何东平), the editor-in-chief of Guangming Daily, a paper published by the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department, wrote a commentary in which he outlined the concept of “integration,” or media convergence, as he announced the formation at his paper of a “media convergence center.”

He Dongping explained that convergence focused on integrating the content resources, editorial resources, distribution, product forms, communication channels, technical solutions and marketing strategies used by traditional media and new media in close collaboration – creating what he called a “unified platform for media content creation.”

Neatly contained within this new vision of the newsroom was the old idea of CCP-run media, like Guangming Daily, as the vanguard of “public opinion guidance,” ensuring that audiences (and the Party’s agenda) did not become lost in the chaotic world of digital information. “Facing a massive amount of new media information, readers can easily get lost in it, and the popularity of social media and apps has particularly aggravated this trend,” the editor wrote. “The converged media newspaper will be the navigator in the midst of the vastness of online information, providing the audience with a reading guide of the most important, essential and trustworthy [content].”

The Party and its re-made media structure were to play a crucial role in “navigating” (导航) through China’s digital transformation.  The challenge, then, was to consolidate the Party’s leadership of this transformation at all levels.

Localizing Convergence

During a meeting on propaganda and ideology in August 2018, five years after his crucial first meeting, Xi Jinping included “the construction of county-level media convergence centers” (县级融媒体中心建设) in his proposal for the re-making of “propaganda and ideology work under the new situation,” this being a reference to digital transformation as well as wider geopolitical change. According to the read-out from the official Xinhua News Agency, Xi said “the government needs to solidly conduct the construction of county-level media convergence centers in order to better guide the masses and serve the masses.”

In fact, the construction of county-level media convergence centers had already begun across the country. In a report weeks ahead of the 2018 meeting on propaganda and ideology, the “National Broadcasting Think Tank” (国家广电智库), a WeChat public account under the National Radio and Television Administration, reported that broadcasting stations at the county-level nationwide had begun building media convergence centers in order to “promptly convey the voice of the Party and the government, and effectively guide local public opinion.”

The article showcased Pizhou (邳州), a county-level city under the administration of Xuzhou (徐州), a major city in northwestern Jiangsu province, as an example of how local state-owned television stations could make the transition to media convergence using integrated media platforms – everything from dedicated mobile apps, online communities and social media channels, to traditional print and broadcast media. All of these activities could be conducted through a core department known as the “Central Kitchen” (中央厨房), where all interviews, video and audio recording, press releases and post-production could be integrated and distributed consistently.

In Pizhou, as in other counties across China, the “Central Kitchen” approach means consolidating the voice of the Party, and by extension its leadership at the local, “grassroots” (基层) level.

In the recent news from Gansu’s Zhang County, we can see the Party’s media convergence strategy continuing to play out, ensuring – at least in principle – that the all-important process of “public opinion guidance” is not just a top-down mandate, but can be fostered from the ground up.

Just like those fava beans.