The catastrophe that struck the China-Nepal border last month is a case study in information control — and the clearest sign yet that Xi Jinping has rewritten the script for domestic media.

When a small plane struck the tallest skyscraper in China’s capital last week, the dramatic crash was followed by something equally striking — total silence from China’s state media and the obliteration of all efforts to report even the barest facts. The world should take notice.

As China’s economy sputters, journalists are falling silent — not for lack of facts, but because the space for telling these stories continues to narrow, undermining the public’s ability to understand how the economy actually functions.

On the front page of the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship newspaper today, Xi Jinping urges children to inherit “red genes” and dedicate themselves to the Party — the opening salvo in a week of propaganda designed to bury the memory of the students killed in 1989.

A small disclaimer added to two AI-generated news anchors on a Chinese provincial news broadcast exposed a tension at the heart of the country’s rush to automate the (state-controlled) newsroom.

With no reference to the dispute in question, China’s top state social sciences institution issues a mysterious warning to media against meddling in “academic viewpoints” — suggesting instead that they pursue public power.

A simple technical test reveals that AI models from Alibaba’s Qwen family have been broadly aligned to give positive messages about China in English.

As the city’s main newspaper group marked its 70th anniversary, the top local leader delivered a message of perfect conformity — his words a carbon copy of Xi Jinping’s media directives.

A forum held at a leading university in Beijing over the weekend shows how China’s leadership keeps tight control over journalism — from the classroom to the newsroom.

A test of the Chinese tech giant’s trending language model reveals that in some cases, English-language answers are more guided by the leadership’s priorities than Chinese ones.

China’s 80th anniversary WWII celebrations weren’t just about military might—they were about rewriting history to erase America’s wartime role.

Updated roster shows modest growth to 1,456 sources, with expansion focused on provincial and government platforms.

The safety test content for an AI-powered children’s toy shows political safety figures heavily in even the most everyday applications of Chinese AI.

China’s AI models are now a crucial part of the Party’s censorship system for sudden-breaking stories and emergencies.

The results are in for China’s “Clear and Bright” campaign targeting artificial intelligence abuses — and bad actors still have ready access to deepfake tools.

Governments and companies are underestimating the power of the high-performing AI model as a propaganda tool.

DeepSeek’s latest model is its most restricted yet, particularly for users making politically sensitive queries in Chinese. Is a global split opening in AI?

The government has announced that netizens will require IDs to go on the internet. For now this is voluntary, but there are signs it will not remain that way for long.

In the wake of a deadly boat accident, state media have moved to control the narrative, following a playbook created in 2008. But despite tight message discipline across official outlets, one Shanghai news source broke ranks with a story that raised uncomfortable questions about negligence and ignored safety warnings.

As programs in China become propaganda mouthpieces and meaningful content disappears, stations face financial collapse while viewers abandon traditional media entirely. Everyone inside knows the way out of the dilemma — but that door is closed by Beijing’s refusal to loosen control over public discourse.

Hundreds of gigabytes of data from an unsecured server expose how China is using artificial intelligence to automate the surveillance of online discourse, with a sophisticated classification system prioritizing military, social, and political content.

With DeepSeek-R1 making waves around the world, tech companies are rushing to deploy the model. Some are struggling to remove pro-CCP biases, while others aren’t even bothering.

Chinese developers are using mock civil service exams and Communist Party ideology to train artificial intelligence – and that could shape how these models talk to the world.

When it comes to assessing the risks of DeepSeek, are we asking the wrong questions? Governments, journalists, and coders need to know that it’s a much more sophisticated propaganda tool than we all thought.

In proposed new oversight measures, the top cyberspace authorities place political as well as professional constraints on the multi-channel networks that manage social media influencers.

Xinjiang has finally unveiled its own International Communication Center, tasked with clearing the air of accusations of human rights abuse. But it’s just one move in a broader propaganda push to rehabilitate the region’s poisoned image.

First launched as a newspaper in 1946, the flagship media group of the Chinese Communist Party is now a sprawling content empire — relaying everything from the dictates of the leadership to the latest entertainment news. But the Party, as ever, remains at the center.

A new AI tool allowing users to generate text based on the speeches of China’s top leader shows just how difficult it is to create tech that is both cutting-edge and politically compliant.

Those who grew up as the “internet generation” have also been reared inside the walls of online censorship — and some have grown up to become censors themselves. How do the people within the system operate its machinery? And what goes on the heads of those working as “screws” within that machine?

The killing last week of a Japanese schoolboy in south China is the latest in a pattern of anti-Japanese hate — but the hard lessons of the tragedy are lost on the country’s media.

This summer, China’s top political body floated the creation of a safety and regulation system for AI. A new document released this week by the country’s cyberspace regulators offers the first clues of what that might look like.

The latest findings from Hong Kong’s Press Freedom Index don’t look good, but they do shed light on how the city’s media environment is changing four years into an ongoing crackdown.

Outside China, the idea of “media convergence,” the joining together of communication technologies on handheld devices, is now so much a way of life that few even talk about it. But for China’s leadership it is a concept with era-defining significance — having far-reaching consequences for the current and future exercise of power.

As the Wall Street Journal fires the head of Hong Kong’s biggest press union, sources tell us this is only the tip of the iceberg — across the board, international media are pressuring their Hong Kong employees to keep away from the group, or risk losing their jobs.

Chinese developers hope to build the AI of the future. What, if anything, will it have to say about the past?

China is eager to show the world that it can lead in generative AI technology. But one of its first challenges is chillingly unique — how to make its industry-leading chatbots speak like the Communist Party.

China’s leadership is actively pushing culture throughout the country’s vast rural hinterland, including through hundreds of thousands of “rural bookrooms.” But the overriding goal is to push the Party’s continued dominance at China’s grassroots — to the detriment of real cultural development.

During political meetings in Beijing earlier this month, China made a show of its openness to foreign journalists. A closer look at its efforts to cultivate invited guests, particularly from the Global South, suggests what the government really wants is to have less experienced China reporters who arrive as tabula rasa — ready to be imprinted with the government’s message.

At this year’s gathering of top propaganda officials in China, held last week, the emphasis was once again on the CCP’s dominance of the message — in the media, propaganda, and culture more broadly. The prominent use of a new Xi Jinping catchphrase made clearer than ever who is in charge of the national narrative.

The latest notice from China’s top cyberspace control body is clear about just one thing — the absurdity that ensues when an authoritarian system tries to be specific about everything it wants to erase, and everything it doesn’t.

Internet control authorities in China routinely portray “online rumors” as a threat to public well-being. But the real concern, which has nothing to do with factualness or accuracy, is that they might be harmful to the Party’s well-being — a fact that inflates the value of rumors, including truly false information.

State media coverage of a ceremony yesterday to honor the recipients of China’s most prestigious journalism awards makes clear that the most prized asset in China’s press is control.

According to the long-running theme of Journalists’ Day festivities under Xi Jinping, “good journalists tell good stories.” So what makes a good story in China today?

A new measure could be on the horizon requiring all influential self-media accounts in China to publicly display the identities of the people behind them, which some fear could have a chilling effect on one of the country’s more vibrant information spaces.

The results are in: what were the most “positive” articles, pictures, and videos in China over the past year? “Positive energy” (正能量) has been a priority for Chinese media for years, but the 550 pieces showcased from 2022 highlight their current top priority and reveal how “positive energy” isn’t always positive.

The cancelation of a TEDx speaking event in Guangzhou has invited debate over whether the move was about curbing “foreign influence” or a simple legal infraction. A new regulation released before the weekend suggests it might be both — and one more ripple in a growing nationwide campaign.

As the pandemic raged, live online performances took off in China, filling the offline gap and giving post-90s audiences a much-needed outlet. Now, say the authorities, it’s time to retune — and reassert control over a growing market.

New regulations for independent content creators in China are a reminder of how political priorities in the oversight of digital platforms undermine regulatory action that might protect the public.

These days, Chinese media must be loud and clear in declaring their political loyalty to Xi Jinping and the CCP. The annual “social responsibility reporting” process, in which media tout their most praiseworthy acts of praise, is a sickening gaze into a political system that has lost the ability to see itself clearly.

In the latest effort to centralize and tighten control over the ideological education of journalists, Chinese authorities are introducing a customized training platform with more than 220 separate courses in the Marxist View of Journalism.

China’s new draft law on “enhancing patriotic education” looks to add to the leadership’s legislative toolbox for repression and ideological control.

Tours organized for foreign journalists in China by propaganda officials and organizations like the All-China Journalists Association may be deployed with slightly more subtlety than those for domestic “news workers.” But the goal is the same — to guide coverage in ways favorable to the leadership.

When it comes to media and information control policies, all Chinese live today with the legacy of the Tiananmen Massacre. We look back on a brief moment before the brutal crackdown when China’s press stood with those clamoring for change.

As the ostensibly independent China Association of Performing Arts disciplined comedian Li Haoshi this week, it offered a glimpse into how China uses professional associations as proxies through which to exercise political and ideological control.

A post going viral late Tuesday night on Weibo could be seen as proof of the crucial role social media can play in exposing wrongdoing by those in positions of power. But its subsequent treatment in the media more broadly is a lesson in how authorities in China effectively exercise controls on public opinion.

Xi Jinping has been lauded in the official press as a deep reader who wants to create an atmosphere of love for books in China. But the latest numbers from the country’s publishing industry suggest a climate of political hypersensitivity is killing book titles before they ever reach the shelves.

China’s release this week of new draft rules governing the generation of AI content, coming just months after the launch of ChatGPT, might give the impression leaders are scrambling to catch up. But for years now, the Chinese Communist Party has planned to power up AI innovations — even as it contains them.

Earlier this week, the Ministry of Human Resources posted its 2023 call for the hiring of positions within the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department and its subsidiary departments. Could this be the opportunity you’ve been waiting for?

Cai Qi, the Politburo Standing Committee member in charge of ideology, led a national meeting of propaganda ministers in Beijing this week. The national strategy for media and ideology boils down to this simple formula: unquestioning obedience to Xi Jinping.

“History illuminates the future, and the journey has no end,” Xinhua chief Fu Hua wrote in the soaring conclusion to a recent piece on his news agency’s obedience to Xi Jinping. But when history conveys no real lessons, when its primary business is to construct models of achievement and greatness, what it reveals instead is the rottenness at the core of the politics that have wrought it.