Recent reflections on China’s efforts at global influence in the CCP’s official newspaper suggest core Party media have made little real progress in developing their own international channels for communication since “going out” was defined as a key goal in the late 2000s — and that when it comes to foreign audiences, they just aren’t listening.
The official announcements of the death of former top leader Jiang Zemin may seem like heaps of nonsense and overwrought praise. But take a closer look at newspaper layouts today and they tell us clearly where the Chinese Communist Party would like us to focus.
In China, the death of an esteemed comrade is never strictly a private matter. For context on the passing of Jiang Zemin, CMP runs this piece from the 2017 archives — on the politics of the official funeral.
Plan C, founded in 2016, is an organization dedicated to promoting critical thinking and public reason through education and public advocacy. They offer online courses that have influenced many students, parents, and teachers, providing training in critical thinking that is lacking in public education. They also publish articles on social media looking at trending topics and instructing people on how to analyze social issues with a critical frame of mind. Fang Kecheng spoke with Plan C founders Lan Fang and Guo Zhaofan in mid-July 2022.
One of the key themes in Xi Jinping’s “New Era” over the past 10 years has been much tighter control of the press. Shortly after Xi’s most crucial media policy speech in February 2016, CMP wrote about the absurd levels such control can take, with reference to the CCP’s pre-reform history.
In China, official versions of history in the present are meant to signal future plans and ambitions. Here’s a look at today’s chronicle of the last five years under the CCP.
More important than all other matters of substance at the upcoming 20th National Congress of the CCP will be the question of how deeply the CCP commits to the dualism of Xi Jinping and his governing ideas as the formula for China’s future.
The CCP has long viewed science as both a crucial contributor to national development and as closely interwoven with political claims to truth as a source of political power. New rules for “science popularization” released over the weekend make this history painfully present.
A Maoist legacy from the period of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), this phrase encapsulates the call for the Chinese Communist Party to adhere ideologically to the early principles that, according to CCP historiography, led to revolutionary victory and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The phrase was only rarely used during the first three decades of reform and opening but has soared under Xi Jinping — one of a number of terms that underscore the sharp ideological turn under the current CCP leadership.
This month China announced its preliminary selections for the China Press Awards, the “highest award for outstanding national journalism.” Under the country’s tightly-controlled media system, what exactly amounts to excellence?
