Zuo Fang, who passed away earlier this month at the age of 86, was one of China’s most influential press figures of the reform era. His reflections on his country and its media sector seven years ago while in Hong Kong to promote the publication of his book “How Steel is Not Made” are keenly relevant today.
Back in July, Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of Henan, experienced record rainfall. The flooding that followed resulted in the death of more than 300 people. As dramatic scenes from Henan were shared across social media, coverage of the floods by the media became a controversial issue in China. While correspondents from the Los Angeles Times and Germany’s Deutsche Welle were surrounded and questioned by local residents, accused of biased coverage of the flood’s aftermath, some netizens asked whether Chinese domestic media had done an adequate job reporting the story. Last month, CMP’s Stella Chen reached out to Professor Zhan Jiang, an expert on Chinese media development, to reflect on Chinese media coverage of the flooding in Henan and other breaking stories, and to discuss more generally Chinese media developments over the past 30 years.
Years after its global release on the Discovery channel, a documentary series extolling the virtues of Xi Jinping’s leadership is still avidly studied inside China as an instance of unvarnished success in “telling China’s story well” and furthering its external propaganda goals. But what does this say about the health of the “Chinese discourse system” some pundits say is on the rise?
As China’s government has moved to crack down on “fandom culture,” state media have claimed that the country’s youth must be saved from “toxic idol worship.” In this recent analysis for Brookings TechStream, David Bandurski looks at the deeper political reasons for this move against youth obsessions.
The term “Chaoyang Masses,” or chaoyang qunzhong (朝阳群众), is used by Chinese media, local police and internet users to refer to Beijing’s community network of public informants, essentially groups of neighborhood volunteers empowered to monitor their areas for illegal activities as well as breaches of moral and even political norms. While the Chaoyang Masses refers specifically to such volunteer groups within the Beijing district of Chaoyang, the term has gradually come to stand in more generally for such forms of mass mobilization for the public security (political security) objectives of the Chinese Communist Party. Similar district-based “community groups” (群众组织) in Beijing include the “Old Neighbours of Shijingshan” (石景山老街坊), the “Xicheng Aunties” (西城大妈) and the “Fengtai Advising Squad” (丰台劝导队). The growing prevalence of groups like the Chaoyang Masses across China points to deeper changes in the Xi era around the idea of “innovated” social governance, including the contemporary application of the so-called “Fengqiao experience” (枫桥经验), a Mao-era notion re-introduced by Xi Jinping.
The release yesterday of an updated list of domestic news sources that can legally be shared by digital media is an effort to maintain and reinforce the Party’s control over news at the source, and to expand sourcing in a way that befits broader changes to the country’s information landscape.
From its modern origins in the 1960s, the notion of “public diplomacy”, which broadly involves the cultivation by governments of public opinion in other countries and intercultural communications, was meant to distinguish government-led international public relations efforts from the distasteful notion of propaganda. The trend in China in the reform era, and particularly since the 1990s, has likewise been to distance international public relations from so-called “external propaganda,” a mainstay of the Chinese Communist Party since the founding of the PRC. Since 2013, however, the re-centralization of CCP power under Xi Jinping and a renewed emphasis on ideological conformity have reinvigorated the focus on “external propaganda” around the conviction that state media and even quasi-private actors must work internationally to “tell China’s story well” (讲好中国故事), thus enhancing the country’s “international discourse power” (国际话语权) as a key aspect of its “comprehensive national power” (综合国力).
In a post last month shared by major state media, a virtually unknown blogger named Li Guangman declared that China was turning away from capital and undergoing a “profound revolution.” In his latest post, Li praises the detention of former journalist Luo Changping as well as new rules driving private capital out of the news media.
An article penned by a virtually unknown blogger, Li Guangman (李光满), and shared across scores of websites, has prompted speculation that China is on the brink of new political movement.
In the PRC, democracy refers to the Marxist-Leninist system of democratic dictatorship (人民民主专政) and democratic centralism (民主集中制), in which the CCP is the ultimate representative of the peoples. This political system of “socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics” is explicitly distinguished from Western liberal democracy, which is seen as incompatible with China’s unique conditions.