This week we have a wide range of stories to pick from in China’s media, dealing with everything from dramatic falls from official grace to odd official appointments that expose the opacity of official appointment to begin with. To start with, we have the sentencing of former cyber czar Lu Wei, a key architect of […]
On the last day of February, a pair of new political catchphrases made their way not just into the Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper but into a central-level Party document. These were “high-level black,” or gaojihei (高级黑) and “low-level red,” or dijihong (低级红). Before we explore how these two terms emerged on the internet and […]
Topping our short list of media stories for the past week, the controversy over missing documents in a contract dispute between the private Kechley Energy and the state-run Xian Institute of Geological and Mineral Exploration — a case driven into the public eye by former television host Cui Yongyuan (崔永元) — took a bizarre turn as the key whistle-blower […]
In late January, Introduction to Constitutional Law (宪法学导论), a textbook on China’s Constitution first published in 2004 and now in its third edition, vanished from online bookstores, including Amazon.cn, JD.com and dangdang.com. Offline, the book was apparently pulled from shelves at Xinhua Bookstore, a government-affiliated book chain that is also the country’s largest. Written by Zhang […]
This week we have a People’s Daily commentary from a former New Zealand prime minister (who did not actually write it), a social media controversy over freckles that some felt insulted women across China, and a senior editor at a Party-run news website suspended for running fake news about an official appointment. To add a […]
In this imagined “New Era” of governance for China, President Xi Jinping has emphasised again and again the need to shore up the Chinese Communist Party’s dominance of all aspects of society. The media, as constructors and communicators of the Party’s “mainstream” ideology, are absolutely core to this mission, and so we have seen not […]
On January 25, all seven members of China’s elite Politburo Standing Committee, including President Xi Jinping, gathered at the headquarters of the flagship People’s Daily newspaper to underline the importance of “convergence media” and digital media development as a means of strengthening the Party’s dominance of ideas and information. Xi Jinping told those present that the Party […]
In late December, the local government in Qingdao, a major city in China’s coastal Shandong province, issued a curious notice. It instructed Communist Party cadres and government officials to “dine more with entrepreneurs, make friends with them, and learn from them.” This was, said the notice, about forming “a new type of cadre-entrepreneur relationship,” or […]
Anyone kicking back this morning with a fresh cup of coffee and their copy of the People’s Daily — let’s just pretend — would have noticed, down below all of the babel about the 40th anniversary of reforms and President Xi Jinping as “the core,” a smaller news item accompanied by a black-framed portrait. This […]
December is just around the corner. That means the Chinese Communist Party is gearing up for the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of “reform and opening up,” which formally dates back to the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the CCP, held in Beijing from December 18 to December 22, 1978. Yesterday, […]