Tag: china

National Security on the Silver Screen

Written by Zack Chiang on 2 October 2026. Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

More than three decades ago, the man who would later become Taiwan’s first democratically elected president sat down with a celebrated Japanese writer and spoke of “the sorrow of being born Taiwanese.” Lee Teng-hui (李登辉), the then Kuomintang (KMT) chairman who had been born in Taiwan during the period of Japanese colonial rule, was describing the tragedy of Taiwan’s repeated foreign occupations and historical lack of self-rule. “Even the KMT is a foreign regime,” he said in the 1994 interview.

For many in Taiwan, the interview represented a new national consciousness emerging amid a democratic transition. Two years later, Lee would be elected to the country’s top political post in a fully democratic process.

But in the debut episode of The Long Watch (交锋), a Chinese spy drama released last month, Lee’s words become something else entirely. They are the catalyst for dramatic action, with the underlying message that Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinese territory. The words are a warning to all Chinese — and a call to action.

Spearheaded by and co-produced with China’s Ministry of State Security, or MSS, the organ responsible for the country’s domestic and foreign intelligence and security affairs, The Long Watch is no ordinary spy drama. Its widespread release — and popular success — is a case study in how the role of China’s top spy agency has expanded under the current leadership. No longer is the secretive MSS focused only on domestic enforcement of political security, the harassment of overseas dissidents, economic espionage and hacking. It is an entertainment giant, working in newly creative ways to build national security consciousness on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party — so that the public is attracted, and even electrified, by its core messages.

As the MSS itself asserted in an article last week, the public plays an important role in creating a “solid foundation” for national security, it said, adding that integrating the security agency’s efforts with the life of the public is now a key principle driving national security work.

Capitalizing on Crisis

In the opening scene of The Long Watch, a Chinese news broadcaster reads Lee Teng-hui’s words, calling them “incitement of ethnic division and separatism,” before shifting focus to its three key characters — undercover MSS agents in a Hong Kong dim sum cafe. The action unfolds in the run-up to the “Third Taiwan Strait Crisis” between 1995 and 1996, precipitated when the United States granted Lee a visitor visa to speak at his alma mater, Cornell University, a move the PRC interpreted as encouraging Taiwanese separatism.

The Long Watch — or Jiaofeng in Chinese, meaning “clash of swords” — topped the nation’s weekly ratings on all channels after all episodes were released in September, according to the country’s television data monitoring platform Kuyun (酷云). The drama topped prime-time TV ratings during its premiere on September 6, the state-run CCTV, one of the show’s broadcasters, reported. The series draws inspiration from real intelligence missions that took place in China and Taiwan during the mid-1990s, blended with fictional characters and locations.

Promotional poster for *The Long Watch.*

China, which sees Taiwan as an “inalienable part of its territory,” largely bases its “sovereignty” claim over Taiwan on the island’s partial annexation by the Qing dynasty in 1683. The CCP has never ruled the island. But in recent years, the PRC has stepped up its coercion of Taiwan through regular military exercises and threats to unify by force if necessary. Chinese and Taiwanese leadership have not spoken directly since the election of then-President Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party in 2016, despite DPP efforts to resume communication.

The release of The Long Watch coincides with the more recent escalation in espionage allegations across the Taiwan Strait. In a 2020 press conference, the Chinese government’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesperson Zhu Fenglian (朱凤莲) suggested that Taiwan’s “intelligence agencies” have “engaged extensively in intelligence theft and subversive activities.” In 2023, a revision to the counter-espionage law expanded the Chinese government’s power to target security risks. Questioned about the risk of visiting China, Ma Xiaoguang (马晓光), another Taiwan Affairs Office spokesperson, said during a 2023 press conference that the law’s intention was to “provide peaceful and integrated development of cross-strait relations.”

Though open-source data on Taiwanese spies in China is limited, the MSS claimed in 2024 that it had cracked over a thousand cases involving Taiwanese espionage activities. In response, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said that the CCP abused its power by detaining people who do not conform to its political ideology. According to Taiwan’s National Security Bureau, 58 people were accused of providing intelligence tips to Chinese officials between last year and March this year. This June, Taiwan launched a website for Chinese nationals to offer intelligence tips, which was then condemned by China, which said it would take countermeasures.

People Indicted in Chinese Espionage Cases in Taiwan

Hover or tap a year

Source: National Security Bureau [1] [2] Case notes: Central News Agency, Reuters, Global Taiwan Institute

Interactive graphic created by Claude with China Media Project research

In the past, Chinese spy dramas have rarely touched on espionage activities in the period after the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, retreated to the island after losing the civil war with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949.

But in September last year, another series, Silent Honor (沉默的荣耀) broke new ground as the first TV drama on CCP espionage operations in Taiwan set in the year 1949. It was also a breakout success, according to statistics from China’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA), which claimed it attracted 960 million viewers on its television debut.

A workshop on Silent Honor was held by the NRTA on October 25 last year, the same day that China marked its newly established “Taiwan Retrocession Day,” marking the end of Japanese colonial rule at the close of the Second World War. Joined by the central and provincial propaganda offices, the NRTA workshop emphasized the need to “tell good stories” (讲好故事) and commemorate the heroes. But the message just behind was unmistakable: Taiwan’s history is China’s history, and China’s national sovereignty over Taiwan is a matter of “firm will” (坚定意志).

"Every Citizen's Responsibility"

Silent Honor was also produced under the “direction” (主导) of the MSS. But whereas that production is set in an era few are alive to remember, The Long Watch’s focus on the modern period feels far more relevant to contemporary audiences. Both productions represent a significant development in the MSS’ efforts to reach the public directly through the media.

A closer look at the promotion surrounding The Long Watch paints a picture of this campaign’s core message. Across stories in state media, as well as in other official outlets, in press conferences, and in MSS social media posts, a common thread emerges — that national security is “every citizen’s responsibility.”

For example, the People’s Daily, the Party’s official mouthpiece, ran six dedicated articles about the series last month alone, spanning reviews, commentaries, and interviews with actors. One article notes that the show’s realism is what sets it apart from other spy dramas released in recent years. This was possible, says the article, only thanks to cooperation with the MSS, which aided the producers by providing them with research materials and access to security officers for interviews. Another commentary notes that the series’ realistic narratives “break down barriers” between popular understandings about spies and the reality of national security work, leaving readers with a call to action:

“The small acts of perseverance by countless ordinary people have built the most solid grassroots barrier for national security. 12339 [the phone number and online platform opened by the MSS for whistleblowing tips] is no longer just a cold number, but an important channel for the whole nation to participate in safeguarding national security.”

The MSS has undergone a significant transformation under Xi Jinping, reshuffling its leadership structure and beefing up its capacity and scope of work over the past decade. Introduced in 2014, Xi’s “Comprehensive National Security Concept” (总体国家安全观總), as scholar Sheena Chestnut Greitens writes, pays close attention to “the risks of internal destabilization due to foreign subversion and infiltration,” particularly from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

The same year, a new counter-espionage law was passed and then further revised in 2023 to expand the definition of espionage and mandate further public education and awareness campaigns on national security threats. Soon after, the MSS began to experiment with creative ways to reach the public. It opened a WeChat account that provides updates on the country’s espionage challenges and released a comic series based on true counter-espionage stories in 2024. And in 2025, it deployed its own AI anchor, “Agent 012339,” a reference to its own intelligence hotline. Ambitious television productions now seem to have entered the agency’s playbook for successful outreach campaigns.

While agencies like the Taiwan Affairs Office and Taiwan-facing PRC media have taken aim at Taiwanese audiences in promoting the series, the success of this national security propaganda push has so far been limited to China. For its part, Taiwan has developed its own ways to counterbalance China’s unification narrative through the media. Released in August last year, the government-subsidized TV drama Zero Day Attack, which depicted a Chinese military invasion scenario, faced stiff criticism from Chinese authorities months ahead of release as well as after, panned as a tool of “cognitive warfare” and incitement of political resistance against China.

For China’s leaders, it seems, a drama unfolding from any other perspective is simply not entertaining.

Scripting the Source

Written by Yu Tian on 24 September 2026. Posted in Tracking Control.

“Many of our interviews aren’t done on the spot these days,” says Wu Ting, a journalist who works in television news production at Jiangxi Television, a provincial-level state broadcaster in China. “Instead, higher-ups set the direction for us in meetings ahead of time, and we just complete the filming on-site.” This may seem a surprising admission from a working journalist, but it is not an isolated phenomenon, Wu told Tian Jian.

In recent years, the way some media outlets in China conduct interviews has changed. No longer do interviews need to unfold before the camera lens. Rather, their basic framework can often be set before the recording ever begins. At some television stations and for documentary-style feature segments, interviewees receive talking points before taping and some are even required to recite lines prepared for them. The interview, in other words, is no longer something generated on the spot. It is a programmed output.

The trend is expanding across many kinds of programming, says Wu, including current affairs reporting, segments on social issues and profile interviews. “If we can find someone who is willing to go on camera and say things the way we want, all the better,” she says. “We go back to them again and again, and give them a few hundred yuan for travel expenses as compensation.”

To explore this trend, Tian Jian interviewed several media professionals who have worked at Chinese television stations. For reasons of personal safety and to protect their employment, all interviewees in this article except Su Yutong and Liu Dongmei have been identified by pseudonyms.

Huang Miao, director of the news features department at Zhejiang Television, who has also worked on documentary-style programs, said that since the pandemic, public frustration has been growing under pressures like unemployment and mortgage payments. Yet the content, settings and structure of feature interviews must still follow official rules, so what gets said in an interview is often decided ahead of time. “That includes the dialogue between reporters and interviewees,” she said. “Content that once came out of live interaction has been moved up to the planning stage. The on-camera question-and-answer has become more a visual rendering of a set narrative than a process of producing information.”

Because hers is a state-run outlet, Huang said, its reporting must meet the requirements of the propaganda department. “What they want to see is that we ‘sing the main melody’ (唱好主旋律), guide the audience and spread ‘correct thinking,’” she said, referring to Chinese Communist Party language for ideological control. “That means we have to tell interviewees what to say. Some interviewees are given a few fairly standard lines, and they can’t really stray far from them.”

“You can change the tone, but you can’t change the meaning,” she adds.

Risk Management First

Behind this change lies a shift toward what these journalists call “risk management.” In the past, the risks a news story posed in China were dealt with during editing and publication, when stories could be reviewed, revised or rewritten. Today, some of those risks are neutralized before reporting even begins, so that content meets set requirements from the moment it is created.

Su Yutong, a former reporter for Beijing Radio who now lives in Germany, said the practice reflects the climate of public opinion in recent years. “Some interviewees are prone to grumbling and complaining, so sometimes the script is written in advance. The interviewee reads it over first, and then reads it out word for word.”

Such practices are not uncommon in news work, she said. “Sometimes people dig up footage or photos and find they’re several years old. That kind of thing we could see coming. But now even interviews have been reduced to reading from a script. It has reached an extreme.”

Four editors and reporters in Zhejiang, Shaanxi, Beijing and elsewhere told Tian Jian that interviews based on pre-prepared scripts are fairly common. This up-front control can include supplying the range of questions in advance, limiting the direction of answers, setting up frameworks to steer around sensitive topics and, in some cases, handing interviewees ready-made lines. What they say is confined within boundaries drawn beforehand.

Gu Le, an insider at Shanghai Oriental Television, said that controlling what interviewees say has become part of news censorship, with programs going through multiple rounds of review before broadcast. “The most important thing now is to keep anything uncontrollable from appearing. Rather than deleting it later, it’s better to prevent it from appearing in the first place,” Gu said.

Gu pointed to a recent viral interview with motorcycle entrepreneur Zhang Xue as an example. Zhang founded the brand ZXMOTO in 2024, and its bikes won two straight races at the World Superbike Championship round in Portugal in March 2026. In a post-race interview, when a reporter prompted him to thank the Chongqing government for its support, he replied, “Not a single penny.” When another reporter, from the Chongqing Communist Youth League, asked what drove him, he replied, “Why don’t you just tell me what to say, and I’ll say it?” Social media users passed the clip around as a rare case of an interviewee going off script.

According to Pan Yi, a veteran Chinese journalist, this shift has also changed the source of journalists’ professional anxiety. Where they once worried about whether a story would get published, they now worry about whether trouble will follow “the moment words come out of [an interviewee’s] mouth.”

“This kind of pressure has warped journalists’ professional instincts, shifting their focus from uncovering stories to assessing risks,” said Pan. “Today’s journalists are less ‘looking for people’ than ‘looking for characters.’ Our function has been drastically watered down. We’ve been reduced to casting directors for a grand narrative, responsible only for finding interviewees who fit neatly into a predetermined script. As for the risks behind the content, editors-in-chief and media platforms hedge against them through rigorous self-censorship.”

Dai An, a communication scholar at the Communication University of China, said the goal is to head off risks in advance and keep problems from arising during interviews. By filtering out uncertainty at the very start of the process, news production becomes highly “controllable.” “This approach completely stifles the room for authentic expression,” he said. “Complex truths that might otherwise have sparked debate in the newsroom are shut out of view the moment the shutter clicks or the recorder switches on.”

Under this approach, reporters are no longer focused on providing information, but on avoiding statements that deviate from expectations. What can and cannot be said is often settled before the interview begins, and whether a segment airs smoothly depends on whether it stays within those boundaries.

“Scripting” the Editorial Process

As pre-interview controls have tightened, the role of interviewees in Chinese news has also changed. Once seen as sources of information and voices for different viewpoints, they have been folded into predetermined narratives, and their room for expression has noticeably narrowed.

The shift has not gone unnoticed by news consumers. Despite the government’s professed crackdown on fake news, suspicions that reporting and editing are “scripted” have persisted, frequently drawing the attention of the public and international media.

On April 16, 2022, for example, CCTV’s flagship evening newscast, “Xinwen Lianbo,” reported that some supermarkets in Shanghai had reopened during the city’s Covid-19 lockdown, with “ample goods and normal stock.” Internet users later questioned whether the footage had been staged. The next day, the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee’s propaganda office released an official response stating that the footage had been shot on April 15 in Jinshan District, which was “nearing zero-Covid” status. But a photographer using the name “Fei Diwen” (費迪聞) later claimed on WeChat that he had shot the footage himself on March 31 at an RT-Mart supermarket in Yangpu District, and that CCTV had used it without permission.

Such controversies are not isolated. On December 10, 2025, CCTV-4’s program “National Memory” (國家記憶) aired the first episode of “The Call of the Times” (時代呼喚), a documentary series about China’s high-speed rail. Some scenes of railway construction bore a “Doubao AI” (豆包) watermark in the lower right corner, the mark of ByteDance’s AI assistant. Railway enthusiasts online noticed that the construction footage “defied common sense.” The episode was then taken down from CCTV’s website — and when it was reposted, the footage had been replaced.

Screenshot from the original episode of the CCTV documentary series “Chinese High Speed Rail: The Call of the Times” with AI-generated images. Via 复兴号铁路 on WeChat.

Guo Yajun, a scholar at Peking University’s School of Journalism and Communication, said the phenomenon reflects an adjustment in how news is produced as a whole. “When an interviewee’s statements are controlled in advance, the interview is no longer a process of gathering information, but the confirmation of a predetermined narrative.”

“The media no longer generate content on the spot,” he said. “Instead, they move the uncertainty to the stage before the interview begins.”

Guo said that while this mechanism helps contain public opinion risks in the short term, it will undermine the basic function of news in the long run. “News has traditionally relied on bringing different pieces of information together in pursuit of the truth. Once expression is uniformly restricted, audiences no longer confront reality itself, only a single, filtered version of it. As the public keeps noticing this gap, trust will gradually erode, and the media’s credibility will fall further.”

The Changing Role of Journalists

Faced with preemptive control and predetermined narrative frameworks, journalists are no longer in the business of uncovering information and building narratives. Their job has become managing risk.

Liu Dongmei, a former reporter at Hefei Radio in Anhui province, said that beginning in 2023, the first question before an interview was no longer “what to ask,” but “what not to ask.”

“The station instructed us that preparing for an interview wasn’t just about collecting information and drafting questions, but also about assessing the potential risks posed by the interviewee,” Liu said. “In the end, I could only find interviewees through classmates’ referrals or by approaching people I knew. Since we were on good terms, they would just say, ‘Tell me what you want me to say, and I’ll go along with it.’ I actually felt pretty awkward about it.”

A Chinese reporter stands nearby, holding a script for the interviewee to read from. (Screenshot from Xiaohongshu)

Liu found it hard to adapt. Three months into the job, she quit reporting and moved to another industry. She said that by the time she realized her work was shifting from “identifying questions” to “managing risks,” she had already decided to leave. “Where else — in foreign media, Hong Kong or Taiwan — is news reported like this? You focus only on the risks a story might pose to the station, never on its news value.”

As censorship permeates the day-to-day operations of every media outlet, journalists’ professional roles are being reshaped — from a focus on content to a focus on structure. In the process, journalists are no longer just reporters. They have also become regulatory checkpoints within the news system. Their work is not only to present reality but to ensure that expression stays within the bounds the authorities deem acceptable.

Shifting Boundaries

With the move toward pre-interview preparation and the changing role of journalists, the nature of news storytelling itself has begun to change. Content no longer comes primarily from on-site interaction but is increasingly built on a prearranged framework, producing a more uniform overall presentation.

The Chinese journalists, journalism instructors and media professionals interviewed for this story all described a similar situation in their workplaces: the information that reaches readers often already carries a clear stance and bias, making it hard for some readers to grasp the full course of events in stories about mass incidents or so-called “revenge against society,” a phrase used for random acts of violence.

Liu said that for news and programming, propaganda departments typically draw up a plan in advance that the media must follow. “The ‘preset structure’ of news has been around a long time, and many people have grown used to working this way. Whether they are fresh out of journalism school or reporters with years of experience, they all work within the same framework. That includes the questions and answers, which are settled before the interview takes place. The interview itself is largely just a supplement to what’s already there.”

When the content of an interview is prepared before recording, the way news is produced changes, too. Much of the information no longer comes from the scene, and exchanges between reporters and interviewees often amount to repeating predetermined lines. What audiences ultimately see is often nothing more than a selection of pre-approved statements.

Tian Yu is a freelance journalist covering Chinese-language current affairs and social issues, with a focus on China’s media landscape and public governance. This article originally appeared in Chinese at Tian Jian (田間).

Careful Words on the Trump-Xi Summit

Written by David Bandurski on 14 May 2026. Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

In global news today, and certainly in China news, there is just one story topping the headlines — the state visit of Donald Trump to Beijing, the first visit by a US president in nearly 10 years. Is that story splashed across the front page of the official newspaper of the ruling Chinese Communist Party? Of course not.

Trump arrived in China aboard Air Force One late yesterday, and yet the People’s Daily (人民日报) today occupies its prime space with niggling ideological points about Chinese-style modernization and combating “formalism” (形式主义), the party’s term to criticise bureaucratic box-ticking. It moves on to “red genes,” a buzzword about keeping to and cherishing the Party’s political tradition. The myopia continues on page two, where grain security, regional economic development in southwestern Yunnan province, and the use of AI technology at a port in the city of Ningbo are marched out for readers.

Don’t look for America on the front page of today’s *People’s Daily* newspaper.

How do we explain such journalistic obtuseness on such an important news day, when so much is riding on what media across the world are calling “high-stakes talks”? The simplest answer is that the People’s Daily is not a newspaper, not in the way many of us generally understand newspapers or news outlets — as the “eyes and ears” of society, drawing public attention to the points that matter most. In the party’s own formulation, the People’s Daily is the “mouth and throat” of the leadership. And today, when diplomacy is live and the outcomes uncertain — and, yes, high-stakes — this official voice must speak cautiously.

Only on page three does the United States finally make its appearance. But there is no mention at all of Trump or his entourage. Instead, the focus is on “civic exchange” (民间交往) between the two countries, the more grassroots-level engagement that Chinese leaders like to call people-to-people exchange.

The piece of apparent second priority on this same page is a letter from Xie Feng (谢锋), China’s ambassador to the United States, written in measured tones to sketch the boundaries of what the CCP leadership hopes these talks will address. The letter refers to these as the “four red lines” (四条红线) in the relationship — meaning “the Taiwan question,” democracy and human rights, China’s development rights, and fundamental differences in political systems.

These cautions, which state media and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have pressed in recent days, are not called “red lines” in the headline or high up in the piece, another sign of the cautious but firm posture. “With sails raised high to break great waves, we climb new peaks to open new horizons,” Xie Feng writes lyrically at the finish, before concluding with a basketful of official diplomatic buzzwords. “We look forward, under the strategic guidance of the two heads of state, to exploring the right path of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation.”

Next up on the page is the obligatory foreign voice. Not surprisingly, it is the familiar figure of Robert Lawrence Kuhn, an American commentator who regularly features on Chinese state media, closely mirroring CCP talking points. Kuhn strikes a carefully optimistic note, expressing confidence in the summit while calling for “practical expectations” (务实预期). “I have an optimistic attitude toward this meeting of heads of state,” Kuhn says, hitting exactly the note China’s leaders are certainly hoping for today. “I am full of confidence.”

On the next page, the People’s Daily returns to myopic form. Page four offers a teachers’ forum on the spirit of education, a Xi Jinping-inflected essay urging young people to create new achievements at their respective posts, and a piece on grassroots disaster preparedness across China’s provinces. There is also a mention of the WorldSkills Competition (WSC), coming to Shanghai in a distant four months.

The paper is done talking about America. It appears nowhere in the pages that follow, not even on the commentary and international pages.

The front page of tomorrow’s edition will surely be an explosion of photographs, with stiff handshakes and strolls down the red carpet. Very probably, a readout on Trump’s visit will appear in the “newspaper eye” (报眼), that position of pride to the right of the People’s Daily masthead. There may be further signs, somewhere in those pages, of how China wishes to frame the meeting, and its hoped-for outcomes.

Today? The mouthpiece would rather not say.

How China’s Press Abandoned Its Readers

Written by David Bandurski on 15 April 2026. Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

In a rare post yesterday, a user on China’s WeChat platform offered a thoughtful — and cutting — assessment of the state of the country’s news environment. Responding to a recent wave of notices from newspapers about pending closures, the essay countered the idea that this trend stems from the growing irrelevance of traditional print media in an era defined by digital media and AI.

The author’s core argument was that traditional newspapers and magazines in China, which from the early 2000s through the early 2010s carved out a space of relative vibrance, have not just shifted to digital — but have, more importantly, abandoned any pretense of reporting news or doing journalism.

“I have a perspective that may be a bit tougher to hear,” the post read. “That it was the newspapers that first lost their capacity to produce content, and that it was they in fact who took the initiative in abandoning their readers.”

Well worth a read, the post is an excellent complement to several recent stories we have written here at the China Media Project, including Dalia Parete’s look at the collapse of local broadcasters across China, our piece over at Tian Jian (田间), translated here, about the extreme challenges facing journalists in China today, and my own post about the gleeful uptake of AI by official state media, who have little need in a climate saturated by propaganda for the soul-searching one finds among journalists elsewhere in the world.

Despite the fact that this post made no directly correlation between the worsening journalism space and the unbending media and information control policies of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, it was removed from WeChat sometime earlier today, yielding a message that it was in violation of “relevant laws.”

A translation of the first two sections of the WeChat post follow, and we also provide a downloadable PDF down below for those who wish to read the original.

____________________

Since the outset of this year, at least 14 newspapers have announced they are closing shop. Thing about this for just a moment and you realize that notices of this kind are no longer news. By now, we should be long accustomed to the long winter of print. Some point to the frenetic pace of modern life — people are just too unsettled to sit back and read the newspaper. Others say that newspapers have simply been forsaken by the times.

I have a perspective that may be a bit tougher to hear. That it was the newspapers that first lost their capacity to produce content, and that it was they in fact who took the initiative in abandoning their readers.

01

Have you guys noticed that it’s not just newspaper readership that has cratered? It’s also the case that fewer people are watching television. These days, craving news or gossip, we turn first to Weibo, to the push notifications we received from news apps, to Douyin, to WeChat public accounts, or to Toutiao and scores of other such channels.

Print and television media no longer have the news that people need.

According to the Blue Book of Data Journalism (2024), 831 separate news website domains are operated by newspapers in our country, as well as 852 mobile apps and 9,393 WeChat public accounts. The total number of users of new media has passed 10 billion, and total revenue from the new media operations of traditional print newspapers reached 6.22 billion RMB, up 3.4 percent from 2023.

So, we can see that traditional print media have not simply been sitting around and waiting to die. They have been transforming.

The form has changed without a doubt. But to what end? Our mobile screens are filled with “shocking” headlines, with “plot twists” and “flowing tears.” Click in to have a look and you’ll find that the six most basic elements of any news story are nowhere to be found. The headline is just meant to grab your eyeballs (吸引眼球), but the content it incomplete from top to bottom, and at the end nothing is clear — or maybe there’s just borderline content tossed in to log an instant of traffic.

One example from a story I saw just yesterday. The headline: “US Military Official: American Forces Consumed 7.6 Million Cups of Coffee During Strikes on Iran.” The outlet that published it is one of the country’s leading domestic media outlets.

A video report from the official China News Service on Facebook shows the remark from US General Caine about the amount of coffee consumed by the US military amid strikes on Iran.

I couldn’t help but ask myself — what is the point of posting this sort of thing? Is this something that can raise public awareness, or something that can advance social progress?

In the meantime, things of genuine social concern go unreported, and stories from the grassroots go unreported. Most alarmingly, this mode of news that does not look like news (这种新闻不像新闻的模式) has already become the industry mainstream.

02

What is the role of the media? In the view of the West, media are “public instruments,” or a “Fourth Estate.”

You’ll find today that many reports bear bylines like “reporter so-and-so.” But read the entire report and you’ll find yourself asking: Where is this reporter exactly? Perhaps they are scrolling through Weibo or lying in wait in the comment sections, or they are waiting for official notices to come out. Whatever the case, they are anywhere but at the scene where news is happening.

When media no longer have the capacity to verify or produce information, but rather become the frontline consumers of information, the truth jostled about amid the flood and frenzy of public attention and traffic often proves too delicate to withstand it.

Back in January, one case in Taizhou, in Zhejiang province, went through three iterations involving a husband and wife and food safety. First, the pair claimed to have been “poisoned” after eating baby cabbage ordered online. Next, the story was that “the seller wrapped the vegetables in toxic newspaper.” Then, finally, it was that “the husband poisoned his wife.” Finally, the authorities announced that “the couple had colluded to poison themselves and fraudulently claim compensation.”

Early in the story, some outlets ran stories based on the couples’ own account that conclude that “the seller used toxic newspaper to wrap the vegetables.” As the story developed, some media spread the claim, without any clear or credible sourcing, that “the husband had poisoned his wife.” When the truth finally dawned and police disclosed that the couple was suspected of extortion and blackmail, some of the outlets that had leapt on the story from the start quietly pulled their posts offline, draining their last dregs of credibility.

The root cause here is that media have become like headless flies that buzz off toward the stench of traffic.

When media no longer provide [the public] with exclusives, no longer offer depth, no longer offer truth, what can possibly induce readers to stay? If media have been abandoned, they have only themselves to blame.

For those who wish to read on, we are posting a full archived version of the post below.

Download

Sweeping the Ancestors Aside

Written by David Bandurski on 8 April 2026. Posted in China Newspeak.

Early Sunday morning, as China’s national anthem, “March of the Volunteers,” blared across the granite plaza of Longhua Martyrs Cemetery in Shanghai, honor guards marched in lockstep toward a tomb commemorating Communist martyrs executed nearly a century ago. Nearby, a group of Young Pioneers, the Chinese Communist Party organization for primary school-aged children, recited “Ode to the Green Pine,” a lyric poem standard at Party youth events, its imagery of pines standing unbowed through the cold of winter a tribute, borrowed from ancient aesthetic traditions, to the unyielding spirit of revolutionary martyrs — and to the Party’s unbending resolve.

The ceremony in Shanghai was echoed across the country over the weekend in celebrations that honored the multi-generational legacy of the Party. At the Shenyang cemetery for martyrs of the 1950–53 war on the Korean peninsula, students from Liaoning University climbed the steps to lay flowers before a martyr’s tombstone. “As I walk through the cemetery, the martyrs’ stories I once read in the textbooks feel more real,” physics student Yang Xinli (杨兴立) was quoted as saying in the official People’s Daily. The rest of his quote was a perfect roadmap pointing the way from remembrance to obligation. “As young people of the new era, we will forever remember the contributions of the revolutionary martyrs, deepen our love for the homeland, study diligently and put our learning into practice, and make the contributions necessary to our generation.”

In the headlines and public ceremonies, the martyrs to the cause of the Chinese Communist Party were honored in place of family ancestors, the mythology of sacrifice and struggle overlaid on Qingming — also known as “Tomb Sweeping Day” — one of the oldest folk observances in Chinese culture.

In its traditional form, the holiday is largely a family affair. Descendants gather at ancestral graves to clear away weeds, burn incense, and lay offerings of food. In places like Taiwan, visiting family members may cast divination blocks to learn whether their forebears have eaten their fill. The day is, at its heart, an opportunity for the reunion of the living and the dead. It is intimate, family-focused, and rooted in Confucian traditions of filial piety that predate the Communist era by more than two millennia.

In the version that played out in official media in China this weekend, such heartfelt family affairs were consigned to a space outside the headlines. Emotion, such a powerful tool, was reserved for the Party itself.

A bronze at Shanghai’s Longhua Martyrs Cemetery commemorates the sacrifices of previous generations for the Communist Party cause. One name on the wall behind is that of Ouyang Li’an (1914 – February 7, 1931), a native of Changsha, Hunan, who was arrested at a Party meeting in Shanghai and shot at Longhua at the age of 17 — the youngest of those executed. IMAGE: Wikimedia Commons.

Across China on Sunday, the People’s Daily reported this week, “cadres and the masses” traveled not to family graves but to revolutionary sites, martyrs’ cemeteries, and red heritage zones, where they “drew on the strength of faith” and “carried forward the spirit of martyrs.” The piece was republished across Party-state media, including on the website of CCTV, China’s official state broadcaster.

The Ministry of National Defense website carried its own Qingming special, publishing a report from China National Defense News that dispatched reporters to sites along the route of the Communist Party’s much-mythologized “Long March” (1934–35), a trek during which they retreated to escape Nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石). The journey across rugged terrain has since been enshrined as a core founding myth of the Party’s rise to power. In Huining, in western Gansu province, at the point where three Red Army columns are said to have converged to mark the march’s end in 1936, tens of thousands of students across seven sites filed into formation and took oaths via livestream.

In perhaps the most vivid illustration of the interbraiding of Party legacy and family obligation, the China National Defense News piece told the story of a Hubei family that had tended the grave of an unnamed Red Army soldier for five generations. The family had handed this volunteer tradition down from father to son since 1936, the paper reported.

To the critical eye, such a story seems too good to be true, a perfect patrilineal line binding successive generations in an unbroken chain of duty. True or not, the license with which such details are delivered in the Party-run press has become an annual Qingming tradition in China, a ritual of displacement in which private and poignant commemorations of the dead are substituted with political mythmaking.

For eight decades now, such propaganda has been inseverable from China’s Tomb Sweeping tradition.

Revolutionary Ancestries

In April 1949, months before the PRC was formally proclaimed, the People’s Daily reported that Baoding, a city in Hebei province just southwest of Beijing, had organized public gatherings to commemorate the saints of the revolution during Qingming. Thousands reportedly attended the ceremonies, in which local officials pledged to carry forward the “unfinished work of the martyrs.”

At the monument to the Red Army’s capture of Luding Bridge, a veteran is shown recounting Long March stories to students. Photo by Sun Junjie, *China National Defense News*.

By 1964, the People’s Daily reported that an estimated 50,000 people had visited graves at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing alone, and that Young Pioneers — in a historical echo of ceremonies this past week — had held induction ceremonies at the feet of martyrs’ tombs in cities from Nanjing to Guangzhou. The report even noted that more than 10,000 people in Fushun had swept the grave of Lei Feng (雷锋) — the model soldier whose martyrdom had been manufactured by propaganda teams just the year before.

The only significant interruption to the march of martyr celebrations on Tomb Sweeping Day came in 1976, as the Gang of Four, the radical clique that dominated Chinese politics in the waning years of the Mao era, dismissed Qingming as “a ghost festival.” The day was to be rooted out as a superstitious example of Mao’s “Four Olds” — outdated ideas, culture, customs, and habits. That year, according to an account published in the People’s Daily two years later, a young bulldozer driver named Han Zhixiong (韩志雄) had been arrested by plainclothes police for mourning the death of Premier Zhou Enlai (周恩来) and posting a satirical essay at the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the center of Tiananmen Square. Han was imprisoned for more than a year along with other conscientious mourners, but by November 1978 had been rehabilitated.

By April 1981, the Gang of Four tried and convicted and the historical resolution just two months away that would criticize the Cultural Revolution as an “error comprehensive in magnitude and protracted in duration,” the People’s Daily was again running Qingming coverage. Far from being an outmoded and superstitious tradition, the day was again a celebration of martyrs past that pointed the way to the Party’s enduring future.

The Cultural Revolution had only interrupted what had already, by all official accounts, become tradition. In Qingming that year, 750 Young Pioneers from a Beijing primary school gathered before the Monument to the People’s Heroes. Beneath a national flag “undulating in the wind,” they recited in unison a poem called “Treading in the Footsteps of the Revolutionary Martyrs,” and inducted 37 new members into the mass organization intended to bear the Party’s legacy of rule into the future like the “blazing red flags” they held aloft.

Interviewed by the People’s Daily, the head teacher from Shuncheng Street No. 1 Primary School was quoted as saying that Qingming remembrance of revolutionary martyrs was “our school’s longstanding tradition.” Just a few short decades after intimate tributes to the family had been supplanted in public life by grandiose gestures to the revolutionary heroes, things had always been this way.

A Prize Against the Odds

Written by David Bandurski on 2 March 2026. Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

Over the weekend, the results of the seventh edition of the Journalists Home News Prize (记者的家新闻奖), a grassroots journalism awards initiative that has been affectionately called “China’s Pulitzers” (中国普利策), were published through the WeChat public account of veteran investigative journalist Liu Hu (刘虎). The release is remarkable considering Liu’s circumstances just a few short weeks earlier.

On February 1, public security officers in the western city of Chengdu detained both Liu and his colleague Wu Yingjiao (巫英蛟) as they were traveling separately — Liu en route to Beijing, and Wu in Hebei. The next day, Chengdu police formally announced that the journalists each faced criminal charges of false accusation (诬告陷害罪) and illegal business operations (非法经营罪) stemming from a report on WeChat alleging that local officials in Sichuan had broken a previous agreement with investors in a construction project, seizing control of the assets.

The police actions triggered a wave of public attention in China — and a countervailing wave of online censorship. China Digital Times reported that 21 articles dealing with the case were added to its deleted-content archive in the five days following the detentions, nearly double the total number of deleted articles added to CDT’s archive on all topics in December last year. The detentions backfired, as one blogger predicted they would. Writing in a post that was subsequently deleted, Xu Peng (徐鹏) observed that few people had actually read Liu’s article before it was taken down — but that the arrests had spread awareness of the case “at home and abroad,” leaving officials with a mess of their own making. “In the end, public opinion spiraled far beyond their control,” Xu wrote, “and the whole plan backfired.”

Liu Hu and Wu Yingjiao were released on bail on February 16, just two weeks before the prize results appeared. “I believe everyone will welcome this ‘follow-up police report,’” wrote rights defense lawyer Pu Zhiqiang (浦志强) on social media. “Best wishes to you both: get some proper rest and have a good New Year.”

This recent brush with the authorities was not Liu Hu’s first. He had previously been detained in 2013 on defamation charges after publicly naming officials he accused of corruption; those charges were eventually dropped.

It was against that backdrop that Liu launched the Journalists Home News Prize in 2019, reviving a name with deep roots in Chinese journalism. “Journalists Home” (记者的家) began as a BBS forum in 2000, a gathering place for reporters during an era of relative openness, when forms of journalism like investigative reporting were flourishing in a relative sense. The prize started with four categories, a public service award added in 2021. Now in its seventh year, it has become what one longtime participant called “possibly the best cross-platform journalism prize on the Chinese mainland.”

That the seventh edition appeared at all — published after delays caused by what Liu described only as ‘an unmentionable mishap’ (不可描述的意外) — is a reminder of the tug-and-pull that persists in China’s media environment, where idealistic professionals can actively seek out space for their work despite immense risks. This year’s jury added four additional commendations beyond the original slate, citing an unusually strong field — an expansion requiring an additional 50,000 yuan in prize money. Southern Weekly (南方周末), a commercial newspaper under Guangdong’s CCP-run Nanfang Daily Group, and the independent WeChat-based platform Aquarius Era (水瓶纪元) emerged as the strongest performers across categories, each taking two prizes.

The nonfiction grand prize went to Luo Ting (罗婷) for “Rape in the Bridal Chamber” (婚房里的强奸案), published in April 2025 in “Everyday People” (每日人物), a WeChat public account run by People (人物) magazine under Beijing Boya Tianxia Media Culture Development, a company majority owned by entrepreneur Rong Bo (荣波) . The piece reconstructed an engagement rape case in Shanxi province, tracing not only the assault itself but the months of family negotiation and legal maneuvering that followed. The story exposed what the jury described as “the brutal landscape of China’s county-town marriage market.”

The public service grand prize recognized Xie Chan’s (谢婵) return to Wuhan on the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 lockdown, published by Aquarius Era. The report revisited journalists, artists, volunteers and ordinary citizens to recover recollections of the early chaos and grassroots mutual aid — memories the jury described as filling a gap in the collective memory of a national disaster.

The major social event reporting prize went to Han Qian (韩谦) of Southern Weekly for a multi-year series (archived) on the practice of residential surveillance at a designated location (指定居所监视居住), or RSDL, a legally defined but widely criticized form of residential surveillance that critics say has been systematically abused as a tool of extrajudicial interrogation. Han’s reporting helped transform an arcane legal debate into a public issue and was credited with contributing pressure that preceded new regulations jointly issued by the Supreme Procuratorate — China’s top prosecutorial authority — and the Ministry of Public Security.

Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) is a form of pre-trial detention authorized under Article 73 of China’s Criminal Procedure Law, as amended in 2012. It allows authorities to detain a suspect for up to six months at a location of the police’s choosing — typically a hotel, guesthouse, or other non-official facility — without disclosing that location to the suspect’s family or lawyer.

Although technically classified as a non-custodial measure weaker than formal arrest, RSDL functions in practice as incommunicado detention. Key features include:

Detention for up to six months without formal charges
No requirement to disclose the detention location, particularly in cases involving alleged national security offenses
Severely restricted or denied access to legal counsel
No meaningful judicial oversight or review

Between 2013 and 2020, an estimated 57,000 people were held under RSDL, with usage peaking in 2020 at a 136 percent increase over the previous year. UN human rights experts have concluded that RSDL, as applied, constitutes a form of enforced disappearance and may amount to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. It has been disproportionately used against journalists, lawyers, and human rights defenders. In June 2025, China’s Supreme Procuratorate and Ministry of Public Security jointly issued new regulations intended to curb RSDL abuses, including stricter approval requirements and mandatory prosecutorial oversight — reforms legal experts have welcomed while noting significant gaps remain.

Source: International Service for Human Rights

The outstanding media professional grand prize honored Zhou Zhimin (周智敏), a senior reporter at Shanghai Television (上海广播电视台), for a 24-minute video investigation into a school dormitory fire in Henan province that killed 13 primary school students in January 2024. Though authorities had quickly promised a public accounting, 16 months passed in silence. Zhou’s report, published in December 2025, pushed the story back into the spotlight, and within nine days the investigation results were released through Xinhua and CCTV, with the related trial opened to the public. Shanghai Television is the broadcast arm of the municipal-level Shanghai Media Group (SMG), run by the local CCP leadership through the Shanghai State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.

The best commentary prize recognized Peng Yuanwen (彭远文), a former CCTV producer, for more than thirty articles arguing for higher rural pension benefits — a campaign the jury said had helped build momentum toward what is now a growing policy consensus on one of China’s most urgent social questions.

One key lesson to emerge from these latest awards is that the efforts of Chinese journalists — even at state-run outlets, which accounted for half the prizes awarded — must not be overlooked. The awards and the work they recognize, which have appeared despite intense pressure at every level of China’s media control system, are a testament to that persistence.

A Self-Serving Global Survey

Written by David Bandurski on 5 January 2026. Posted in China Newspeak.

A report released by Chinese state media on December 29 claims that the unwieldy official phrase for the governing ideology of the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has won “high recognition from the international community.” The assertion is absurd on its face. But lest this ruse pass unchallenged — however transparent it may seem — it’s worth being explicit about why.

Conducted by the Global Times Research Institute, a Chinese Communist Party-run think-tank directly under the state-run Global Times newspaper (under the CCP’s flagship People’s Daily), the “2025 Global Survey on Impression and Understanding of China” (2025年中国国际形象全球调查报告) claims to have surveyed approximately 51,700 people across 46 countries from August to October 2025. The survey was heavily promoted in China’s state media nationwide, with a related readout from the official newswire Xinhua circulated extensively. It was also shared across social media by Chinese official accounts, including the Facebook account of the office of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong.

According to follow-up reports by the Global Times and other state media, the survey “selected some important concepts from Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” (习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想), and asked foreign respondents for their opinions. Nearly 80 percent reportedly endorsed “building a community with a shared future for mankind” (构建人类命运共同体) and the even more mystifying “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets” (绿水青山就是金山银山), the Global Times reports. More than 70 percent approve of “comprehensively governing the party with strict discipline” (全面从严治党), “comprehensive deepening of reform” (全面深化改革), and “putting people at the center” (以人民为中心) — all concepts highly specific to the CCP political context and likely to draw blank stares from all but specialists in PRC political discourse.

How did the Global Times survey team manage to obtain such positive general feedback on what are decidedly political obscurities?

Reports from state media explicitly state that the survey “introduced” certain policies before soliciting opinions, suggesting the possibility — a certainty once you understand how propaganda works in China — that they were explained in positive terms before the survey questions were dropped. The report also claims that 39 percent of respondents favor China over the United States (which polls at 26 percent), a finding that runs counter most independent international polling on China.

How people in 24 countries view the U.S. and China

% who have a favorable opinion of …

China

U.S.

Diff

Note: Statistically significant differences shown in bold.
Source: Spring 2025 Global Attitudes Survey, Pew Research Center.

The Global Times promotes the survey as having sparked “heated discussion among Chinese and foreign scholars” (中外学者热议). A follow-up report by the newspaper features interviews with figures including former Egyptian Prime Minister Essam Sharaf and Pakistani scholar Muhammad Asif Noor, who offer effusive praise for Xi Jinping Thought and China’s global role.

Yet despite this entirely unregarded storm in the Party’s own teapot, the full text of the survey — including its complete methodology, question wording, and raw data — has not been released. In English, only a smattering of related news briefs and videos, all stemming from the Global Times, are available.

The problem should be painfully obvious. These phrases are virtually unknown outside China, and even inside China are poorly understood by most ordinary Chinese. “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” is a 19-character ideological construct that most people globally could not pronounce, much less define. The wave of reports about the as-yet-unreleased survey provide no evidence that respondents had any inkling they were evaluating components of this ideology, or that they understood what these concepts actually mean in Chinese political discourse.

The real story here is not what the survey reveals about global opinion on China and its governing ideology. Rather, it is what the survey demonstrates about how state-run media and organizations in the country use polling to give a patina of legitimacy to the pre-cooked propaganda of the Chinese leadership. Sometimes even the patently obvious needs to be stated explicitly.

Xi Jinping’s Global Quartet

Written by David Bandurski on 16 October 2025. Posted in China Newspeak.

The front page of today’s People’s Daily announces the publication of a major policy article by Chinese leader Xi Jinping (习近平) in the party’s flagship theoretical journal Qiushi (求是), bundling together what the party now characterizes as “Four Great Global Initiatives” (四大全球倡议) — a quartet of related solutions for international challenges. The article, titled “Promoting Implementation of the Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative, Global Civilization Initiative, and Global Governance Initiative,” collects Xi’s statements from September 2021 to September 2025, organizing them around his concept of a “community of shared future for mankind” (人类命运共同体).

The piece is meant to synthesize China’s response to what the party characterizes as four critical “deficits” (赤字) facing the world. These are: the “peace deficit” (和平赤字); the “development deficit” (发展赤字); the “security deficit” (安全赤字); and the “governance deficit” (治理赤字).

Global Development Initiative Development Deficit

全球发展倡议 → 发展赤字

▼

Emphasizes “inclusive” economic globalization with six core principles, including development prioritization, people-centered approaches, and harmony between humanity and nature. Positions the Belt and Road Initiative as a practical vehicle for achieving these goals.

Global Security Initiative Security Deficit

全球安全倡议 → 安全赤字

▼

Promotes “common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security” while rejecting countries “pursuing their own so-called absolute security”—a clear reference to U.S. security policy. Advocates for a security framework based on cooperation rather than zero-sum competition.

Global Civilization Initiative Peace Deficit

全球文明倡议 → 和平赤字

▼

Emphasizes respecting “diversity of world civilizations”—an implicit challenge to universal values that promotes China’s concept of “common values for all humanity.” This formula emphasizes the power of the nation state over citizens, with the “rights” of countries and their systems taking precedence over individual rights.

Global Governance Initiative Governance Deficit

全球治理倡议 → 治理赤字

▼

Confronts what Beijing portrays as threats from “Cold War mentality, hegemonism, and protectionism” — coded language for U.S. policies. Argues that global governance has reached a crossroads, with the implication that the world must turn in China’s direction.

This suite of global initiatives, the People’s Daily read-out today says, is China’s effort “to resolve the above deficits and promote the building of a better world” (破解上述赤字, 推动建设一个更加美好的世界). This framing positions Xi as a responsible and responsive global leader offering comprehensive solutions to international challenges. In this equation, the Belt and Road Initiative (一带一路), lionized during Xi’s first and second terms, is subordinated as a practical vehicle for these loftier aspirations.

The bundling of Xi’s “Four Great” initiatives has gathered pace particularly since late August and early September, taking the stage during the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The push to promote the concepts has redoubled this month with a crucial CCP plenum next week and the upcoming 80th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. The quartet signals Xi’s effort to consolidate his standing with both domestic party elites and the international community.

The People’s Daily read-out hailing the Qiushi article referred to this year “an important moment to remember history and create the future together” (铭记历史、共创未来的重要时刻). And the central idea here is that Xi Jinping is claiming this crossroads for China under the rule of the CCP.

Page 6 of the overseas edition of the CCP’s *People’s Daily* on October 13, a huge feature on China’s role in founding the UN (erasing the ROC from the story).

In recent weeks, before and through the grand military parade held in Beijing on September 3, state media have promoted a revisionist view of history in which China — meaning the current People’s Republic of China under the leadership of the party — played the most decisive role in the founding of the United Nations. Among these efforts, a large feature story in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily on Monday focused on China’s “immense contributions” to the founding of the UN, with framing that completely erased the role of the Republic of China (ROC) — the current name for Taiwan. The feature story showcased materials from the first session of the UN General Assembly now kept in Chongqing, the wartime capital of the ROC.

When it comes to China’s gaze on the future as glimpsed in Xi’s Qiushi article, there is an implicit but unmistakable message about the values of the West as failing to be “inclusive” (包容). Language about the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI) speaks of respecting “diversity of world civilizations” (世界文明多样性), an implicit challenge to the notion of universal values that promotes China’s own concept of “common values for all humanity” (全人类共同价值). While those may sound superficially similar, China’s formula emphasizes the power of the nation state over citizens and communities — the “rights” of countries and their systems taking precedence over individual rights.

Another clear message between the lines is about the United States as an irresponsible force. The Global Governance Initiative (GGI) directly confronts what the party portrays as threats from “Cold War mentality, hegemonism, and protectionism” (冷战思维、霸权主义、保护主义) — barely coded language that is a clear reference US policies. The article argues that while the UN emerged from the “painful lessons” (痛定思痛) of two world wars 80 years ago, “the world has entered a new period of turbulence and transformation, and global governance has reached a new crossroads” (世界进入新的动荡变革期,全球治理走到新的十字路口).

The underlying message is unmistakable: Standing at this crossroads, the world must turn in the direction of China.

Historical Revisions on Parade

Written by David Bandurski on 4 September 2025. Posted in Tracking Control.

For the Chinese leadership, the 80th anniversary of the country’s victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan in World War II is a major milestone — an opportunity to signal the power of the ruling Chinese Communist Party to people at home, and the country’s global ambitions to audiences abroad. These goals were on full display during the ritualized pageantry of the military parade yesterday in Beijing, attended by Russian leader Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

Preparations for the celebrations, coinciding with this week’s Tianjin meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an event that has sparked lively discussion and speculation about whether or not we are witnessing a fundamental shift in the world order, were months in the making. In recent days, the logistical preparations have brought the center of the capital to a literal standstill.

But in the days ahead of this week’s parade of high-tech weaponry, ideological moves of equal or greater importance have prepared the way for the CCP’s new historical consensus. This view rewrites the history of global war and peace to firm up the narrative of China’s centrality. It was the CCP, the story goes, that decisively won the war for Asia and for the world.

Backbone Narratives

On Sunday, the China Youth Daily, an official newspaper under the Chinese Communist Youth League (CCYL), ran an article by Shi Quanwei (史全伟), a research fellow at the Party History and Literature Research Institute of the CCP Central Committee. Shi argued the CCP had been the “backbone” (中流砥柱) of the entire nation’s resistance during the War of Resistance Against Japan. Furthermore, Shi says it was the united front leadership, guerrilla warfare tactics, and exemplary governance of the CCP that made it crucial to China’s wartime resistance.

“The experience of three revolutions, especially the War of Resistance, has given us and the Chinese people this confidence,” he wrote. “Without the efforts of the Communist Party, without Communists serving as the backbone of the Chinese people, China’s independence and liberation would have been impossible.”

Just as the celebrations yesterday invited talk of the conspicuous sidelining of the United States as a global leader — and by extension what state media like to call the “US-led West”(美西方) — reconstructed narratives made much of the historically inflated importance of the US in the global conflict 80 years ago.

Quoting from several global talking heads, the government-run China Daily pressed the point that the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the quintessential inflection point in American narratives of fascist resistance, had been given too central a role in the broader global story — as had the role of the United States in the Pacific theater. Instead, it was the CCP that had led the decisive grassroots resistance years before the belated American entry. As the descendant of one Soviet pilot was quoted as saying, glossing over the role of Republican forces in China at the time: “China’s resistance war was already underway before the Pearl Harbor incident. Chinese forces long tied down Japanese military strength and manpower, preventing them from extending their influence to the Pacific and the entire Far East region at that time.”

This wave of writing and commentary on WWII history was promoted through traditional state-run outlets and new social media accounts all through August. According to these pieces, the emphasis on the US role had for decades overshadowed, or inexcusably sidelined, China’s role in the global conflict.

On August 16, an article appeared on WeChat that claimed American academia had deliberately downplayed China’s role — which was to say, the role of the CCP. In recent years, the author wrote, the geopolitical rivalry between China and the US had led American historians to overlook China’s role in the Pacific theater, “fully exposing the United States’ political manipulation of history to gain political advantage.”

A man identified as a descendant of a World War II-era Soviet fighter pilot praises China’s central role in the Pacific theater, accusing the US of broad historical revisionism.

That argument, of course, has many flaws — not least the absurd assumption that US historians (like Chinese ones?) are an organized and geopolitically-motivated force, lacking professional integrity and unable to distinguish between the present-day People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC). This latter was China’s recognized government during World War II.

But the nature of the messenger in this and many other instances of historical redrafting in recent weeks is perhaps more telling than the substance. The author of this piece, “How Has American WWII Historical Research ‘Drifted’?,” was a scholar from the American Academy (美国研究所), a unit within the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations (中国现代国际关系研究院) — a front organization operated by the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and charged with engaging with foreign scholars.

And what of the outlet that published this piece — a drop in the wave of efforts to re-center China at the expense of the truth? It is a website launched in 2021 called “China’s Diplomacy in the New Era” (习近平外交思想和新时代中国外交), an outlet under the China International Communications Group (中国外文出版发行事业局), or CICG. The office, which masquerades as a press group, operates scores of online outlets including such government sites as China.com.cn, and has been tasked by Xi Jinping as a key vehicle for the CCP’s international communication. CICG’s parent is the Central Propaganda Department of the CCP Central Committee.

The social media account of “China’s Diplomacy in the New Era” — whose Chinese moniker bears the name of Xi Jinping himself — has been pushing a variety of articles on World War II in recent weeks. These mostly re-interpret the conflict through the lens of current geopolitics, colored with familiar state narratives, including contemporary Chinese claims to sovereignty in the South China Sea.

As the soldiers, tanks, missiles and drones goose-stepped and rolled along Chang’an Avenue on Wednesday, and Vladimir Putin had his smiling moment with Xi Jinping, some might have felt a sense of America sliding out of contemporary relevance. But behind the physical demonstrations of military might and the cementing of partnerships, there was an insistent narrative effort on all fronts to re-position China — and by extension, the CCP — at the center of the global historical narrative. For the leadership’s vision of a “new type of international relations,” nudging American leadership out of contemporary geopolitics is only half the battle; ensuring that it slips out of the history books may be equally important.

China Issues Approved News Source List

Written by David Bandurski on 25 August 2025. Posted in Tracking Control.

Earlier this month, China’s top control body for the internet and social media released its updated list of approved internet news information sources, a roster of outlets first issued a decade ago to curtail the sharing of articles and news reports by unauthorized sources — those without close Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and government ties. The publication of the list starting in 2015 was part of a general tightening of control over news and information in the early Xi Jinping era, as the internet and social media came to dominate news consumption.

The 2025 list from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), issued on August 14, includes 1,456 government-run media outlets whose content can be legally republished by other websites and news platforms — a carefully selected group that is meant to establish the CCP’s dominance over news content in China. All digital media platforms are forbidden from republishing news stories that originate from sources not included on the approved roster, including international media as well as public accounts on major platforms like WeChat and Weibo.

CAC Approved News Sources List

CAC Approved News Sources List (2021-2025)

Category	2021	2025	Change	Growth Rate
Total Sources	1,358	1,456	+98	+7.2%
Central Level	286	286	0	0%
Provincial Level	992	1,074	+82	+8.3%
Government Platforms	80	96	+16	+20.0%

Source: Cyberspace Administration of China

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) first introduced the system in 2015 as part of broader internet governance reforms under Xi that include the formation of the CAC as a powerful control and oversight body for cyberspace. The inaugural “Source List” included Caixin, a professional news outlet founded in 2009 by the highly-respected editor Hu Shuli (胡舒立), but the list was further tightened during the second iteration in 2021, at which time Caixin was removed. The 2021 list contained 1,358 approved sources, nearly four times the number in the 2016 list of just 340. These changes reflected the addition of official government accounts within the country’s expanding digital news ecosystem.

The CAC explained that the 2021 update followed three priorities: “adds a group” of trusted sources adhering to correct political orientation, “verifies a group” to update closures and name changes from institutional reforms, and “eliminates a group” of units with “poor regular performance” or lacking influence.

While the overall list grew by just 7.2 percent between this year and 2021 — from 1,358 to 1,456 sources — the distribution of this growth tells a more complex story about Beijing’s information control strategy. Central-level sources remained unchanged at 286 units, suggesting authorities consider the media structure at the national level to be complete. Provincial-level sources, meanwhile, expanded by 8.3 percent (from 992 to 1,074), reflecting efforts to strengthen regional information control infrastructure. This mirrors the trend since 2018 of encouraging the development of local and regional communication hubs, including the creation of “international communication centers” (国际传播中心), or ICCs, which are meant to enhance CCP messaging globally by leveraging provincial, city and county-level media resources.

Government platform sources showed the most dramatic growth at 20 percent, jumping from 80 to 96 units. Among the new additions are several municipal government social media platforms, including the official WeChat accounts of Shenzhen Municipal Government and Chengdu City Administration, reflecting a push in recent years to centralize local news creation by government agencies while adapting to social media-driven information consumption.

The CAC warned that websites not adhering strictly to the approved source list “will be punished according to law and regulations.”