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Tag: Xi Jinping

How China’s Press Abandoned Its Readers

Written by David Bandurski on . 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

Paper Cuts

Written by Dalia Parete on . Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

The Dalian Evening News, a fixture of daily life in the northeastern port city for 37 years, published its final edition on December 30, announcing it would cease publication with a brief notice thanking readers and contributors. The closure makes it the second major newspaper in Dalian to fold in recent years, following Xinshang News (新商报), which ceased publication in 2019.

Founded in 1988, the Dalian Evening News (大连晚报) was part of a wave of metropolitan newspapers that proliferated across China during the reform and opening era, serving as a key source of local news and advertising. These papers emerged in the early 1990s, with the metropolitan newspaper model accelerating after 1995 with the establishment of Chengdu’s Huaxi Metropolitan News (华西都市报) as the prototype for commercial urban dailies, followed by staples such as Guangdong’s Southern Metropolis Daily (南方都市报), founded in 1997. Through to the Xi Jinping era these and other commercial papers were at the heart of a slow-burning professional revolution for journalism in China, breaking important and socially, even politically, relevant stories. Huaxi Metropolitan News, for example, was instrumental in early reporting on the AIDS epidemic in Henan province caused by contaminated blood collection practices that infected as many as a million people.

The Dalian Evening News is one of approximately 14 newspapers that announced cessation or suspension around the start of 2026, including Jiangnan Travel News (江南游报) in the Yangtze River Delta, Yanzhao Rural News (燕赵农村报) in Hebei province, and Langfang Metropolitan News (廊坊都市报) in Langfang, Hebei.

Folding Up

At least 14 newspapers announced cessation or suspension at the start of 2026 in China, marking another wave in the ongoing decline of China’s print media sector.

Newspaper Name Chinese Name Founded Years Active
Dalian Evening News 大连晚报 1988 37 years
Jiangnan Travel News 江南游报 1986 38 years
Yanzhao Rural News 燕赵农村报 1964 / 1982 (relaunched) 60 years
Pingyuan Evening News 平原晚报 2004 20 years
Langfang Metropolitan News 廊坊都市报 2009 16 years
Huanghai Morning Post 黄海晨刊 2003 22 years
Yandu Morning Post 燕都晨报 2003 22 years
Suqian Evening News 宿迁晚报 2001 24 years
Linchuan Evening News 临川晚报 2017 (media convergence) 8 years
Xinyu News 新渝报 1926 99 years
China Philatelic News 中国集邮报 1992 33 years
Today Ningguo 今日宁国 Unknown —
Yalu River Evening News 鸭绿江晚报 1996 29 years
Southern Radio & TV News 南方声屏报 1994 31 years
Source: WeChat Account 想明白再说吧 (archived January 7, 2026)

The wave of closures reflects years of financial crisis in Chinese print media stemming from broader changes in the media landscape in China and globally. Newspaper advertising peaked in 2011, then declined 55 percent by 2015 — and the freefall continued. By 2021, newspaper advertising revenue had shrunk to just one-fifteenth of what it was in 2011. Metropolitan newspapers were hit hardest: commercial advertising dropped over 70 percent, with some papers reduced to operating with zero advertising and forced to rely on their parent organizations for survival.

Circulation has similarly collapsed. Subscription and newsstand sales in 70 major Chinese cities plunged 46.5 percent in 2015, with metropolitan newspapers declining 50.8 percent.

Peking University professor Zhang Yiwu (张颐武) explained in analysis two years ago that short videos and livestreaming have replaced text-based newspapers as readers’ information consumption habits have changed. The most profitable local media outlets — metropolitan newspapers and evening papers — took the hardest hit, he said. Party newspapers maintained operations because the government needed them to disseminate propaganda and other official information. Zhang described the decline as initially gradual, giving false hope for recovery, but then becoming cliff-like, with many newspapers ultimately destroyed by their own wishful thinking about a potential rebound.

Today Ningguo announces its closure on December 26, 2025.

The decline of commercial print newspapers and periodicals in China since around 2010 has had a dramatic impact on the professional journalism cultures that once flourished in these contexts. The more local and relevant reporting they once fostered has also suffered in the face of efforts under Xi Jinping to wrest back control of news reporting, in part by building up Party-run digital convergence media centers (融媒体中心) and empowering local government bodies to lead on digital communication. One sign of this latter trend has been the proliferation of “blue notices” (蓝底通报), official statements released by local authorities on social media that sideline professional journalists and replace independent reporting with government-controlled narratives.

In its year-end reflection, the WeChat public account Aquarius Era (水瓶纪元), run by veterans of China’s commercial newspaper era, described its mission as telling “stories outside the blue background and white text” (蓝底白字之外的故事), a clear criticism of the dominance of official blue notices and the news vacuum in which they dominate. The year-end letter affirmed that despite intense censorship, journalists from different generations continue work in their own ways to document overlooked people and events.

The decline of print media can be seen in the precipitous decline of newsprint consumption, which has devastated the paper industry over the past decade. The Chinese newspaper industry reached its peak in 2012 with domestic newsprint production of 385 million tons annually and over 20 paper mills operating, but declining demand has forced most mills to reduce production or shut down entirely. According to the China Newspaper Association (中国报业协会), nationwide newspaper newsprint consumption totaled just 106.4 million tons in 2023, projected to decline another 3 percent to approximately 103.2 million tons in 2024, leaving only three newsprint producers nationally.

Rather than outright closures — though that is the real meaning — many newspapers are now choosing to announce “suspension” over permanent closure. The reason for that is political and regulatory, rather than commercial or financial. Under China’s tightly controlled press system, all news and other publishing or media outlets that do original content production are required to have licenses, or kanhao (刊号), scarce administrative resources issued by the National Press and Publication Administration that cannot be easily reacquired. By announcing suspension rather than closure, newspapers preserve these licenses even as they cease operations indefinitely.

Because in an era of profound digital, economic and political uncertainty, you just never know.

Historical Revisions on Parade

Written by David Bandurski on . 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.