The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has throughout its history referred to the media as the eyes, ears, throat and tongue (耳目喉舌) of the Party — suggesting their role and purpose is to serve the interests of the leadership. Certain newspapers – namely the People’s Daily and the Liberation Daily – have historically been designated as official Party “mouthpieces” (throats and tongues) that deliver the Party’s policy and messaging directly to the masses. The concept has also often defined how reporters view their work. At the communist base of Yan’an in the 1940s, workers from the Liberation Daily described themselves as “just one part of the Party organization […] but we must all, as one a body united, act according to the Party’s will. Each word and line, each character and sentence, must take the Party into consideration.”
The earliest reference to the media as a “mouthpiece” is often cited by Chinese scholars as Liang Qichao’s 1896 Shiwu Bao essay, “On the Contribution of Newspapers to National Affairs” — written amid the explosion of China’s young newspaper industry in the late Qing dynasty. But Liang’s conception of the “eyes, ears, throat and tongue” differed markedly from later ideas within the CCP of the media as “mouthpieces.” In contrast to the Party’s control-centered mindset, Liang believed that newspapers should be a vehicle for measured and moral criticism of state policies, and that journalists should act as both educators of the people and as government watchdogs to “supervise the government” (监督政府), putting journalists on equal footing with officials.
This vision stood in stark contrast to the CCP’s approach. Whereas Liang advocated for journalists to mediate relations between the people and the government and call out the government’s flaws when necessary, the CCP has generally promoted total control over propaganda and messaging. This principle was established at the First Party Congress in 1921, when the CCP declared in its first resolution that all publications must be under the leadership of Party members and that “no publication, whether central or local, may publish articles that violate the Party’s principles, policies and resolutions.” Mao reinforced this idea in 1957 with his statement that the media, in order to adequately represent the politics of the CCP, should be governed by “politicians running newspapers” (政治家办报).
Still, critical reporting has been tolerated to varying degrees throughout PRC history. In the 1980s, as China emerged from the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, media were afforded slightly more liberty to expose social and political ills through reporting and commentary, in large part recognizing that extreme media control under Mao had contributed to the excesses of power. The aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 brought a sharp reassertion of CCP media controls and the mouthpiece role. In the wake of the June 4 massacre, the country’s new top leader, Jiang Zemin, again stressed the importance of the media’s role as “the government’s and the people’s mouthpiece,” and singled out such outlets as CCTV and the People’s Daily for “‘not transmitting the correct voice of the Central Committee’ in the weeks leading up to June 4,” as the scholar Anne-Marie Brady has written.
By the late 1990s, as China’s economy accelerated, developments in the media again complicated the “mouthpiece” role. In the “golden era” of Chinese investigative journalism of the 2000s, Taiwanese media scholar Luo Shih-hung writes, a new generation of market-oriented newspapers “gradually developed a free and independent character distinct from the ‘mouthpiece’ party newspapers and periodicals.” Metropolitan newspapers like the Southern Metropolis Daily were well known for producing watchdog journalism, often seen as unwelcome by government officials.
Since assuming leadership of the Party in late 2012, Xi Jinping has forcefully reasserted the Party’s dominance of the media. Issued by the Party’s general office in 2013, Document Number 9, warned explicitly against “the West’s idea of journalism” as “society’s public instrument” and as the “Fourth Estate.” Three years later, in his first full address on media policy, Xi said that the media “must be surnamed Party,” an idiomatic expression meaning the media must fundamentally belong to and identify with the Party. The words underscored the CCP and its prerogatives as defining the core nature of media work.
The term “mouthpiece” continues to be applied in a current context to define the role of the media as subservient to Party interests. A 2025 article in the official journal Seeking Truth (求是) described the media as “the Party’s and the people’s mouthpiece,” emphasizing that outlets must faithfully project the Party’s voice.
Ironically, state-run media in China have in recent years applied the derogative sense of “mouthpiece” — as often understood in the West — to attack US-supported media outlets such as Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA). A report by Shanghai’s Observer outlet in March 2025 characterized US President Donald Trump’s executive order to cut federal agencies, including the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), as an effort “to eliminate waste and reduce excessive government power.” The report noted that among the eight federal agencies affected was USAGM, “which oversees Voice of America (VOA) and several other government ‘mouthpieces.'”
