The China News Service is the second largest in the People's Republic of China, trailing the Xinhua News Agency. It serves mainly overseas Chinese and residents of Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan.
The CNS was established in 1952. It has established news offices and stations in every province in mainland China, as well as in Hong Kong and Macau. CNS also has news offices in foreign countries, including the United States, Japan, France, and Australia.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Xinhua News Agency
The Xinhua News Agency is the official press agency of the government of the People's Republic of China and the biggest center for collecting information and press conferences in the PRC. It is one of the two news agencies in the PRC, the other being the China News Service. Xinhua is an institution of the State Council of China. Xinhua reports directly to the Communist Party of China's Public Information Department.
Xinhua employs more than 10,000 people — as compared to about 1,300 for Reuters; has 107 bureaus worldwide both collecting information on other countries and dispensing information about China; and maintains 31 bureaus in China — one for each province plus a military bureau. As most of the newspapers in China cannot afford to station correspondents abroad, or even in every Chinese province, they rely on Xinhua feeds to fill their pages. ''People's Daily'', for example, uses Xinhua material for approximately 25 percent of its stories. Xinhua is a publisher as well as a news agency — it owns more than 20 newspapers and a dozen magazines, and it prints in , , , , , and .
Beijing has been cutting funding to the news agency by an average of seven percent per year over the past three years, and state funds currently cover only about 40 percent of Xinhua's costs. As a result, the agency is raising revenues through involvement in public relations, construction, and information service businesses.
In the past, Xinhua was able to attract the top young journalists emerging from the universities or otherwise newly entering the field, but it can no longer do so as easily because of the appeal and resources of other newspapers and periodicals and the greater glamour of television and radio jobs. For example, mid-level reporters for the Xinmin Evening News in Shanghai often are given an apartment, whereas at Xinhua and People's Daily this benefit is reserved for the most senior journalists.
The Xinhua press agency was started in November 1931 as the Red China News Agency and changed to its current name in 1937. It began broadcasting to foreign countries in English from 1944.
The Xinhua headquarters is located in Beijing. The Xinhua News Agency established its first overseas affiliate in 1947 in London, with Samuel Chinque as publisher. Now it distributes its news in Asia, Middle East, Latin America, Africa where run the superior offices; in Hong Kong, Macau and many foreign countries and districts. There are more than one hundred Xinhua affiliates.
Today, Xinhua News Agency delivers its news across the world in seven languages including , , , , , , etc., as well as news pictures and other kinds of news. It has made contracts to exchange news and news pictures with more than eighty foreign news agencies or political news departments.
Unlike the ''People's Daily'', which is an organization of the Communist Party of China rather than of the PRC government, Xinhua rarely offers editorials, but rather passes through speeches by government officials. Its position set as a platform of receiving and distributing the information all over the world and thus it covers the world news, live news and exclusive reports.
Like many other media organizations, Xinhua struggled to find the "right line" to use in covering the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Although more cautious than People's Daily in its treatment of sensitive topics during that period — such as how to commemorate reformist Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang's April 1989 death, the then ongoing demonstrations in Beijing and elsewhere, and basic questions of press freedom and individual rights — Xinhua gave some favorable coverage to demonstrators and intellectuals who were questioning top party leaders. Even so, many Xinhua reporters were angry with top editors for not going far enough and for suppressing stories about the Tiananmen Square crackdown. For several days after the violence on 4 June, almost no-one at Xinhua did any work, and journalists demonstrated inside the Agency's Beijing compound.
In 2001, Hong Kong-listed media company Sing Tao News Corporation Limited invested in joint ventures with Xinhua News Agency to set up a market information site and offer audio and visual services planning and consulting.
The Chinese media's internal publication system, in which certain journals are published exclusively for government and party officials, provides information and analysis not generally available to the public. The State values these internal reports because they contain much of China's most sensitive, controversial, and high-quality investigative journalism.
Xinhua and many other Chinese media organizations produce reports for the "internal" journals. Informed observers note that journalists generally like to write for the internal publications — typically, only the most senior or most capable print and broadcast reporters are given such opportunities — because they can write less polemical and more comprehensive stories without having to omit unwelcome details as is commonly done in the print media directed to the general public.
The Chinese government's internal media publication system follows a strict hierarchical pattern designed to facilitate party control. A publication called Reference News — which includes translated articles from abroad as well as news and commentary by senior Xinhua reporters — is delivered by Xinhua personnel, rather than by the national mail system, to officials at the working level and above. A three-to-ten-page report called Internal Reference is distributed to officials at the ministerial level and higher. The most highly classified Xinhua internal reports, known as "redhead reference" reports, are issued occasionally to the top dozen or so party and government officials.
There are signs that the internal publication system is breaking down as more information becomes widely available in China. A Hong Kong-based political journal circulated on the Chinese mainland has questioned the need for such a system in light of China's modern telecommunications and expanding contacts with the outside world. Internal publications are becoming less exclusive; some are now being sold illegally on the street and are increasingly available to anyone with money.
Xinhua's branch in Hong Kong was not just a press office. It was named a news agency under the special historic conditions before the territory's sovereignty was transferred from Britain to the PRC, because the PRC did not recognise British sovereignty over the colony, and an embassy cannot be set up within what it considered its soil. Until 1997, it served as the de facto diplomatic mission of the PRC in the territory. It was authorized by the special administrative region government to continue to represent the central government after 1997, and it was renamed ''The Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in the Hong Kong SAR'' on January 18, 2000. The appointed Gao Siren as the director in August 2002. After renaming as , a Xinhua Agency which is a true press office was set up.
As suggested by the name change, Xinhua's present role is mainly about liaison with the broad spectrum of groups and associations in Hong Kong, or what is known as "united front" work in the terminology of the Communist Party of China.
According to some press reports in Hong Kong, the Liaison Office was under pressure from Beijing after the July 1 mass protest in 2003. Beijing officials reportedly criticised the Liaison Office for its inaccurate assessment of the public sentiment in Hong Kong during that period.
The former Hong Kong headquarters of Xinhua in Wan Chai was vacated in 2001, when the office relocated to Sai Wan, and sold in September 2002. The 23-storey building will be converted back into a four-star hotel with 480 rooms. Located at 387 , the 1970s building had been Xinhua's home for more than 20 years.
Xu Jiatun headed the Hong Kong branch of Xinhua until 1990, when he fled to the United States amid accusations that he sympathized with Beijing students during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
Xu angered Beijing when he comforted Hong Kong students who staged a hunger strike outside the Xinhua office in support of the pro-democracy movement in Beijing in 1989. Years after, he joined to appeal for a reversal of the official verdict that the demonstrations were a "counter-revolutionary rebellion".
Zhou Nan succeeded exiled Xu Jiatun as the director of Xinhua in Hong Kong after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Crackdown. Zhou henceforth played a key role in the 13-year Sino-British argument on the handover in 1997.
During the hostile years, Zhou named Hong Kong's last governor Chris Patten as a 'sinner of a thousand years'. He said Patten had committed 'three violations', referring to Patten's political reforms, branded by Beijing as a breach of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the Hong Kong Basic Law, and understandings between the two sovereign nations.
Zhang Junsheng , former Xinhua vice-director, was brought into the agency by its former Hong Kong director, Xu Jiatun, in 1985. He was one of the few pre-1989 staff to survive the post-Tiananmen purge. For 13 years, he was one of the few Xinhua officers who enjoy publicity by building up contacts in the film and arts world as the agency's cultural attaché.
His most famous manoeuvre was to repeat criticism of the Bill of Rights made in confidence by then-chief justice Sir Ti Liang Yang. Zhang also openly called Hong Kong's last governor Chris Patten a liar. He accused Patten of trying to create chaos in the civil service by undermining its neutrality.
A Xinhua News Agency branch was set up in Macau in the late 80s. The News Department of the Xinhua news Agency Macau Branch, a working organ sent by the central people's government of the PRC, is responsible for gathering news. The latter was renamed the ''Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in the Macau SAR''.
The Xinhua News Agency runs the prominent news website Xinhuanet.com, which provides news in six different languages.
The domain ''xinhuanet.com'' attracted almost annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com survey.
According to Reporters Without Borders, Xinhua's journalists are hand-picked and indoctrinated to produce media reports that give the official point of view of the Chinese Communist Party. The non-governmental organization accuses the Xinhua of being "the world's biggest propaganda agency", and claims that it distorts its international reports to express disdain toward China's opponents nations while supporting other nations accused of human rights violations. . In 2006, Xinhua issued directives limiting foreign news agencies from directly selling news to other Chinese media outlets.
Xinhua employs more than 10,000 people — as compared to about 1,300 for Reuters; has 107 bureaus worldwide both collecting information on other countries and dispensing information about China; and maintains 31 bureaus in China — one for each province plus a military bureau. As most of the newspapers in China cannot afford to station correspondents abroad, or even in every Chinese province, they rely on Xinhua feeds to fill their pages. ''People's Daily'', for example, uses Xinhua material for approximately 25 percent of its stories. Xinhua is a publisher as well as a news agency — it owns more than 20 newspapers and a dozen magazines, and it prints in , , , , , and .
Beijing has been cutting funding to the news agency by an average of seven percent per year over the past three years, and state funds currently cover only about 40 percent of Xinhua's costs. As a result, the agency is raising revenues through involvement in public relations, construction, and information service businesses.
In the past, Xinhua was able to attract the top young journalists emerging from the universities or otherwise newly entering the field, but it can no longer do so as easily because of the appeal and resources of other newspapers and periodicals and the greater glamour of television and radio jobs. For example, mid-level reporters for the Xinmin Evening News in Shanghai often are given an apartment, whereas at Xinhua and People's Daily this benefit is reserved for the most senior journalists.
History
The Xinhua press agency was started in November 1931 as the Red China News Agency and changed to its current name in 1937. It began broadcasting to foreign countries in English from 1944.
The Xinhua headquarters is located in Beijing. The Xinhua News Agency established its first overseas affiliate in 1947 in London, with Samuel Chinque as publisher. Now it distributes its news in Asia, Middle East, Latin America, Africa where run the superior offices; in Hong Kong, Macau and many foreign countries and districts. There are more than one hundred Xinhua affiliates.
Today, Xinhua News Agency delivers its news across the world in seven languages including , , , , , , etc., as well as news pictures and other kinds of news. It has made contracts to exchange news and news pictures with more than eighty foreign news agencies or political news departments.
Unlike the ''People's Daily'', which is an organization of the Communist Party of China rather than of the PRC government, Xinhua rarely offers editorials, but rather passes through speeches by government officials. Its position set as a platform of receiving and distributing the information all over the world and thus it covers the world news, live news and exclusive reports.
Like many other media organizations, Xinhua struggled to find the "right line" to use in covering the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Although more cautious than People's Daily in its treatment of sensitive topics during that period — such as how to commemorate reformist Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang's April 1989 death, the then ongoing demonstrations in Beijing and elsewhere, and basic questions of press freedom and individual rights — Xinhua gave some favorable coverage to demonstrators and intellectuals who were questioning top party leaders. Even so, many Xinhua reporters were angry with top editors for not going far enough and for suppressing stories about the Tiananmen Square crackdown. For several days after the violence on 4 June, almost no-one at Xinhua did any work, and journalists demonstrated inside the Agency's Beijing compound.
In 2001, Hong Kong-listed media company Sing Tao News Corporation Limited invested in joint ventures with Xinhua News Agency to set up a market information site and offer audio and visual services planning and consulting.
Xinhua and the internal media
The Chinese media's internal publication system, in which certain journals are published exclusively for government and party officials, provides information and analysis not generally available to the public. The State values these internal reports because they contain much of China's most sensitive, controversial, and high-quality investigative journalism.
Xinhua and many other Chinese media organizations produce reports for the "internal" journals. Informed observers note that journalists generally like to write for the internal publications — typically, only the most senior or most capable print and broadcast reporters are given such opportunities — because they can write less polemical and more comprehensive stories without having to omit unwelcome details as is commonly done in the print media directed to the general public.
The Chinese government's internal media publication system follows a strict hierarchical pattern designed to facilitate party control. A publication called Reference News — which includes translated articles from abroad as well as news and commentary by senior Xinhua reporters — is delivered by Xinhua personnel, rather than by the national mail system, to officials at the working level and above. A three-to-ten-page report called Internal Reference is distributed to officials at the ministerial level and higher. The most highly classified Xinhua internal reports, known as "redhead reference" reports, are issued occasionally to the top dozen or so party and government officials.
There are signs that the internal publication system is breaking down as more information becomes widely available in China. A Hong Kong-based political journal circulated on the Chinese mainland has questioned the need for such a system in light of China's modern telecommunications and expanding contacts with the outside world. Internal publications are becoming less exclusive; some are now being sold illegally on the street and are increasingly available to anyone with money.
Xinhua in Hong Kong
Xinhua's branch in Hong Kong was not just a press office. It was named a news agency under the special historic conditions before the territory's sovereignty was transferred from Britain to the PRC, because the PRC did not recognise British sovereignty over the colony, and an embassy cannot be set up within what it considered its soil. Until 1997, it served as the de facto diplomatic mission of the PRC in the territory. It was authorized by the special administrative region government to continue to represent the central government after 1997, and it was renamed ''The Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in the Hong Kong SAR'' on January 18, 2000. The appointed Gao Siren as the director in August 2002. After renaming as , a Xinhua Agency which is a true press office was set up.
As suggested by the name change, Xinhua's present role is mainly about liaison with the broad spectrum of groups and associations in Hong Kong, or what is known as "united front" work in the terminology of the Communist Party of China.
According to some press reports in Hong Kong, the Liaison Office was under pressure from Beijing after the July 1 mass protest in 2003. Beijing officials reportedly criticised the Liaison Office for its inaccurate assessment of the public sentiment in Hong Kong during that period.
The former Hong Kong headquarters of Xinhua in Wan Chai was vacated in 2001, when the office relocated to Sai Wan, and sold in September 2002. The 23-storey building will be converted back into a four-star hotel with 480 rooms. Located at 387 , the 1970s building had been Xinhua's home for more than 20 years.
Previous directors of Hong Kong Xinhua
Xu Jiatun headed the Hong Kong branch of Xinhua until 1990, when he fled to the United States amid accusations that he sympathized with Beijing students during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
Xu angered Beijing when he comforted Hong Kong students who staged a hunger strike outside the Xinhua office in support of the pro-democracy movement in Beijing in 1989. Years after, he joined to appeal for a reversal of the official verdict that the demonstrations were a "counter-revolutionary rebellion".
Zhou Nan succeeded exiled Xu Jiatun as the director of Xinhua in Hong Kong after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Crackdown. Zhou henceforth played a key role in the 13-year Sino-British argument on the handover in 1997.
During the hostile years, Zhou named Hong Kong's last governor Chris Patten as a 'sinner of a thousand years'. He said Patten had committed 'three violations', referring to Patten's political reforms, branded by Beijing as a breach of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the Hong Kong Basic Law, and understandings between the two sovereign nations.
Zhang Junsheng , former Xinhua vice-director, was brought into the agency by its former Hong Kong director, Xu Jiatun, in 1985. He was one of the few pre-1989 staff to survive the post-Tiananmen purge. For 13 years, he was one of the few Xinhua officers who enjoy publicity by building up contacts in the film and arts world as the agency's cultural attaché.
His most famous manoeuvre was to repeat criticism of the Bill of Rights made in confidence by then-chief justice Sir Ti Liang Yang. Zhang also openly called Hong Kong's last governor Chris Patten a liar. He accused Patten of trying to create chaos in the civil service by undermining its neutrality.
Xinhua in Macau
A Xinhua News Agency branch was set up in Macau in the late 80s. The News Department of the Xinhua news Agency Macau Branch, a working organ sent by the central people's government of the PRC, is responsible for gathering news. The latter was renamed the ''Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in the Macau SAR''.
Xinhua online
The Xinhua News Agency runs the prominent news website Xinhuanet.com, which provides news in six different languages.
The domain ''xinhuanet.com'' attracted almost annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com survey.
Criticism
According to Reporters Without Borders, Xinhua's journalists are hand-picked and indoctrinated to produce media reports that give the official point of view of the Chinese Communist Party. The non-governmental organization accuses the Xinhua of being "the world's biggest propaganda agency", and claims that it distorts its international reports to express disdain toward China's opponents nations while supporting other nations accused of human rights violations. . In 2006, Xinhua issued directives limiting foreign news agencies from directly selling news to other Chinese media outlets.
PRC internal media
The Chinese internal document system protects China’s officials from being blinded by their own elaborate system of media control.
As He Qinglian documents in chapter four of ''Media Control in China'', there are many grades and types of internal documents . Many are restricted to a certain level of official – such as county level, provincial level or down to a certain level of official in a ministry. Some Chinese journalists, including Xinhua correspondents in foreign countries, write for both the mass media and the internal media.
* Formal Documents are written and issued by leading organizations of the PRC Communist Party and government. These instructions , regulations , and notices are binding on lower level units. The most important formal documents are CCP Central Committee documents .
* Status Reports are written and issued by Party, government and military leading departments provide comprehensive reports to higher levels and bulletins to guide the work of lower level units. In news organizations the most important is the monthly evaluation entitled the Situation Report . The Situation Report lists incidents in which the media violated guidelines and the penalties imposed in each instance. The Report is an essential management tool of the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party for controlling news media so that the various PRC media do not violate propaganda discipline or as the propaganda department puts it “self-discipline”.
* Reference Materials are edited and published by larger news units such as Party newspapers or government newspapers. According to news discipline, any matter that the media outlets believe would harm the image of the Party or government, threaten social stability and unity, or other matters not suitable for open publications such as corruption, social unrest, and larger business swindles are often reported internally rather than in the mass media. Many well done reports by conscientious journalists are placed in internal channels rather than in the mass media. These “internal materials” are often printed in only a few dozen copies for distribution to leaders and certain organizations. The most authoritative are the three types of internal reference edited by the New China Press Agency.
The PRC State Secrecy Protection Law Section Nine stipulates has three grades of state secrets top secret , secret and confidential as well as a fourth grade of information, internal materials that may be read by Chinese citizens only. The PRC State Secrecy Protection Law Implementing Regulations section two defines these grades of secrecy and the permissions allowed to government departments at each level. In each Chinese administrative region, Party organizations such as committees and disciplinary committees; government organizations such as people’s congresses, governments, and consultative congresses; and military organizations such as military districts and their provincial military districts; and the hundreds of agencies subordinate to them issue these three types of internal documents.
The level of classification is tied to the administrative levels of Party and government in China. The higher the administrative level of the issuing office, generally the more secret the document is. In local government the issuing grades are province , region and county ; grades within government organs are ministry , bureau and office ; in the military corps (, division , and regiment . The most authoritative documents are drafted by the Central Committee to convey instructions from CCP leaders. Documents with Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Document at the top in red letters are the most authoritative.
The first three publications are internal news edited and distributed within the PRC news control system are edited and distributed by the Second Editorial Office of the Domestic News Department of the New China News Agency and by the Chief Editor’s Office of the People’s Daily. The fourth publication is devoted to policy suggestions and reports and also reaches relatively low level officials.
* Domestic Developments Foundry Proofs edited by New China News Agency once or twice daily to report on important domestic events and important proposals at the high level of the CCP. Generally called Big Reference , it is 2 – 6 pages long and distributed to the central committee leaders, officials of ministerial rank, and to provincial governors and Party secretaries. This top secret document must be returned after being read those who lose it assume political responsibility. Unlikely to leak overseas, but some of the content might pass by word of mouth. Domestic Developments is a bulletin for the leaders; more detailed analysis of matters that will not be reported in the mass media such as certain social disturbances, appear later in Internal Reference.
* Internal Reference edited by the New China News Agency twice weekly, 40 – 60 pages to report major domestic developments and statements. This secret document is circulated as far down as the regional and divisional levels and is the only formal channel to provide domestic classified information to middle and higher ranking Party members.
* Internal Reference Selections edited by the New China News Agency weekly, 30 – 40 pages. Provides confidential level information to grassroots cadres down to the district and township leader level as well as to officials at the higher county and regimental level. After the mid 1990s very little few true confidential matters appeared in it and it was no longer collected after reading. Readership was extended to the deputy office director level.
* Internal Readings edited by the People’s Daily. Internal Readings is a secret level news document that contains policy suggestions and some survey reports of sensitive matters such as corruption in government and studies of problems of village government. From the mid 1990s cadres at the vice office director level have been allowed to subscribe privately to Internal Readings.
The news monopoly has enabled the CPC to filter the news although this has become more difficult since the Internet arose in the 1990s. Security has weakened and many units no longer collect ''Internal Reference Selections'' or ''Internal Readings''. Sometimes these publications are sent out with the trash. However private citizens are not allowed to hold secret or above classified material and some people have been prosecuted for that offense. The scope of state secrets can be expanded at the Party’s convenience. In some cases, He Qinglian writes, formerly open materials have become classified. After June 4, 1989, for the sake of protecting China’s image, many documents issued by the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party to guide the media have been classified at the top secret or secret levels or have been passed orally.
As He Qinglian documents in chapter four of ''Media Control in China'', there are many grades and types of internal documents . Many are restricted to a certain level of official – such as county level, provincial level or down to a certain level of official in a ministry. Some Chinese journalists, including Xinhua correspondents in foreign countries, write for both the mass media and the internal media.
Types of Internally Circulated Documents
* Formal Documents are written and issued by leading organizations of the PRC Communist Party and government. These instructions , regulations , and notices are binding on lower level units. The most important formal documents are CCP Central Committee documents .
* Status Reports are written and issued by Party, government and military leading departments provide comprehensive reports to higher levels and bulletins to guide the work of lower level units. In news organizations the most important is the monthly evaluation entitled the Situation Report . The Situation Report lists incidents in which the media violated guidelines and the penalties imposed in each instance. The Report is an essential management tool of the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party for controlling news media so that the various PRC media do not violate propaganda discipline or as the propaganda department puts it “self-discipline”.
* Reference Materials are edited and published by larger news units such as Party newspapers or government newspapers. According to news discipline, any matter that the media outlets believe would harm the image of the Party or government, threaten social stability and unity, or other matters not suitable for open publications such as corruption, social unrest, and larger business swindles are often reported internally rather than in the mass media. Many well done reports by conscientious journalists are placed in internal channels rather than in the mass media. These “internal materials” are often printed in only a few dozen copies for distribution to leaders and certain organizations. The most authoritative are the three types of internal reference edited by the New China Press Agency.
The PRC State Secrecy Protection Law Section Nine stipulates has three grades of state secrets top secret , secret and confidential as well as a fourth grade of information, internal materials that may be read by Chinese citizens only. The PRC State Secrecy Protection Law Implementing Regulations section two defines these grades of secrecy and the permissions allowed to government departments at each level. In each Chinese administrative region, Party organizations such as committees and disciplinary committees; government organizations such as people’s congresses, governments, and consultative congresses; and military organizations such as military districts and their provincial military districts; and the hundreds of agencies subordinate to them issue these three types of internal documents.
The level of classification is tied to the administrative levels of Party and government in China. The higher the administrative level of the issuing office, generally the more secret the document is. In local government the issuing grades are province , region and county ; grades within government organs are ministry , bureau and office ; in the military corps (, division , and regiment . The most authoritative documents are drafted by the Central Committee to convey instructions from CCP leaders. Documents with Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Document at the top in red letters are the most authoritative.
Internal News Publications for Senior Party and Government Officials
The first three publications are internal news edited and distributed within the PRC news control system are edited and distributed by the Second Editorial Office of the Domestic News Department of the New China News Agency and by the Chief Editor’s Office of the People’s Daily. The fourth publication is devoted to policy suggestions and reports and also reaches relatively low level officials.
* Domestic Developments Foundry Proofs edited by New China News Agency once or twice daily to report on important domestic events and important proposals at the high level of the CCP. Generally called Big Reference , it is 2 – 6 pages long and distributed to the central committee leaders, officials of ministerial rank, and to provincial governors and Party secretaries. This top secret document must be returned after being read those who lose it assume political responsibility. Unlikely to leak overseas, but some of the content might pass by word of mouth. Domestic Developments is a bulletin for the leaders; more detailed analysis of matters that will not be reported in the mass media such as certain social disturbances, appear later in Internal Reference.
* Internal Reference edited by the New China News Agency twice weekly, 40 – 60 pages to report major domestic developments and statements. This secret document is circulated as far down as the regional and divisional levels and is the only formal channel to provide domestic classified information to middle and higher ranking Party members.
* Internal Reference Selections edited by the New China News Agency weekly, 30 – 40 pages. Provides confidential level information to grassroots cadres down to the district and township leader level as well as to officials at the higher county and regimental level. After the mid 1990s very little few true confidential matters appeared in it and it was no longer collected after reading. Readership was extended to the deputy office director level.
* Internal Readings edited by the People’s Daily. Internal Readings is a secret level news document that contains policy suggestions and some survey reports of sensitive matters such as corruption in government and studies of problems of village government. From the mid 1990s cadres at the vice office director level have been allowed to subscribe privately to Internal Readings.
The news monopoly has enabled the CPC to filter the news although this has become more difficult since the Internet arose in the 1990s. Security has weakened and many units no longer collect ''Internal Reference Selections'' or ''Internal Readings''. Sometimes these publications are sent out with the trash. However private citizens are not allowed to hold secret or above classified material and some people have been prosecuted for that offense. The scope of state secrets can be expanded at the Party’s convenience. In some cases, He Qinglian writes, formerly open materials have become classified. After June 4, 1989, for the sake of protecting China’s image, many documents issued by the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party to guide the media have been classified at the top secret or secret levels or have been passed orally.
Media of the People's Republic of China
Within the People's Republic of China , there is heavy government involvement in the media, with many of the largest organizations being agencies of the government of the PRC. There are certain taboos and red lines within the media in mainland China, such as questioning the legitimacy of the Communist Party of China. Yet within those restrictions, there is a vibrance and diversity of the media and fairly open discussion of social issues and policy options within the parameters set by the Party.
Much of the surprising diversity in the media in mainland China is attributable to the fact that most state media outlets no longer receive large government subsidies and are expected to largely pay for themselves through advertising. As a result,
they can no longer serve solely as mouthpieces for the government but must also produce that people find attractive and interesting so that money can be generated through advertising revenue. In addition, while the government does issue directives defining what can and cannot be published, it does not prevent, and in fact actively encourages state media outlets to compete with each other for viewers and commercial advertising.
Government control of information can also be ineffective in other ways. Despite government restrictions, much information is gathered either at the local level or from foreign sources and passed on through personal conversations and . The withdrawal of government media subsidies has caused many newspapers in s to take bold editorial stands critical of the government, as the necessity to attract readers and avoid bankruptcy has been a more pressing fear than government .
In addition, the traditional means of media control have proven extremely ineffective against newer forms of communication, most notably text messaging.
Although the government can and does use laws against state secrets to reports about social and political conditions, these laws have not prevented the press from all discussion of Chinese social issues. Chinese newspapers have been particularly affected by the loss of government subsidies, and have been especially active at gaining readership though must engaging in hard hitting investigative reporting and muckraking . As a result even papers which are nominally owned by the Communist Party are sometimes very bold at reporting social issues. However both commercial pressures and government restrictions have tended to cause newspapers to focus on lurid scandals often involving local officials who have relatively little political cover, and Chinese newspapers tend to lack depth in analysis of political events, as this tends to be more politically sensitive.
Among social issues first reported in the press of mainland China include the AIDS epidemic in Henan province, the unsafe state of mines in mainland China. In addition, the coverup was first revealed by a fax to CCTV which was forwarded to Western news media.
In 1978, the PRC had less than one television receiver per 100 people, and fewer than ten million Chinese had access to a television set. According to World Bank report in 2003, there are about 35 TVs for every 100 people. Roughly a billion Chinese have access to television. Similarly, in 1965 there were 12 television and 93 radio stations in mainland China; today there are approximately 700 conventional television stations—plus about 3,000 —and 1,000 radio stations.
Television broadcasting is controlled by Chinese Central Television , which, with its 16 program channels, is the country's only national network. CCTV, which employs about 10,000 people and has an annual income of ?1,120mln yuan , falls under the dual supervision of the , responsible ultimately for media content, and the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, which oversees operations. A Vice in the latter ministry serves as chairman of CCTV. The 's principal directors and other officers are appointed by the State. So are the top officials at local conventional television stations in mainland China—nearly all of which are restricted to broadcasting within their own province or municipality—that receive CCTV broadcasts.
CCTV produces its own news broadcasts three times a day and is the country's most powerful and prolific television program producer. It also has a monopoly on purchases of programming from overseas. All local stations are required to carry CCTV's 7 p.m. main news broadcast; an internal CCTV survey indicates that nearly 500 million people countrywide regularly watch this program.
Even if CCTV is the most powerful network of mainland China, it has only about 30% of audience share all over the national territory. The fact shows how the Chinese viewers are biased in favour of local tv programs, that are more likely to represent the differences of an audience that is the largest in the world, more than the national or even international programs, that can hardly attend the needs of such a wide public.
Since September 1, 2006, the Chinese government has banned foreign-produced animation between the hours of 5:00 to 8:00 P.M. on state-run television to protect struggling Chinese animation studios that have been affected by the popularity of such cartoons.
The number of newspapers in mainland China has increased from 42—virtually all Communist Party papers—in 1968 to 382 in 1980 and more than 2,200 today. By one official estimate, there are now more than 7,000 magazines and journals in the country. The number of copies of daily and weekly newspapers and magazines in circulation grew fourfold between the mid-1960s and the mid-to-late 1980s, reaching 310 million by 1987.
These figures, moreover, underreport actual circulation, because many publishers use their own distribution networks rather than official dissemination channels and also deliberately understate figures to avoid taxes. In addition, some 25,000 printing houses and hundreds of individual bookstores produce and sell nonofficial material—mostly and pornography but also political and intellectual journals.
The media in mainland China also are becoming more autonomous and more diverse. Since Mao Zedong's death in 1976 and the subsequent emergence of Deng Xiaoping as the country's paramount leader, an overall climate of economic and social reform in mainland China has been reflected in media content.
A prime example of the liberalisation has been the party's flagship newspaper, People's Daily, which had been rigidly controlled under Mao, used against his enemies, and copied verbatim by every other newspaper in the country during the Cultural Revolution. This leading daily was reformed and enlivened in the late 1970s and early-to-middle 1980s by then editor-in-chief Hu Jiwei. Hu expanded the paper's size and coverage, encouraged public criticism through letters to the editor, called for promulgation of a press law to spell out journalists' rights, and introduced a sprightlier writing style.
Nevertheless, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that China "continues to be the world's leading jailer of journalists," with 42 imprisoned journalists at the end of 2004, and accuses private companies, both foreign and domestic, of having been complacent toward or complicit with government censorship. Also, in their ''Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2007 '', Reporters Without Borders ranked China 163rd in terms of press freedom.
In preparation of the in 2007, new restrictions were placed on all sectors of the press, Internet-users, bloggers, website managers, foreign journalist, more than 30 of which have been arrested since the start of the year. In addition, a thousand discussion forums and websites have been shut down, and "a score of dissidents" have been imprisoned since July 2007.
The media's growing autonomy has been reflected in their increasingly diversified content. Since the late 1970s, despite periodic reversals, media in mainland China have frequently criticized party cadres and have published debates on such fundamental issues as the rule of law, freedom of the press, and universal human rights. They also have reported on a myriad of previously untouched social and lifestyle subjects. The only inviolable restrictions appear to be an unwritten ban on challenges to the party's right to rule and to the legitimacy and decision-making authority of top party leaders.
Talk radio in mainland China allows a much freer exchange of views than other media formats. In effect, talk radio has shifted the paradigm from authorities addressing the people to people addressing the authorities. For example, until 1991 the 14 million inhabitants of Shanghai were served by only one radio station—Radio Shanghai—which primarily aired predictable, pro-government propaganda.
Magazines and journals published in mainland China also have become much less inhibited in their coverage. These publications appear to enjoy more freedom than newspapers, which in turn have more leeway than radio and television. Magazines now print internal police reports on jailings of religious leaders and other dissidents. The State is unwilling to shut down such publications because it worries about public reaction, is anxious to avoid drawing more popular attention to the magazines, and knows that its own resources are already stretched thin.
Chinese journalists in Hong Kong on occasion have written politically controversial articles for mainland intellectual journals without encountering problems. Such opportunities have abounded because of the range of publications on the and because party officials there are too busy with weightier matters to review such journals systematically.
Mainland China's rapid economic development, as well as educational advances leading to greater literacy, have been important reasons for the dramatic expansion of the media and the diversification of coverage.
* Per capita gross domestic product, as measured in 1990 yuan, has increased fourfold since 1980. Rising disposable incomes have freed many Chinese from worrying about the basics of survival and provided them the wherewithal to purchase more television sets, newspaper and magazine subscriptions, and, more recently, satellite dishes and computers.
* Rising literacy rates have produced tens of millions of additional readers in the past decade, creating ever-expanding markets for the print media. According to UN statistics, Mainland China's adult literacy rate rose from 65.5 percent in 1982 to 81.5 percent in 1995.
Other overarching factors that are helping to make the mainland Chinese media more and diverse include a general decline in the influence of political and systems of belief; growing Chinese popular skepticism toward authority; increased contact with the West; greater competition in the media market; ebbing government resources; improved professional training for journalists; and new communication technologies.
The waning influence of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought has weakened the State's ability to use the media to shape public s and has made it harder for the authorities to penalize the media for publishing material that is not strictly consistent with Marxist theory. Although Marxism remains the official doctrine of the PRC, the de-emphasis of ideology has strengthened the media's hand in two fundamental ways: it has helped undercut government efforts to indoctrinate the public and micromanage the content of political and social reporting in the media, and it has opened the door for the media to pursue marketing practices that respond to customer wants and bring increasing financial independence from the State.
Other practices that are emerging in mainland China, such as decision making based on verifiable data and stronger quality controls on information, also have helped dilute the impact of ideology. In a change driven by the dual need for scientists to have reliable data with which to work and for the business sector to use in making investment and commercial decisions, the State Statistical Board since the mid-1980s has gained increased power to acquire and disseminate data for media and business use, reducing or eliminating the hither to common practice in which each sector used "its own" data.
Although difficult to quantify, growing skepticism toward authority in mainland China appears to be spurring public support for media criticism of the State and slowly diluting the legitimacy of the party. This rise in skepticism is reported by informed observers to be occurring all across East Asia. Such observers point to increased publicity given to cases of official , malfeasance, and ineptness—along with broader declines in social values such as civility and respect—as at least partly responsible for greater media and popular doubts about and appointed officials as compared to the past. At the same time, public skepticism of authority can and often does include skepticism toward the media themselves. Journalists, like individuals in other sectors of the mainland Chinese society, are far less willing than in the past to submit blindly to authority. Journalists were active participants in the 1989 demonstrations that culminated in the . The Tiananmen episode made it all but impossible to reconcile the growing desire of mainland Chinese journalists for control over their own profession with the party's interest in not letting that happen.
Closer and more varied contact with appears to be increasingly influencing educated urban opinion in mainland China on concepts such as a free press, freedom of speech, and political pluralism. This phenomenon is consistent with trends elsewhere in East Asia, where principles such as freedom of expression and legal guarantees of individual rights are playing a growing role. Perhaps most interestingly, many mainland Chinese journalists trained or educated in the West appear to have an outlook that is much closer to Western ideals of media freedom than to the attitudes of other Chinese, although a gap persists between mainland China and the West in professionalism and in grasping the principles of objective journalism.
Virtually all foreign reporters in mainland China operate under restrictions that are considerably more severe than in most Asian countries. One result is that Western media influence on mainland Chinese media organizations as a whole is generally limited. Nonetheless, the contacts that do occur are having an impact on individual mainland Chinese journalists, according to people interviewed for this study. In particular, one observer noted that younger reporters who have measurable, if cautious, contact with the West generally show minimal trust in official sources of information, are inclined to discount propaganda, and are determined to be comprehensive in their reporting.
Intense competition for the media market is among the most important factors behind the emergence of more diverse and autonomous media in China. As indicated earlier in this study, efforts by the Chinese media to respond to an increasingly demanding print and broadcast market have created an expanding spectrum of media products ranging from serious news journalism to purely entertainment stories. Monetary rewards for meeting such demands continue to grow, resulting in greater financial autonomy for the growing numbers of Chinese media firms that win sizable market shares. As a result, these companies are able to hire and retain more and better journalists, further boosting their capacity to compete. Commercialization thus has been a major liberating force for the media in China. The regime is far less able than before to wield financial leverage over the media, which have increasingly become self-supporting through revenues and circulation. According to one estimate, advertising in all media forms increased 35-fold between 1981 and 1992. Print ad revenues jumped ten times between 1990 and 1995—from 1.5 billion yuan to 15 billion yuan.
Television revenues also are growing dramatically: they totaled about $2 billion in 1995 and are expected to rise above $6 billion by 2005. In 1995, China Central Television earned nearly $150 million in advertising revenue, covering almost 90 percent of its total costs. In the past, radio and television tended to run well behind the print press in their news coverage. More recently, television has come under market pressure to be as timely, informative, and responsive as the print media.
Competition from outside mainland China has further impelled domestic media organizations to become more diverse, assertive, and skeptical of official authority. For example, in order to compete against Hong Kong radio stations that could be heard in , Guangdong radio managers created Pearl River Economic Radio in 1986. PRER, copying Hong Kong radio's approach, began to emphasize daily life, entertainment, "celebrity" deejays, and caller phone-in segments, while eliminating ideological, preachy formats that included little information beyond what was provided by government sources. By 1987, PRER had obtained 55 percent of the Guangdong market; previously, Hong Kong radio stations had held 90 percent of this market. Local party cadre in southern China reportedly are unhappy about PRER, mainly because some of the station's commentators, as well as its talk radio programs, highlight party failures and the misdeeds of individual party members in the region.
The top national Chinese Communist Party papers —which mostly feature party speeches, announcements, propaganda, and policy viewpoints—are steadily losing circulation and much-sought advertising revenues to evening municipal papers that have far more diverse content. For example, People's Daily's circulation fell from 3.1 million copies a day in 1990 to 2.2 million in 1995; the paper's 1994 advertising revenues were down as well. Moreover, its subscriptions consist overwhelmingly of mandatory ones by party and government organizations. Similarly, the Liberation Army Daily has become almost entirely dependent on State subsidies. Its circulation has fallen from 1.7 million in 1981 to fewer than 500,000 at present.
By contrast, the circulation of the Xinmin Evening News, operated by the Shanghai Municipal Government, has risen from 1.3 million to 1.7 million over the same time period. The Guangzhou Daily, owned by the Guangzhou Municipal Government, doubled its circulation in six years to 600,000 in 1994, and its ad revenues also were up.
The media also have attracted and are retaining more competent people than before. Journalism is widely seen as a more promising career field than in the past, while government work has lost much of its allure as other opportunities open up. At the same time, the explosion of business and entrepreneurial opportunities in recent years has complicated efforts by both the media and the government to attract good people. Journalism and government both face stiff competition from the relatively high salaries and profits available in the business sector. But the rising popularity and profitability of evening newspapers offer the prospect that higher quality, better paid jobs in journalism will expand in the years ahead.
Improved training, more education, and higher professional standards are bolstering the skills and confidence of journalists across East Asia, better positioning media organizations to gain positions of influence in their societies. Although mainland Chinese journalists only recently have begun to participate in these opportunities, there is some evidence that such training is having an effect. Many of the young mainland Chinese journalists being trained at US and other and professional programs in the West have been characterized by their trainers as "smart," "aware," and devoted to the profession.
Beginning in the 1980s, it became necessary in most cases for reporters to have a college education, and often a university degree, to get good jobs with the top party newspapers. The highly profitable evening papers, sponsored in the main by municipal governments, usually also require a college education.
Technical advances in the field of are undercutting the PRC Government efforts to control media content and are likely to play an even-greater role in the future. In the PRC and other developing countries, even fairly basic present a challenge to autocratic governments intent on controlling the information their citizens can receive. For example, importing fax machines—which are frequently used to spread copies of politically incorrect material from overseas news sources, internal party domestic publications, and more obscure domestic media—is strictly illegal in mainland China, but corruption in the form of payoffs and favors to officials hinders efforts to control such imports.
Residents of the Chinese mainland now receive more than 20 outside television channels by satellite, including Chinese-language services of CNN, Star TV, and the United States Information Agency. In the southern province of Guangdong, 97 percent of the households have television sets, and all—except those in a few parts of the city of Guangzhou, where reception is poor—have access to Hong Kong television through cable networks. Some local stations even intercept the signals and insert their own commercials. Beijing is unable to effectively monitor, let alone control, the illicit cable operators who have sprung up since the early 1990s. As of 1995, about 1,000 of the 3,000 cable stations in mainland China, linked to perhaps 50 million homes, were unlicensed.
Satellite dishes in mainland China that pull in programs from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other places are regulated, but government entities such as the Ministry of Machinery Industry and the military services produce such dishes outside allowable quotas and guidelines and then sell them illicitly to eager customers. Efforts by the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television to halt this practice have been ineffective, mostly because of the large profits involved—up to 50% per dish. Indeed, the government has backtracked in its efforts to stop these practices—moving from an outright ban on satellite dishes , to requiring that they be licensed , to specifying allowable programs and viewing hours .
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Widening Chinese use of the Internet is also undercutting government efforts to control the flow of information. According to CNNIC's 19th Statistical Survey Report on the , more than 100 million people in mainland China now have Internet access.
Since the beginning of 1996, the State has suspended all new applications from Internet service providers seeking to commence operations in the PRC; moved to put all existing Internet services under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, the Ministry of Electronics Industry, and the State Education Commission; and attempted—without much success—to establish , limit the contents of home pages, and block access to certain Internet sites through routing filters. Although much of the Internet access in China is subjugate to the so-called "Great Firewall of China", which blacklists certain websites and even blocks chat sessions, it has proven relatively ineffective: there are logistical problems with a firewall over such a large network, and in most instances its effects can be negated with a simple . Government officials are worried that, as the number of Chinese homes with telephone lines grows from the present level of less than 4%, the State will become totally unable to monitor Internet access at residences.
Over the last decade, the ways in which the Chinese Communist Party does its business—especially the introduction of s aimed at decentralizing power—have spurred greater media autonomy in several ways:
* The growth of "peripheral"—local and some regional—media. This trend has decentralized and dampened party oversight. In general, the farther reporters and media organizations are from Beijing and important provincial capitals, the greater their leeway.
* A shift toward administrative and legal regulation of the media and away from more fluid and personal oversight. Party efforts to rely on regulations rather than whim to try to control the media—as evidenced by the dozens of directives set forth when the State Press and Publications Administration was created in 1987, and by new regulations in 1990 and 1994—probably were intended to tighten party control, making it a matter of law rather than personal relationships. In fact, however, these regulations came at a time when official resources were being stretched more thinly and individual officials were becoming less willing—and less able—to enforce regulations.
* Vicissitudes of media acceptability. Since the early 1990s, the types of media coverage deemed acceptable by the regime have risen sharply. Growing uncertainties about what is allowable and what is out of bounds generally have worked in the media's favor.
Provincial broadcasters increasingly are trying to identify subjects on which the party will allow them more autonomy. Recent demands—unmet thus far—by such broadcasters include seeking authority to carry international news, to contract out television and radio programming to nongovernment organizations, and to explore possibilities for quasi-private media ownership.
As State resources have become stretched more thinly, the media have found it far easier than before to print and broadcast material that falls within vaguely defined gray areas. Officials are too few, too busy, and often too incompetent to be able to micromanage the media as in the past. Prior to the 1990s, it was common for party and government officials to participate in the actual drafting of newspaper editorials. Now, for the most part, these officials merely discuss editorial policies with newspaper managers.
In the past, prime-time news on Chinese Central Television was routinely examined, prior to airing, by the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television. Since 1994, however, the Ministry has ceased to prescreen CCTV news programs; now the programs are examined after they have aired. The diversity and quantity of material, moreover, have compelled officials to prioritize their reviews of broadcasts; the 7:00 p.m. news broadcasts, for instance, receive far more attention from the authorities than does the midnight news. In another manifestation of weakening government controls, recently launched news programs such as CCTV's Focal Report and Beijing Television's Express News include moderate criticisms of the party and government and explore some controversial public topics in an effort to make programs relevant to—and more popular with—viewers.
Evidently recognizing the limits on their ability to maintain tight control over an industry that has been expanding rapidly, party leaders during the last decade have publicly acknowledged the need to establish priorities. In particular, they have spoken of the high priority attached to maintaining control over the "big media"—national party papers and central and provincial TV and radio stations.
Many PRC officials appear anxious to avoid confronting the media because they are afraid they will be accused of transgressions in newspapers, in magazines, or on television or radio. As media autonomy has expanded, print and broadcast organs have tried to flex their "independence," albeit cautiously, in their coverage of State activities. Such coverage often focuses on specific government officials suspected of illegal actions, including use of their authority for personal gain.
Although the media's leverage stems mostly from officials' worries that rival insiders will use such publicity against them, it also appears to reflect growing respect within Chinese officialdom for the emerging influence of public opinion. A case in point is the Beijing Youth Daily. This paper has been punished for criticizing government actions and policies, but the authorities have stopped short of shutting it down, almost certainly out of reluctance to antagonize the paper's expanding readership.
Although the trend in mainland China clearly is toward greater media autonomy and diversity and away from government control and intimidation, crosscurrents of resistance persist. Powerful domestic institutions still constrain efforts by the media to become more autonomous and politically diverse.
Journalists were actively involved in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in the spring of 1989. About 1,000 of the 1,600 editors and staffers at People's Daily joined the demonstrations. Reporters also took part in marches and gatherings across the country from early May until early June, when the crackdown began. Journalists were among the principal targets of the suppression: hundreds of them were arrested or fired, and thousands, including more than 500 staffers at People's Daily, were forced repeatedly to write lengthy self-criticisms and to participate in much-loathed small group meetings. According to one account, more than 20 journalists were still in prisons as of mid-1996.
Beyond those arrested for their involvement in protests, the party also decided to punish—mainly by demotion or transfer—one percent of all staff members in major Beijing media offices as a warning to others. Although the Tiananmen crackdown damaged morale among mainland Chinese journalists, journalists' spirits recently have begun to rebound as a result of increasing party tolerance of diversity in the media, as well as improvements in journalists' salaries and benefits.
Beijing still tries to compel the media to report favorably on government activities and to limit negative coverage of official policies and actions. Neither the —promulgated in 1982—nor the Communist Party-directed judiciary provides the media with meaningful legal protection from the State. Although Article 35 of the Constitution guarantees the citizens the rights of free speech, press, and assembly, in reality citizens do not have such rights. The authorities in Beijing continue to give precedence to the principles enunciated in the Constitution's preamble—including upholding Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought and the party's leadership role.
The lack of an independent judiciary further hamstrings efforts by the media to mount court challenges against restrictions on media activities. The party appoints judges, and the position of the courts is merely equal to—not above—that of the bureaucracy.
The government uses a variety of approaches to retain some control over the media:
* It requires that newspapers be registered and attached to a government ministry, institute, research facility, labor group, or other State-sanctioned organization. Entrepreneurs cannot establish newspapers or magazines under their own names, although they reportedly have had some success in setting up research institutes and then creating publications attached to those bodies.
* It still occasionally s or fines journalists for unfavorable reporting.
* It imposes other punishments when it deems that criticism has gone too far. For example, it shut down the magazine Future and Development in 1993 for publishing two articles calling for greater democracy in mainland China, and it forced the firing of the Beijing Youth Daily's editor for aggressively covering misdeeds and acts of poor judgment by party cadre.
* It continues to make clear that criticism of certain fundamental policies—such as those on PRC sovereignty over territories under Republic of China administration and Tibet and on Hong Kong's future in the wake of the transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty on 1 July 1997 —are off limits.
* It has set up numerous official journalists' associations—the largest is the All-China Journalist Federation, with more than 400,000 members—so that no single organization can develop major autonomous power.
* It holds weekly meetings with top newspaper editors to direct them as to what news items they want focused upon and which stories they want to go unreported. The controversial closure of the Freezing Point journal was generally unreported in mainland China due to government orders.
The government also exploits a longstanding hierarchical relationship among Chinese print and broadcast entities in seeking to maintain some control over the media. It appoints the leaders of the most powerful media institutions, and then uses these organizations to try to dominate the rest of the media countrywide.
and People's Daily, the two most important print media, have status as separate government ministries; their directors sit on the party's Central Committee. Just below, hierarchically, are the two national newspapers under the control of the Propaganda Department—the Guangming Daily and the English-language'' China Daily''. These entities have the rank of vice ministries, as does the State Council-controlled Economic Daily. The National Propaganda Department appoints publishers, chief editors, and other key officials of the above-mentioned newspapers—plus a few others—while provincial and local party leaders make similar appointments for party papers in their jurisdictions.
In many ways, Xinhua is the fuel propelling mainland China's print media. Perhaps unique in the world because of its role, size, and reach, Xinhua reports directly to the party's Propaganda Department; employs more than 10,000 people—as compared to about 1,300 for the UK's Reuters, for example; has 107 bureaus worldwide both collecting information on other countries and dispensing information about mainland China; and maintains 31 bureaus in China—one for each province plus a military bureau. In as much as most of the newspapers in mainland China cannot afford to station correspondents abroad—or even in every province in mainland China—they rely on Xinhua feeds to fill their pages. People's Daily, for example, uses Xinhua material for approximately 25 percent of its stories. Xinhua is a publisher as well as a news agency—it owns more than 20 newspapers and a dozen magazines, and it prints in Chinese, English, and four other languages.
Like other government entities, Xinhua is feeling the pinch of reduced State financial subsidies. Beijing has been cutting funding to the news agency by an average of seven percent per year over the past three years, and State funds currently cover only about 40 percent of Xinhua's costs. As a result, the agency is raising revenues through involvement in public relations, construction, and information service businesses.
In the past, Xinhua was able to attract the top young journalists emerging from the universities or otherwise newly entering the field, but it can no longer do so as easily because of the appeal and resources of other newspapers and periodicals and the greater glamour of television and radio jobs. For example, midlevel reporters for the Xinmin Evening News often are given an apartment, whereas at Xinhua and People's Daily this benefit is reserved for the most senior journalists.
Like many other media organizations, Xinhua struggled to find the "right line" to use in covering the Tiananmen Square events of April-June 1989. Although more cautious than People's Daily in its treatment of sensitive topics during that period—such as how to commemorate reformist Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang's April 1989 death, the then ongoing in Beijing and elsewhere, and basic questions of press freedom and individual rights—Xinhua gave some favorable coverage to demonstrators and intellectuals who were questioning top party leaders. Even so, many Xinhua reporters were angry with top editors for not going far enough and for suppressing stories about the Tiananmen Square crackdown. For several days after the violence on 4 June, almost no one at Xinhua did any work, and journalists demonstrated inside the Agency's Beijing compound.
The mainland Chinese media's internal publication system, in which certain journals are published exclusively for government and party officials, provides information and analysis not generally available to the public. The State values these internal reports because they contain much of mainland China's most sensitive, controversial, and high-quality investigative journalism.
Xinhua and many other media organizations produce reports for the "internal" journals. Informed observers note that journalists generally like to write for the internal publications—typically, only the most senior or most capable print and broadcast reporters are given such opportunities—because they can write less polemical and more comprehensive stories without having to omit unwelcome details as is commonly done in the print media directed to the general public. A Chinese historian has noted, as an example of such self-censorship, that only a minority of China's population are aware 30 million people starved to death in the early 1960s, because the Party has never allowed the subject to be openly explored in the media.
The PRC internal media publication system follows a strict hierarchical pattern designed to facilitate party control. A publication called Reference Information —which includes translated articles from abroad as well as news and commentary by senior Xinhua reporters—is delivered by Xinhua personnel, rather than by the national mail system, to officials at the working level and above. A three-to-ten-page report called Internal Reference is distributed to officials at the ministerial level and higher. The most highly classified Xinhua internal reports, known as "redhead reference" reports, are issued occasionally to the top dozen or so party and government officials.
He Qinglian documents in chapter four of ''Media Control in China'', There are many grades and types of internal documents . Many are restricted to a certain level of official – such as county level, provincial level or down to a certain level of official in a ministry. Some Chinese journalists, including Xinhua correspondents in foreign countries, write for both the mass media and the internal media. The level of classification is tied to the administrative levels of Party and government in China. The higher the administrative level of the issuing office, generally the more secret the document is. In local government the issuing grades are province , region and county ; grades within government organs are ministry , bureau and office ; in the military corps (, division , and regiment . The most authoritative documents are drafted by the Central Committee to convey instructions from CCP leaders. Documents with Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Document at the top in red letters are the most authoritative.
There are signs the PRC internal media publication system is breaking down as more information becomes widely available in mainland China. A Hong Kong-based political journal circulated on the Chinese mainland has questioned the need for such a system in light of mainland China's modern telecommunications and expanding contacts with the outside world. Internal publications are becoming less exclusive; some are now being sold illegally on the street and are increasingly available to anyone with money.
Some of the internal publications have changed substantially in an effort to avoid becoming obsolete. For example, the publication News Front—started in 1957 as a weekly tool for the Communist Party to instruct journalists on what to write—no longer was limited to that function when it reappeared after the Cultural Revolution. It continued to change gradually and is now a monthly publication that serves as a professional rather than political guide for journalists.
Despite the diverse and independent press which has previously existed, and the assurances of one country, two systems, apprehensions have grown among Hong Kong journalists, since Hong Kong returned to PRC sovereignty in July, 1997, that Beijing would curtail their freedom to write articles on mainland China not to its liking. At the launch of a joint report published by the Hong Kong Journalists Association and Article 19 in July 2001, the Chairman of the Association said: "More and more newspapers self-censor themselves because they are controlled by either a businessman with close ties to Beijing, or part of a large enterprise, which has financial interests over the border."
In 2001 the Jamestown Foundation reported that China was buying into Chinese-language media in the U.S., offering free content, and leveraging advertising dollars -- all to manipulate coverage.
Much of the surprising diversity in the media in mainland China is attributable to the fact that most state media outlets no longer receive large government subsidies and are expected to largely pay for themselves through advertising. As a result,
they can no longer serve solely as mouthpieces for the government but must also produce that people find attractive and interesting so that money can be generated through advertising revenue. In addition, while the government does issue directives defining what can and cannot be published, it does not prevent, and in fact actively encourages state media outlets to compete with each other for viewers and commercial advertising.
Government control of information can also be ineffective in other ways. Despite government restrictions, much information is gathered either at the local level or from foreign sources and passed on through personal conversations and . The withdrawal of government media subsidies has caused many newspapers in s to take bold editorial stands critical of the government, as the necessity to attract readers and avoid bankruptcy has been a more pressing fear than government .
In addition, the traditional means of media control have proven extremely ineffective against newer forms of communication, most notably text messaging.
Although the government can and does use laws against state secrets to reports about social and political conditions, these laws have not prevented the press from all discussion of Chinese social issues. Chinese newspapers have been particularly affected by the loss of government subsidies, and have been especially active at gaining readership though must engaging in hard hitting investigative reporting and muckraking . As a result even papers which are nominally owned by the Communist Party are sometimes very bold at reporting social issues. However both commercial pressures and government restrictions have tended to cause newspapers to focus on lurid scandals often involving local officials who have relatively little political cover, and Chinese newspapers tend to lack depth in analysis of political events, as this tends to be more politically sensitive.
Among social issues first reported in the press of mainland China include the AIDS epidemic in Henan province, the unsafe state of mines in mainland China. In addition, the coverup was first revealed by a fax to CCTV which was forwarded to Western news media.
Television
In 1978, the PRC had less than one television receiver per 100 people, and fewer than ten million Chinese had access to a television set. According to World Bank report in 2003, there are about 35 TVs for every 100 people. Roughly a billion Chinese have access to television. Similarly, in 1965 there were 12 television and 93 radio stations in mainland China; today there are approximately 700 conventional television stations—plus about 3,000 —and 1,000 radio stations.
Television broadcasting is controlled by Chinese Central Television , which, with its 16 program channels, is the country's only national network. CCTV, which employs about 10,000 people and has an annual income of ?1,120mln yuan , falls under the dual supervision of the , responsible ultimately for media content, and the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, which oversees operations. A Vice in the latter ministry serves as chairman of CCTV. The 's principal directors and other officers are appointed by the State. So are the top officials at local conventional television stations in mainland China—nearly all of which are restricted to broadcasting within their own province or municipality—that receive CCTV broadcasts.
CCTV produces its own news broadcasts three times a day and is the country's most powerful and prolific television program producer. It also has a monopoly on purchases of programming from overseas. All local stations are required to carry CCTV's 7 p.m. main news broadcast; an internal CCTV survey indicates that nearly 500 million people countrywide regularly watch this program.
Even if CCTV is the most powerful network of mainland China, it has only about 30% of audience share all over the national territory. The fact shows how the Chinese viewers are biased in favour of local tv programs, that are more likely to represent the differences of an audience that is the largest in the world, more than the national or even international programs, that can hardly attend the needs of such a wide public.
Since September 1, 2006, the Chinese government has banned foreign-produced animation between the hours of 5:00 to 8:00 P.M. on state-run television to protect struggling Chinese animation studios that have been affected by the popularity of such cartoons.
Newspapers and journals
The number of newspapers in mainland China has increased from 42—virtually all Communist Party papers—in 1968 to 382 in 1980 and more than 2,200 today. By one official estimate, there are now more than 7,000 magazines and journals in the country. The number of copies of daily and weekly newspapers and magazines in circulation grew fourfold between the mid-1960s and the mid-to-late 1980s, reaching 310 million by 1987.
These figures, moreover, underreport actual circulation, because many publishers use their own distribution networks rather than official dissemination channels and also deliberately understate figures to avoid taxes. In addition, some 25,000 printing houses and hundreds of individual bookstores produce and sell nonofficial material—mostly and pornography but also political and intellectual journals.
Media reform
The media in mainland China also are becoming more autonomous and more diverse. Since Mao Zedong's death in 1976 and the subsequent emergence of Deng Xiaoping as the country's paramount leader, an overall climate of economic and social reform in mainland China has been reflected in media content.
A prime example of the liberalisation has been the party's flagship newspaper, People's Daily, which had been rigidly controlled under Mao, used against his enemies, and copied verbatim by every other newspaper in the country during the Cultural Revolution. This leading daily was reformed and enlivened in the late 1970s and early-to-middle 1980s by then editor-in-chief Hu Jiwei. Hu expanded the paper's size and coverage, encouraged public criticism through letters to the editor, called for promulgation of a press law to spell out journalists' rights, and introduced a sprightlier writing style.
Nevertheless, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that China "continues to be the world's leading jailer of journalists," with 42 imprisoned journalists at the end of 2004, and accuses private companies, both foreign and domestic, of having been complacent toward or complicit with government censorship. Also, in their ''Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2007 '', Reporters Without Borders ranked China 163rd in terms of press freedom.
In preparation of the in 2007, new restrictions were placed on all sectors of the press, Internet-users, bloggers, website managers, foreign journalist, more than 30 of which have been arrested since the start of the year. In addition, a thousand discussion forums and websites have been shut down, and "a score of dissidents" have been imprisoned since July 2007.
Diversified content
The media's growing autonomy has been reflected in their increasingly diversified content. Since the late 1970s, despite periodic reversals, media in mainland China have frequently criticized party cadres and have published debates on such fundamental issues as the rule of law, freedom of the press, and universal human rights. They also have reported on a myriad of previously untouched social and lifestyle subjects. The only inviolable restrictions appear to be an unwritten ban on challenges to the party's right to rule and to the legitimacy and decision-making authority of top party leaders.
Talk radio
Talk radio in mainland China allows a much freer exchange of views than other media formats. In effect, talk radio has shifted the paradigm from authorities addressing the people to people addressing the authorities. For example, until 1991 the 14 million inhabitants of Shanghai were served by only one radio station—Radio Shanghai—which primarily aired predictable, pro-government propaganda.
Magazines and journals
Magazines and journals published in mainland China also have become much less inhibited in their coverage. These publications appear to enjoy more freedom than newspapers, which in turn have more leeway than radio and television. Magazines now print internal police reports on jailings of religious leaders and other dissidents. The State is unwilling to shut down such publications because it worries about public reaction, is anxious to avoid drawing more popular attention to the magazines, and knows that its own resources are already stretched thin.
Chinese journalists in Hong Kong on occasion have written politically controversial articles for mainland intellectual journals without encountering problems. Such opportunities have abounded because of the range of publications on the and because party officials there are too busy with weightier matters to review such journals systematically.
Greater prosperity and literacy
Mainland China's rapid economic development, as well as educational advances leading to greater literacy, have been important reasons for the dramatic expansion of the media and the diversification of coverage.
* Per capita gross domestic product, as measured in 1990 yuan, has increased fourfold since 1980. Rising disposable incomes have freed many Chinese from worrying about the basics of survival and provided them the wherewithal to purchase more television sets, newspaper and magazine subscriptions, and, more recently, satellite dishes and computers.
* Rising literacy rates have produced tens of millions of additional readers in the past decade, creating ever-expanding markets for the print media. According to UN statistics, Mainland China's adult literacy rate rose from 65.5 percent in 1982 to 81.5 percent in 1995.
Ideological and political trends
Other overarching factors that are helping to make the mainland Chinese media more and diverse include a general decline in the influence of political and systems of belief; growing Chinese popular skepticism toward authority; increased contact with the West; greater competition in the media market; ebbing government resources; improved professional training for journalists; and new communication technologies.
Weakening of ideological shackles
The waning influence of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought has weakened the State's ability to use the media to shape public s and has made it harder for the authorities to penalize the media for publishing material that is not strictly consistent with Marxist theory. Although Marxism remains the official doctrine of the PRC, the de-emphasis of ideology has strengthened the media's hand in two fundamental ways: it has helped undercut government efforts to indoctrinate the public and micromanage the content of political and social reporting in the media, and it has opened the door for the media to pursue marketing practices that respond to customer wants and bring increasing financial independence from the State.
Other practices that are emerging in mainland China, such as decision making based on verifiable data and stronger quality controls on information, also have helped dilute the impact of ideology. In a change driven by the dual need for scientists to have reliable data with which to work and for the business sector to use in making investment and commercial decisions, the State Statistical Board since the mid-1980s has gained increased power to acquire and disseminate data for media and business use, reducing or eliminating the hither to common practice in which each sector used "its own" data.
Skepticism toward authority
Although difficult to quantify, growing skepticism toward authority in mainland China appears to be spurring public support for media criticism of the State and slowly diluting the legitimacy of the party. This rise in skepticism is reported by informed observers to be occurring all across East Asia. Such observers point to increased publicity given to cases of official , malfeasance, and ineptness—along with broader declines in social values such as civility and respect—as at least partly responsible for greater media and popular doubts about and appointed officials as compared to the past. At the same time, public skepticism of authority can and often does include skepticism toward the media themselves. Journalists, like individuals in other sectors of the mainland Chinese society, are far less willing than in the past to submit blindly to authority. Journalists were active participants in the 1989 demonstrations that culminated in the . The Tiananmen episode made it all but impossible to reconcile the growing desire of mainland Chinese journalists for control over their own profession with the party's interest in not letting that happen.
Contact with the West
Closer and more varied contact with appears to be increasingly influencing educated urban opinion in mainland China on concepts such as a free press, freedom of speech, and political pluralism. This phenomenon is consistent with trends elsewhere in East Asia, where principles such as freedom of expression and legal guarantees of individual rights are playing a growing role. Perhaps most interestingly, many mainland Chinese journalists trained or educated in the West appear to have an outlook that is much closer to Western ideals of media freedom than to the attitudes of other Chinese, although a gap persists between mainland China and the West in professionalism and in grasping the principles of objective journalism.
Virtually all foreign reporters in mainland China operate under restrictions that are considerably more severe than in most Asian countries. One result is that Western media influence on mainland Chinese media organizations as a whole is generally limited. Nonetheless, the contacts that do occur are having an impact on individual mainland Chinese journalists, according to people interviewed for this study. In particular, one observer noted that younger reporters who have measurable, if cautious, contact with the West generally show minimal trust in official sources of information, are inclined to discount propaganda, and are determined to be comprehensive in their reporting.
Market competition
Intense competition for the media market is among the most important factors behind the emergence of more diverse and autonomous media in China. As indicated earlier in this study, efforts by the Chinese media to respond to an increasingly demanding print and broadcast market have created an expanding spectrum of media products ranging from serious news journalism to purely entertainment stories. Monetary rewards for meeting such demands continue to grow, resulting in greater financial autonomy for the growing numbers of Chinese media firms that win sizable market shares. As a result, these companies are able to hire and retain more and better journalists, further boosting their capacity to compete. Commercialization thus has been a major liberating force for the media in China. The regime is far less able than before to wield financial leverage over the media, which have increasingly become self-supporting through revenues and circulation. According to one estimate, advertising in all media forms increased 35-fold between 1981 and 1992. Print ad revenues jumped ten times between 1990 and 1995—from 1.5 billion yuan to 15 billion yuan.
Television revenues also are growing dramatically: they totaled about $2 billion in 1995 and are expected to rise above $6 billion by 2005. In 1995, China Central Television earned nearly $150 million in advertising revenue, covering almost 90 percent of its total costs. In the past, radio and television tended to run well behind the print press in their news coverage. More recently, television has come under market pressure to be as timely, informative, and responsive as the print media.
Competition from outside mainland China has further impelled domestic media organizations to become more diverse, assertive, and skeptical of official authority. For example, in order to compete against Hong Kong radio stations that could be heard in , Guangdong radio managers created Pearl River Economic Radio in 1986. PRER, copying Hong Kong radio's approach, began to emphasize daily life, entertainment, "celebrity" deejays, and caller phone-in segments, while eliminating ideological, preachy formats that included little information beyond what was provided by government sources. By 1987, PRER had obtained 55 percent of the Guangdong market; previously, Hong Kong radio stations had held 90 percent of this market. Local party cadre in southern China reportedly are unhappy about PRER, mainly because some of the station's commentators, as well as its talk radio programs, highlight party failures and the misdeeds of individual party members in the region.
The top national Chinese Communist Party papers —which mostly feature party speeches, announcements, propaganda, and policy viewpoints—are steadily losing circulation and much-sought advertising revenues to evening municipal papers that have far more diverse content. For example, People's Daily's circulation fell from 3.1 million copies a day in 1990 to 2.2 million in 1995; the paper's 1994 advertising revenues were down as well. Moreover, its subscriptions consist overwhelmingly of mandatory ones by party and government organizations. Similarly, the Liberation Army Daily has become almost entirely dependent on State subsidies. Its circulation has fallen from 1.7 million in 1981 to fewer than 500,000 at present.
By contrast, the circulation of the Xinmin Evening News, operated by the Shanghai Municipal Government, has risen from 1.3 million to 1.7 million over the same time period. The Guangzhou Daily, owned by the Guangzhou Municipal Government, doubled its circulation in six years to 600,000 in 1994, and its ad revenues also were up.
Improvements in personnel
The media also have attracted and are retaining more competent people than before. Journalism is widely seen as a more promising career field than in the past, while government work has lost much of its allure as other opportunities open up. At the same time, the explosion of business and entrepreneurial opportunities in recent years has complicated efforts by both the media and the government to attract good people. Journalism and government both face stiff competition from the relatively high salaries and profits available in the business sector. But the rising popularity and profitability of evening newspapers offer the prospect that higher quality, better paid jobs in journalism will expand in the years ahead.
Improved training, more education, and higher professional standards are bolstering the skills and confidence of journalists across East Asia, better positioning media organizations to gain positions of influence in their societies. Although mainland Chinese journalists only recently have begun to participate in these opportunities, there is some evidence that such training is having an effect. Many of the young mainland Chinese journalists being trained at US and other and professional programs in the West have been characterized by their trainers as "smart," "aware," and devoted to the profession.
Beginning in the 1980s, it became necessary in most cases for reporters to have a college education, and often a university degree, to get good jobs with the top party newspapers. The highly profitable evening papers, sponsored in the main by municipal governments, usually also require a college education.
New technologies
Technical advances in the field of are undercutting the PRC Government efforts to control media content and are likely to play an even-greater role in the future. In the PRC and other developing countries, even fairly basic present a challenge to autocratic governments intent on controlling the information their citizens can receive. For example, importing fax machines—which are frequently used to spread copies of politically incorrect material from overseas news sources, internal party domestic publications, and more obscure domestic media—is strictly illegal in mainland China, but corruption in the form of payoffs and favors to officials hinders efforts to control such imports.
Cable television
Residents of the Chinese mainland now receive more than 20 outside television channels by satellite, including Chinese-language services of CNN, Star TV, and the United States Information Agency. In the southern province of Guangdong, 97 percent of the households have television sets, and all—except those in a few parts of the city of Guangzhou, where reception is poor—have access to Hong Kong television through cable networks. Some local stations even intercept the signals and insert their own commercials. Beijing is unable to effectively monitor, let alone control, the illicit cable operators who have sprung up since the early 1990s. As of 1995, about 1,000 of the 3,000 cable stations in mainland China, linked to perhaps 50 million homes, were unlicensed.
Satellite dishes
Satellite dishes in mainland China that pull in programs from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other places are regulated, but government entities such as the Ministry of Machinery Industry and the military services produce such dishes outside allowable quotas and guidelines and then sell them illicitly to eager customers. Efforts by the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television to halt this practice have been ineffective, mostly because of the large profits involved—up to 50% per dish. Indeed, the government has backtracked in its efforts to stop these practices—moving from an outright ban on satellite dishes , to requiring that they be licensed , to specifying allowable programs and viewing hours .
Internet
:
Widening Chinese use of the Internet is also undercutting government efforts to control the flow of information. According to CNNIC's 19th Statistical Survey Report on the , more than 100 million people in mainland China now have Internet access.
Since the beginning of 1996, the State has suspended all new applications from Internet service providers seeking to commence operations in the PRC; moved to put all existing Internet services under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, the Ministry of Electronics Industry, and the State Education Commission; and attempted—without much success—to establish , limit the contents of home pages, and block access to certain Internet sites through routing filters. Although much of the Internet access in China is subjugate to the so-called "Great Firewall of China", which blacklists certain websites and even blocks chat sessions, it has proven relatively ineffective: there are logistical problems with a firewall over such a large network, and in most instances its effects can be negated with a simple . Government officials are worried that, as the number of Chinese homes with telephone lines grows from the present level of less than 4%, the State will become totally unable to monitor Internet access at residences.
Weakening of party controls
Over the last decade, the ways in which the Chinese Communist Party does its business—especially the introduction of s aimed at decentralizing power—have spurred greater media autonomy in several ways:
* The growth of "peripheral"—local and some regional—media. This trend has decentralized and dampened party oversight. In general, the farther reporters and media organizations are from Beijing and important provincial capitals, the greater their leeway.
* A shift toward administrative and legal regulation of the media and away from more fluid and personal oversight. Party efforts to rely on regulations rather than whim to try to control the media—as evidenced by the dozens of directives set forth when the State Press and Publications Administration was created in 1987, and by new regulations in 1990 and 1994—probably were intended to tighten party control, making it a matter of law rather than personal relationships. In fact, however, these regulations came at a time when official resources were being stretched more thinly and individual officials were becoming less willing—and less able—to enforce regulations.
* Vicissitudes of media acceptability. Since the early 1990s, the types of media coverage deemed acceptable by the regime have risen sharply. Growing uncertainties about what is allowable and what is out of bounds generally have worked in the media's favor.
Provincial broadcasters increasingly are trying to identify subjects on which the party will allow them more autonomy. Recent demands—unmet thus far—by such broadcasters include seeking authority to carry international news, to contract out television and radio programming to nongovernment organizations, and to explore possibilities for quasi-private media ownership.
As State resources have become stretched more thinly, the media have found it far easier than before to print and broadcast material that falls within vaguely defined gray areas. Officials are too few, too busy, and often too incompetent to be able to micromanage the media as in the past. Prior to the 1990s, it was common for party and government officials to participate in the actual drafting of newspaper editorials. Now, for the most part, these officials merely discuss editorial policies with newspaper managers.
In the past, prime-time news on Chinese Central Television was routinely examined, prior to airing, by the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television. Since 1994, however, the Ministry has ceased to prescreen CCTV news programs; now the programs are examined after they have aired. The diversity and quantity of material, moreover, have compelled officials to prioritize their reviews of broadcasts; the 7:00 p.m. news broadcasts, for instance, receive far more attention from the authorities than does the midnight news. In another manifestation of weakening government controls, recently launched news programs such as CCTV's Focal Report and Beijing Television's Express News include moderate criticisms of the party and government and explore some controversial public topics in an effort to make programs relevant to—and more popular with—viewers.
Evidently recognizing the limits on their ability to maintain tight control over an industry that has been expanding rapidly, party leaders during the last decade have publicly acknowledged the need to establish priorities. In particular, they have spoken of the high priority attached to maintaining control over the "big media"—national party papers and central and provincial TV and radio stations.
Many PRC officials appear anxious to avoid confronting the media because they are afraid they will be accused of transgressions in newspapers, in magazines, or on television or radio. As media autonomy has expanded, print and broadcast organs have tried to flex their "independence," albeit cautiously, in their coverage of State activities. Such coverage often focuses on specific government officials suspected of illegal actions, including use of their authority for personal gain.
Although the media's leverage stems mostly from officials' worries that rival insiders will use such publicity against them, it also appears to reflect growing respect within Chinese officialdom for the emerging influence of public opinion. A case in point is the Beijing Youth Daily. This paper has been punished for criticizing government actions and policies, but the authorities have stopped short of shutting it down, almost certainly out of reluctance to antagonize the paper's expanding readership.
Party resistance to media autonomy
Although the trend in mainland China clearly is toward greater media autonomy and diversity and away from government control and intimidation, crosscurrents of resistance persist. Powerful domestic institutions still constrain efforts by the media to become more autonomous and politically diverse.
Impact of Tiananmen crackdown
Journalists were actively involved in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in the spring of 1989. About 1,000 of the 1,600 editors and staffers at People's Daily joined the demonstrations. Reporters also took part in marches and gatherings across the country from early May until early June, when the crackdown began. Journalists were among the principal targets of the suppression: hundreds of them were arrested or fired, and thousands, including more than 500 staffers at People's Daily, were forced repeatedly to write lengthy self-criticisms and to participate in much-loathed small group meetings. According to one account, more than 20 journalists were still in prisons as of mid-1996.
Beyond those arrested for their involvement in protests, the party also decided to punish—mainly by demotion or transfer—one percent of all staff members in major Beijing media offices as a warning to others. Although the Tiananmen crackdown damaged morale among mainland Chinese journalists, journalists' spirits recently have begun to rebound as a result of increasing party tolerance of diversity in the media, as well as improvements in journalists' salaries and benefits.
Efforts to reinforce party controls
Beijing still tries to compel the media to report favorably on government activities and to limit negative coverage of official policies and actions. Neither the —promulgated in 1982—nor the Communist Party-directed judiciary provides the media with meaningful legal protection from the State. Although Article 35 of the Constitution guarantees the citizens the rights of free speech, press, and assembly, in reality citizens do not have such rights. The authorities in Beijing continue to give precedence to the principles enunciated in the Constitution's preamble—including upholding Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought and the party's leadership role.
The lack of an independent judiciary further hamstrings efforts by the media to mount court challenges against restrictions on media activities. The party appoints judges, and the position of the courts is merely equal to—not above—that of the bureaucracy.
The government uses a variety of approaches to retain some control over the media:
* It requires that newspapers be registered and attached to a government ministry, institute, research facility, labor group, or other State-sanctioned organization. Entrepreneurs cannot establish newspapers or magazines under their own names, although they reportedly have had some success in setting up research institutes and then creating publications attached to those bodies.
* It still occasionally s or fines journalists for unfavorable reporting.
* It imposes other punishments when it deems that criticism has gone too far. For example, it shut down the magazine Future and Development in 1993 for publishing two articles calling for greater democracy in mainland China, and it forced the firing of the Beijing Youth Daily's editor for aggressively covering misdeeds and acts of poor judgment by party cadre.
* It continues to make clear that criticism of certain fundamental policies—such as those on PRC sovereignty over territories under Republic of China administration and Tibet and on Hong Kong's future in the wake of the transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty on 1 July 1997 —are off limits.
* It has set up numerous official journalists' associations—the largest is the All-China Journalist Federation, with more than 400,000 members—so that no single organization can develop major autonomous power.
* It holds weekly meetings with top newspaper editors to direct them as to what news items they want focused upon and which stories they want to go unreported. The controversial closure of the Freezing Point journal was generally unreported in mainland China due to government orders.
The government also exploits a longstanding hierarchical relationship among Chinese print and broadcast entities in seeking to maintain some control over the media. It appoints the leaders of the most powerful media institutions, and then uses these organizations to try to dominate the rest of the media countrywide.
Structure of media in mainland China
Mainland China's media network
and People's Daily, the two most important print media, have status as separate government ministries; their directors sit on the party's Central Committee. Just below, hierarchically, are the two national newspapers under the control of the Propaganda Department—the Guangming Daily and the English-language'' China Daily''. These entities have the rank of vice ministries, as does the State Council-controlled Economic Daily. The National Propaganda Department appoints publishers, chief editors, and other key officials of the above-mentioned newspapers—plus a few others—while provincial and local party leaders make similar appointments for party papers in their jurisdictions.
In many ways, Xinhua is the fuel propelling mainland China's print media. Perhaps unique in the world because of its role, size, and reach, Xinhua reports directly to the party's Propaganda Department; employs more than 10,000 people—as compared to about 1,300 for the UK's Reuters, for example; has 107 bureaus worldwide both collecting information on other countries and dispensing information about mainland China; and maintains 31 bureaus in China—one for each province plus a military bureau. In as much as most of the newspapers in mainland China cannot afford to station correspondents abroad—or even in every province in mainland China—they rely on Xinhua feeds to fill their pages. People's Daily, for example, uses Xinhua material for approximately 25 percent of its stories. Xinhua is a publisher as well as a news agency—it owns more than 20 newspapers and a dozen magazines, and it prints in Chinese, English, and four other languages.
Like other government entities, Xinhua is feeling the pinch of reduced State financial subsidies. Beijing has been cutting funding to the news agency by an average of seven percent per year over the past three years, and State funds currently cover only about 40 percent of Xinhua's costs. As a result, the agency is raising revenues through involvement in public relations, construction, and information service businesses.
In the past, Xinhua was able to attract the top young journalists emerging from the universities or otherwise newly entering the field, but it can no longer do so as easily because of the appeal and resources of other newspapers and periodicals and the greater glamour of television and radio jobs. For example, midlevel reporters for the Xinmin Evening News often are given an apartment, whereas at Xinhua and People's Daily this benefit is reserved for the most senior journalists.
Like many other media organizations, Xinhua struggled to find the "right line" to use in covering the Tiananmen Square events of April-June 1989. Although more cautious than People's Daily in its treatment of sensitive topics during that period—such as how to commemorate reformist Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang's April 1989 death, the then ongoing in Beijing and elsewhere, and basic questions of press freedom and individual rights—Xinhua gave some favorable coverage to demonstrators and intellectuals who were questioning top party leaders. Even so, many Xinhua reporters were angry with top editors for not going far enough and for suppressing stories about the Tiananmen Square crackdown. For several days after the violence on 4 June, almost no one at Xinhua did any work, and journalists demonstrated inside the Agency's Beijing compound.
The role of the PRC internal media
The mainland Chinese media's internal publication system, in which certain journals are published exclusively for government and party officials, provides information and analysis not generally available to the public. The State values these internal reports because they contain much of mainland China's most sensitive, controversial, and high-quality investigative journalism.
Xinhua and many other media organizations produce reports for the "internal" journals. Informed observers note that journalists generally like to write for the internal publications—typically, only the most senior or most capable print and broadcast reporters are given such opportunities—because they can write less polemical and more comprehensive stories without having to omit unwelcome details as is commonly done in the print media directed to the general public. A Chinese historian has noted, as an example of such self-censorship, that only a minority of China's population are aware 30 million people starved to death in the early 1960s, because the Party has never allowed the subject to be openly explored in the media.
The PRC internal media publication system follows a strict hierarchical pattern designed to facilitate party control. A publication called Reference Information —which includes translated articles from abroad as well as news and commentary by senior Xinhua reporters—is delivered by Xinhua personnel, rather than by the national mail system, to officials at the working level and above. A three-to-ten-page report called Internal Reference is distributed to officials at the ministerial level and higher. The most highly classified Xinhua internal reports, known as "redhead reference" reports, are issued occasionally to the top dozen or so party and government officials.
He Qinglian documents in chapter four of ''Media Control in China'', There are many grades and types of internal documents . Many are restricted to a certain level of official – such as county level, provincial level or down to a certain level of official in a ministry. Some Chinese journalists, including Xinhua correspondents in foreign countries, write for both the mass media and the internal media. The level of classification is tied to the administrative levels of Party and government in China. The higher the administrative level of the issuing office, generally the more secret the document is. In local government the issuing grades are province , region and county ; grades within government organs are ministry , bureau and office ; in the military corps (, division , and regiment . The most authoritative documents are drafted by the Central Committee to convey instructions from CCP leaders. Documents with Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Document at the top in red letters are the most authoritative.
There are signs the PRC internal media publication system is breaking down as more information becomes widely available in mainland China. A Hong Kong-based political journal circulated on the Chinese mainland has questioned the need for such a system in light of mainland China's modern telecommunications and expanding contacts with the outside world. Internal publications are becoming less exclusive; some are now being sold illegally on the street and are increasingly available to anyone with money.
Some of the internal publications have changed substantially in an effort to avoid becoming obsolete. For example, the publication News Front—started in 1957 as a weekly tool for the Communist Party to instruct journalists on what to write—no longer was limited to that function when it reappeared after the Cultural Revolution. It continued to change gradually and is now a monthly publication that serves as a professional rather than political guide for journalists.
Hong Kong
Despite the diverse and independent press which has previously existed, and the assurances of one country, two systems, apprehensions have grown among Hong Kong journalists, since Hong Kong returned to PRC sovereignty in July, 1997, that Beijing would curtail their freedom to write articles on mainland China not to its liking. At the launch of a joint report published by the Hong Kong Journalists Association and Article 19 in July 2001, the Chairman of the Association said: "More and more newspapers self-censor themselves because they are controlled by either a businessman with close ties to Beijing, or part of a large enterprise, which has financial interests over the border."
Overseas Chinese press
In 2001 the Jamestown Foundation reported that China was buying into Chinese-language media in the U.S., offering free content, and leveraging advertising dollars -- all to manipulate coverage.
News Probe
News Probe is a television programme in China Central Television that has aired since 1996. It attempts to investigate various news, issues, and scandals, aiming to reveal the social problems and the insufficiencies of state policies. Its Chinese title, ''Xinwen Diaocha'', means "News Investigations". Together with Oriental Horizon , Focus and Tell It Like It Is News Probe shares the similar reputation in documentary television programmes in China.
*Authority
*Reality
*Richness
*Liveliness
*Reporting the happening history and finding out the news in the news
*Encourage viewers to develop their own understanding of China problems
*Cultivate new generation of China being more sensitive and critical to diverse problems and dilemma
*Allow the audience to acquire a global horizon while viewing different issues in relation to other countries
*Initiate reform for societal progress
The maiden broadcast of 'Oriental Horizon' on May 1, 1993 signified the start of the broadcast of programme on current affairs. One year later, on April 1, 1994, a similar programme , which means a talk show on the hottest topics, was broadcast. At the prime time of 9p.m. on May 17, 1996, the first episode of News Probe-- "Hongzhi Ban" was broadcasted. The programme 'News Probe' is produced as a result of the ongoing development of such kind of programme. The founders of 'News Probe' expected this programme to report in a much detailed, in-depth, objective, systematic and authoritative way.
During the past developmental years, the production team found a position for the program. News Probe is thus aired as an investigative doucumentary, not only a commentary one.
The reason of setting up this position is due to the vast competitions from other news programmes in CCTV. Focus provides detailed and universal description for different news events while 'Oriental Horizon' is good at rousing audiences' emotion during news reporting. Besides, the broadcasting time of News Probe is beyond all these news programs. Therefore, what News Probe can do is to provide innovative reporting methods so as to raise audiences' interests. As a result, an investigative reporting style was developed.
At the earlier stage of the program, the criteria on choosing the program topic are known as the slogan of "Sanxing" , which means whether the topic is worth reporting, editing into program and investigating. However, in most cases, the three criteria are separately considered and only part of them are fulfiled. Afterwards, four methods of choosing a topic have been developed, known as the investigation on the theme, consensus, event and the inside skinny.
Being an investigative documentary, the News Probe raised the slogan of "hunting the truth", which consists of 2 layers of meaning. Firstly, to
uncover the inside skinny which is concealed by some people or organizations, and those secret incidents which harm the public interest. News Probe thus also includes some reports involving wrongdoings by governmental departments, such as in the Chinese Police. Secondly, News Probe also aimed at providing deep discussion on the complex problems that being investigated.
The production crew does not aim at generating any conclusion for each episode. Instead, it allows the audience to make their own judgements after viewing the programs.
Since News Probe has been developed into an investigative documentary, it has its own characteristics:
*The reporters of News Probe must cultivate a sense of investigation
*The core part of the program is the process of investigation but not only the description of the event
*The investigation process is initiated by the suspension of reporters on certain events, and it ends when the suspension is proved.
To cut in short, the performance of the reporters during the investigation process determines the quality of the investigative documentary, therefore, reporters should be able in appling different methods depended on different situations in order to carry out a good programme .
Reporters of the programme must also reach several criteria of the production crew. They must be:
*rational in order to investigate the events in objective manners;
*able to exchange ideas and examine issues at the same time;
*able to look into issues in audiences point of view;
*fair to all the parties involved in the events and should be unbiased to certain parties; and
*able to raise questions towards every parts of the events
News Probe based on the framework of “Investigative” Reporting. Investigative means from unknown to known, marching toward the darkness. Investigators intervene into internal parts of the incidents and find out the truth systematically. They need to stand in an objective position and base on real evidences.
Through continuously questioning and criticizing a range of social issues, News Probe has developed its unique style and made people aware of the blind spots of China, where sometimes also report affairs of China in connection with other countries. By reporting on social issues such as the proliferation of AIDS and SARS in China, the problem of Greenhouse effect, pollution in China and Germany , via interviewing the people involved, and by questioning everything, the objectives of the program are thus reached.
Investigation of each episode is initiated by reporters' suspect towards the events. The reporters then start the investigation together with the production crew. Apart from reporters' own finding of the stories, the general public can also tell the secret incidents through contacting the production crew directly, via the use of mail, news hotline and email.
Apart from interviewing the involved parties, crews of News Probe also investigate issues by different methods, such as consulting powerful institutions and people, referring to reference books, studying the issue’s history etc. These empirical methods enable News Probe to investigate issues in an objective and unbiased manner.
The programme itself is a report of the truth and is a reveal of the process of investigation made by crew. Each episode includes the discovery of the problems, the investigatory work done by the reporters and the crew, the evidence collected and all the way down to the exposure of the truth.
*Narration: Process of the incidents and the truth
*Figure description: Experience of the main characters and description on his/her disposition
*Investigation: Internal and external reasons
The production crew of the program includes the following posts :
#Chief
#Secretary
#Producer
#
#Reporter
#Cameraman
#Recorder
#Post-production
#Coordinator
Chief Producer is responsible for the broadcast of the program, including the content of the program and the administrative work. Producer is responsible for the production of each episode and is accountable to Chief Producer.
The production of each episode follows the sequence stated below:
#Selection of topic
#Declaration of topic selected
#Investigation
#Recording of the investigation process
#Post-production
#Screening of the episode
#Broadcast of the episode
#Evaluation
The production team has several criteria when choosing a suitable topic for each episode, including:
*it must be a story long enough to produce a 45-minute programme
*it must have special characteristics which can reflect some social changes
*it must be able to raise public concern
*there must be a truth behind the story
*it must be an exclusive discovery, including the story and the angle of view of the reporter
*it must be the first hand materials and not be reported by other news programs
Length of the program: about 40 minutes each episode
All of Mainland China, with an estimated audience figure of 100 million people.
Name:
The government prosecuted a businessman, called Chan Yuen-Ho, over bribes. After his three-year imprisonment, the government released him because of lack of evidence.
News Probe resolved to find out the inside story of the case. After interviewing the involved people, they found that the government prosecuted Chan Yuen-Ho because Chan was inobedient in taking advice and orders from the government. He rejected the government's advice of stopping external investment in his company.
Chan was insistent on his innocence and appealed to the high court continuously. He was released after three years of prison life. However, his company went bankrupt during these three years.
News Probe has been a pioneer, providing a rare voice to investigate the
actions of the Chinese government. It has courage to interview the involved officials by asking to-the-point questions and let audience know the actions of the China government.
It has allowed formerly voiceless persons to speak, and their Web site has allowed viewers to have their opinion heard. In this case, it gives a valuable opportunity for Chan Yuen-Ho to fight for the just response from the government.
1996
China Broadcasting Television News
Social, educational and political Group
Second Class Prize
Wen Chi-ban
1998
36th Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union
Special Prize
Life
?????La Maison du Maroc Television Documentary Prize
Silver Goddess Prize
Choosing village Head from big Head village
Highest watching rate in 9:00-9:45pm programmes
1999
China Broadcasting Television Club
12th Excellent Broadcast and Compere Work Piece
Second Class Prize
Greatest Bankrupt Case of State Enterprise
2000
China Broadcasting Television News
?????????????????Social, educational and political Group
First Class Prize
Confession by Drug Addicts Getting rid of it
Annual Award from The Center for Radio & Television Studies
2001
39th Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union
Television Information Group Main Prize
Litigation After Wedding
*30% of News Probe programme were categoried as top ten programmes in the Overall watching rate calculation
*Highly recommended by the same profession
*Address: No.11, FuXingLu, Beijing, China
*E-mail: ab35@mail.cctv.com
*Phone no.: 010-68579889
*Phone no. for news providing: 010-63984650
*Postal code: 100859
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1. 中央電視臺新聞評論部編: 《正在發生的歷史 新聞調查 1998 實錄》。
2. 夏駿 王堅平主編﹕《目擊歷史﹕新聞調查幕後的故事》。
3. 陳新紅 張羽編﹕《逃亡日記》。
4. 中央電視臺新聞評論部編: 《第一現場》。
Mission
General mission of CCTV News Programs
*Authority
*Reality
*Richness
*Liveliness
Additional mission of News Probe
*Reporting the happening history and finding out the news in the news
*Encourage viewers to develop their own understanding of China problems
*Cultivate new generation of China being more sensitive and critical to diverse problems and dilemma
*Allow the audience to acquire a global horizon while viewing different issues in relation to other countries
*Initiate reform for societal progress
Development
The maiden broadcast of 'Oriental Horizon' on May 1, 1993 signified the start of the broadcast of programme on current affairs. One year later, on April 1, 1994, a similar programme , which means a talk show on the hottest topics, was broadcast. At the prime time of 9p.m. on May 17, 1996, the first episode of News Probe-- "Hongzhi Ban" was broadcasted. The programme 'News Probe' is produced as a result of the ongoing development of such kind of programme. The founders of 'News Probe' expected this programme to report in a much detailed, in-depth, objective, systematic and authoritative way.
During the past developmental years, the production team found a position for the program. News Probe is thus aired as an investigative doucumentary, not only a commentary one.
The reason of setting up this position is due to the vast competitions from other news programmes in CCTV. Focus provides detailed and universal description for different news events while 'Oriental Horizon' is good at rousing audiences' emotion during news reporting. Besides, the broadcasting time of News Probe is beyond all these news programs. Therefore, what News Probe can do is to provide innovative reporting methods so as to raise audiences' interests. As a result, an investigative reporting style was developed.
At the earlier stage of the program, the criteria on choosing the program topic are known as the slogan of "Sanxing" , which means whether the topic is worth reporting, editing into program and investigating. However, in most cases, the three criteria are separately considered and only part of them are fulfiled. Afterwards, four methods of choosing a topic have been developed, known as the investigation on the theme, consensus, event and the inside skinny.
Being an investigative documentary, the News Probe raised the slogan of "hunting the truth", which consists of 2 layers of meaning. Firstly, to
uncover the inside skinny which is concealed by some people or organizations, and those secret incidents which harm the public interest. News Probe thus also includes some reports involving wrongdoings by governmental departments, such as in the Chinese Police. Secondly, News Probe also aimed at providing deep discussion on the complex problems that being investigated.
The production crew does not aim at generating any conclusion for each episode. Instead, it allows the audience to make their own judgements after viewing the programs.
Since News Probe has been developed into an investigative documentary, it has its own characteristics:
*The reporters of News Probe must cultivate a sense of investigation
*The core part of the program is the process of investigation but not only the description of the event
*The investigation process is initiated by the suspension of reporters on certain events, and it ends when the suspension is proved.
To cut in short, the performance of the reporters during the investigation process determines the quality of the investigative documentary, therefore, reporters should be able in appling different methods depended on different situations in order to carry out a good programme .
Reporters of the programme must also reach several criteria of the production crew. They must be:
*rational in order to investigate the events in objective manners;
*able to exchange ideas and examine issues at the same time;
*able to look into issues in audiences point of view;
*fair to all the parties involved in the events and should be unbiased to certain parties; and
*able to raise questions towards every parts of the events
Reporting Style
News Probe based on the framework of “Investigative” Reporting. Investigative means from unknown to known, marching toward the darkness. Investigators intervene into internal parts of the incidents and find out the truth systematically. They need to stand in an objective position and base on real evidences.
Through continuously questioning and criticizing a range of social issues, News Probe has developed its unique style and made people aware of the blind spots of China, where sometimes also report affairs of China in connection with other countries. By reporting on social issues such as the proliferation of AIDS and SARS in China, the problem of Greenhouse effect, pollution in China and Germany , via interviewing the people involved, and by questioning everything, the objectives of the program are thus reached.
Investigation of each episode is initiated by reporters' suspect towards the events. The reporters then start the investigation together with the production crew. Apart from reporters' own finding of the stories, the general public can also tell the secret incidents through contacting the production crew directly, via the use of mail, news hotline and email.
Apart from interviewing the involved parties, crews of News Probe also investigate issues by different methods, such as consulting powerful institutions and people, referring to reference books, studying the issue’s history etc. These empirical methods enable News Probe to investigate issues in an objective and unbiased manner.
The programme itself is a report of the truth and is a reveal of the process of investigation made by crew. Each episode includes the discovery of the problems, the investigatory work done by the reporters and the crew, the evidence collected and all the way down to the exposure of the truth.
Basic composition of an episode
*Narration: Process of the incidents and the truth
*Figure description: Experience of the main characters and description on his/her disposition
*Investigation: Internal and external reasons
Production Mechanism
The production crew of the program includes the following posts :
#Chief
#Secretary
#Producer
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#Reporter
#Cameraman
#Recorder
#Post-production
#Coordinator
Chief Producer is responsible for the broadcast of the program, including the content of the program and the administrative work. Producer is responsible for the production of each episode and is accountable to Chief Producer.
The production of each episode follows the sequence stated below:
#Selection of topic
#Declaration of topic selected
#Investigation
#Recording of the investigation process
#Post-production
#Screening of the episode
#Broadcast of the episode
#Evaluation
Topic criteria
The production team has several criteria when choosing a suitable topic for each episode, including:
*it must be a story long enough to produce a 45-minute programme
*it must have special characteristics which can reflect some social changes
*it must be able to raise public concern
*there must be a truth behind the story
*it must be an exclusive discovery, including the story and the angle of view of the reporter
*it must be the first hand materials and not be reported by other news programs
Broadcasting time
Length of the program: about 40 minutes each episode
Transmission area
All of Mainland China, with an estimated audience figure of 100 million people.
Example episode
Name:
The government prosecuted a businessman, called Chan Yuen-Ho, over bribes. After his three-year imprisonment, the government released him because of lack of evidence.
News Probe resolved to find out the inside story of the case. After interviewing the involved people, they found that the government prosecuted Chan Yuen-Ho because Chan was inobedient in taking advice and orders from the government. He rejected the government's advice of stopping external investment in his company.
Chan was insistent on his innocence and appealed to the high court continuously. He was released after three years of prison life. However, his company went bankrupt during these three years.
Evaluation on the example
News Probe has been a pioneer, providing a rare voice to investigate the
actions of the Chinese government. It has courage to interview the involved officials by asking to-the-point questions and let audience know the actions of the China government.
It has allowed formerly voiceless persons to speak, and their Web site has allowed viewers to have their opinion heard. In this case, it gives a valuable opportunity for Chan Yuen-Ho to fight for the just response from the government.
Awards of News Probe
1996
China Broadcasting Television News
Social, educational and political Group
Second Class Prize
Wen Chi-ban
1998
36th Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union
Special Prize
Life
?????La Maison du Maroc Television Documentary Prize
Silver Goddess Prize
Choosing village Head from big Head village
Highest watching rate in 9:00-9:45pm programmes
1999
China Broadcasting Television Club
12th Excellent Broadcast and Compere Work Piece
Second Class Prize
Greatest Bankrupt Case of State Enterprise
2000
China Broadcasting Television News
?????????????????Social, educational and political Group
First Class Prize
Confession by Drug Addicts Getting rid of it
Annual Award from The Center for Radio & Television Studies
2001
39th Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union
Television Information Group Main Prize
Litigation After Wedding
Others
*30% of News Probe programme were categoried as top ten programmes in the Overall watching rate calculation
*Highly recommended by the same profession
Contact
*Address: No.11, FuXingLu, Beijing, China
*E-mail: ab35@mail.cctv.com
*Phone no.: 010-68579889
*Phone no. for news providing: 010-63984650
*Postal code: 100859
Link to News Probe
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Link to CCTV
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Other Links of News Program in CCTV
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Other links
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Publications of News Probe
1. 中央電視臺新聞評論部編: 《正在發生的歷史 新聞調查 1998 實錄》。
2. 夏駿 王堅平主編﹕《目擊歷史﹕新聞調查幕後的故事》。
3. 陳新紅 張羽編﹕《逃亡日記》。
4. 中央電視臺新聞評論部編: 《第一現場》。
Wenhui-xinmin United Press Group
The Wenhui-xinmin United Press Group is a Chinese language newspaper publisher, established July 25, 1998. It publishes foreign editions of its newspapers and magazines in ten countries, including and Australian editions.
There are a variety of publications under the Wenhui-Xinmin United Press Group, including:
*Wen Hui Bao
*Shanghai Xinmin Evening News
*Shanghai Daily
*Xinmin Weekly
*Oriental Sports Daily
*Wenhui Book Review
*Xinmin Evening News
*Shanghai Wednesday
*Xinq Bao
*Shanghai Family
*Wen Xue Bao
*The journalist Monthly
*Wenhui Books
*Shanghai Yueji
*Mengya
Publications
There are a variety of publications under the Wenhui-Xinmin United Press Group, including:
*Wen Hui Bao
*Shanghai Xinmin Evening News
*Shanghai Daily
*Xinmin Weekly
*Oriental Sports Daily
*Wenhui Book Review
*Xinmin Evening News
*Shanghai Wednesday
*Xinq Bao
*Shanghai Family
*Wen Xue Bao
*The journalist Monthly
*Wenhui Books
*Shanghai Yueji
*Mengya
The Happy Blue Cat
The Happy Blue Cat is a theme song of the cartoon series "", which is a part of the Chinese cartoon series "3000 Whys of Blue Cat".
In of EP91 of the series "" of 3000 Whys of Blue Cat, Trying Hard to Save Lanmao , Ge Ping and Fu Yilin sang this song for the first and the second time.
After that, Fu Yilin's and 's became the opening song of the series, until the next song Come on, Let's strive together was released.
Ge Ping's is also used as the ending song of the series till the end of this series, often one paragraph each playing.
History
In of EP91 of the series "" of 3000 Whys of Blue Cat, Trying Hard to Save Lanmao , Ge Ping and Fu Yilin sang this song for the first and the second time.
After that, Fu Yilin's and 's became the opening song of the series, until the next song Come on, Let's strive together was released.
Ge Ping's is also used as the ending song of the series till the end of this series, often one paragraph each playing.
Lyrics
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