The deal, and the odd circumstances of its conclusion, are a classic example of how China has in recent years sought to advance state narratives abroad and tip the scales of what it calls “discourse power.” The strategy, meant to raise positive perceptions of China in the world, relies on encouraging provinces and cities to reach out globally, a phenomenon that at CMP we have called “Centralization+.”

But seeing how this connects to tigers and leopards, which are regarded in China’s northeastern Jilin province as both a natural treasure and a cultural brand — and how a European university became caught up in what is essentially a ruse over cultural exchange — will require a bit of context.

As for the basics of the deal, on April 23, Jishi Media (吉视传媒), Jilin Province’s only state-owned listed cultural enterprise, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the University of Salamanca pledging to jointly produce a documentary on ecological themes, build “international communication capacity” — which in a Chinese official context refers concretely to China’s external communication — and deepen exchanges in journalism, culture, and AI. You Zhiqiang (由志强), Jishi Media’s Party secretary and chairman, signed for the Chinese side, while Salamanca rector Juan Corchado signed for the Spanish. The ceremony was witnessed by the propaganda office of the Jilin Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the China Public Relations Association (中国公共关系协会), or CPRA.

The CPRA, an ostensible non-profit association, is a prime example of how the cloaking of Party-state ties is a key strategic aspect of China’s international outreach. In fact, the association is directly run by the Central Propaganda Department, the body under the CCP in charge of ideology, media control, and international messaging. One of its key objectives is to “strengthen international exchanges and continuously expand the international influence of China’s public relations work.”

The upshot is that while the University of Salamanca and its officials may have believed they were completing a media and cultural exchange deal with credible Chinese partners, they were in fact sitting across the table from several different arms of China’s Party-state propaganda structure, all sharing the singular agenda of promoting Chinese narratives back in Spain and across Europe.

That China’s chief interest in this deal is more positive communication about the country globally is clear not just from last week’s signing, but from previous agreements between Spanish entities and Jishi Media. In April 2025, the state-run company signed a memorandum of understanding with the Fundación Conocer China (西班牙知华讲堂基金会), a Madrid-based foundation dedicated to deepening Spanish understanding of China, pledging to develop materials “helpful for Spain to understand 21st century Chinese reality.” This is a subtle reference to China’s state position on external communication, which holds that the country is treated unfairly in global public opinion — owing largely to Western media dominance — and needs to counter-balance this state of affairs with a robust approach, including media partnerships of the kind tracked at CMP’s Lingua Sinica.

Another key aspect of the Salamanca-Jilin story is the involvement of the Northeast Tiger Leopard Cultural International Communication Center (东北虎豹文化国际传播中心). Founded in January 2025 by Jishi Media and the Northeast Tiger Leopard National Park Administration, the center is Jilin Province’s fourth provincial-level international communication center — and a textbook example of the strategy documented in CMP’s Centralization+ report, which describes how China has since 2018 built a nationwide network of such centers under provincial propaganda department oversight to advance Party messaging goals abroad.

The deal last week illustrates the ways that potential partners around the world, including in Europe, can be vulnerable to outreach from media groups and other actors that are simply shifting faces of the Chinese Party-state with a single agenda — to advance China’s official narrative.

The university’s own announcement described the agreement as establishing “a roadmap for the development of joint projects in the field of media communication, especially in areas linked to digital innovation, content production and specialized training.” That language, entirely about the supposed intellectual value of the exchange, gives no hint whatsoever of the Party-state apparatus that lies behind the deal, or its own agenda.

The idea of China’s Central Propaganda Department and the Jilin propaganda office offering substantive exchange on “media communication” to a leading European university is absurd on its face. The whole deal sits uneasily with the core purpose of educational institutions, whose interest is in openness and the free exchange of ideas.

The post Beware the Tigers appeared first on China Media Project.

But a strongly-worded commentary last week in Chinese Social Sciences Today (中国社会科学报), a daily newspaper published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), the flagship academic research institution of China’s Party-state, took media to task for meddling in small matters — suggesting they should not ” interfere in academic affairs,” but instead should set their sights higher. “Supervision by public opinion should be directed primarily at public power, public affairs, and public order,” said the commentary, which at no point made the root incident of the dispute in question clear. “Its starting point should be positive and constructive, with emphasis on those cases that seriously violate major Party and state policies, or involve major problems in social life.”

The Chinese Social Sciences Today article clearly illustrated the bind facing Chinese journalists who attempt serious reporting in Xi Jinping’s China. On the one hand, strict controls on the press mean they are unable to touch the tigers that matter. On the other hand, they are told to avoid the sort of critical coverage, such as investigations into local or corporate malfeasance, that can upset economic development or social order.

Twelve years ago, in what state media reported as a tough turn on corruption, Xi Jinping declared that flies and tigers must be pursued all at once. At no time in the reform era, however, has it been more difficult for China’s media to pursue any story, big or small.

Despite the pretense in the April 21 commentary of keeping media out of academic affairs, it is important to bear in mind that CASS itself is a powerful state institution — a tiger in its own right. The commentary was attributed only to “a commentator from this paper” (本报评论员), suggesting this was a critical view representing at least the official position of a paper published by CASS, and likely the consensus among senior CASS leaders.

The omission of any mention of the case involved seemed to suggest that readers within the CASS leadership and community would already be familiar with what the commentary referred to only as “disputes over academic viewpoints” (学术观点争论).

In reference to such disputes, the commentary insisted that media should not deploy their “soft power” (软权力) to pressure scholars, and that in-depth reporting — or what it dismissively referred to as “so-called in-depth reporting” (所谓的“深度报道”) — cannot substitute for serious academic criticism. Proper media oversight, it said, using the Chinese phrase for “supervision by public opinion,” should be “directed primarily at public power, public affairs, and public order.” It should not, it said, be directed at scholarly debate.

In a further enticing hint about the incident at the center, the commentary warned that courts in China had already ruled against media outlets that “publicly demean scholars” (公开贬低学者), determining that such conduct amounts to reputational infringement. The piece closed by suggesting that media must “keep to their boundaries” (恪守边界), ensuring that academic criticism is a matter of objectivity and rationality, not driven by “social sentiment.”

For journalists in China today, there are boundaries above and boundaries below, and boundaries to the left and the right. For the country’s tigers and flies alike, “supervision by public opinion” is constantly suspended — and the horizons are boundless. 

The post Don’t Swat the Scholars appeared first on China Media Project.

For nearly twenty years, Li has been lionized in official state media for her simple act of community spirit, becoming an enduring symbol trotted out whenever reading and literacy are highlighted as a national priority. In 2023, her story became the subject of a short film celebrating community-minded small shop owners across China. This week, Li’s story appeared once again — this time at the very top of the front page of Monday’s People’s Daily — as China launched its first official National Reading Week and held its fifth annual National Reading Conference in Nanchang, Jiangxi province.

“General Secretary Xi Jinping has attached great importance to promoting nationwide reading and building a society of readers, and has on many occasions explained the importance of reading,” the People’s Daily said.

As the Chinese Communist Party makes its latest push to build momentum on literacy with the help of a new reading promotion law that took effect earlier this year, Li and her “Glimmer Bookhouse” are again presented as a glimmer of hope for the printed page in China. But as Chinese turn increasingly away from the printed page and toward video and the mobile screen, the gap between these ambitions and reality has never been wider.

Too Little Too Late?

The latest literacy push has real institutional force behind it. The Regulations on the Promotion of Nationwide Reading (全民阅读促进条例), signed by Premier Li Qiang late last year and effective from February, mandate the setup of reading facilities in new residential developments, require schools at every level to build reading into the curriculum, and establish accessible formats for disabled readers. Explaining the recent push in the state media — including yesterday’s leading piece in the People’s Daily — Article 13 of the law designates the fourth week of April as the annual National Reading Week. Underscoring its political force, the law is administered by China’s National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA), an office directly under the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department.

But the market, buffeted by forces the new law cannot easily legislate away, tells a more complicated story.

Writing recently on her Substack newsletter The Subtext Asia, Jo Lusby, former North Asia CEO of Penguin Random House, notes that China’s retail book market is now worth just 88 percent of its pre-pandemic 2019 peak, with sales falling 2.24 percent by value in 2025 alone. Short video and social commerce platforms — led by Douyin, the Chinese precursor to TikTok, and RedNote (小红书) — now command 40.53 percent of book sales by value, up more than 30 percent year on year, while physical bookstores hold a mere 13.65 percent of the market.

The broader picture is a downward trajectory for sales, with publishers doing their best to pivot. “The numbers overall paint a portrait of a sector struggling to find its way amid declining sales; yet there is an undeniable energy in certain sectors of the book market as publishers continue to go where the eyeballs are,” Lusby writes. She adds that while China’s publishing industry has “always occupied a special place in the Chinese official hierarchy,” reporting as it does directly to the Central Propaganda Department, official efforts are likely “too little too late.”

In the pages of the state-run media, however, there is hardly a glimmer of uncertainty. In its front-page tribute Monday to Li Cuili and the act of reading, the People’s Daily headlines the phrase “fragrance of books” (书香) — pointing to Xi’s vision of a “society of readers,” or literally, a “society fragrant with books” (书香社会). It is a quaint and evocative notion, invoking the scent of the printed page and shelves filled, like Li Cuili’s at “Glimmer Bookhouse,” with physical books to be borrowed and spirited away to some quiet corner.

The metaphor is wafting across the sector. Beijing Daily announced yesterday that the theme of the coming week would be “book-scented April days” (書香四月天), and that various organizers are giving away more than 10,000 books — everything from Chinese classics to children’s picture books. A special on China Central Television today profiles the historic Hoshwin Library (和顺图书馆) in Yunnan province, with its 130,000 volumes sealed away in display cases. The special was called: “Nothing carries one further than the scent of books” (最是书香能致远).

But the reality is that the glimmer for the book — and for reading — in China’s future will increasingly, irrevocably, be the glow of the screen.

The post Glimmers for the Printed Page appeared first on China Media Project.

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

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

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

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

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

____________________

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

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

01

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

02

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post How China’s Press Abandoned Its Readers appeared first on China Media Project.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revolutionary Ancestries

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Sweeping the Ancestors Aside appeared first on China Media Project.

Off screen, however, there has been an unexpected plot twist. One of the drama’s main characters, the military commander “Yan Zheng” — spoiler alert, he is secretly the Marquis of Wu’an — may be too soft for some stiff-jawed critics back in China. 

On March 27, three days before the show’s finale, an official social media account operated by the People’s Liberation Army Daily (解放军報) voiced shock and awe at the drama’s emasculated visual aesthetic. Some of the characters, it said, were “excessively softened and deliberately refined, with some even wearing rouge and powder.” 

Why did a media outlet operated by China’s powerful Central Military Commission (CMC), the command center of the country’s defense apparatus, feel the need to launch an amphibious assault on popular streaming content? 

The problem was chiefly “Yan Zheng,” the nickname for the military general Xie Zheng, played by actor Zhang Linghe (張凌赫). General Xie should be the embodiment of boots-on-the-ground battlefield decisiveness. And yet, every time he appears on screen for a dramatic moment of courage, he is as impeccably made up as a K-pop star. Even deep into the slaughter of the battlefield, his skin is flawless. 

This odd twist on battle readiness has earned this fictional military man the fond — or furious, depending on your preferences — nickname: “General Foundation” (粉底液将军). 

For its part, the PLA Daily was not laughing. The drama had crossed the unseen battle line of military machismo. “Literary and artistic creation may certainly pursue aesthetic diversity,” wrote the PLA social account, “Junzhengping” (鈞正平), “but ‘beautifying’ the image of soldiers means losing not only authenticity, but also undermining the spirit of masculinity.”

For the People’s Liberation Army, “General Foundation” is more than just a pretty face. He is a dangerous image of military decadence and defacement just as the Party-run institution is buffeted by wave upon wave of scandals. Since Xi Jinping launched his sweeping anti-corruption campaign in 2012, the military has been a primary target. The crackdown reached the upper ranks of the PLA in 2023, when it brought down several senior commanders of China’s elite Rocket Force, the force responsible for China’s nuclear and conventional missile arsenal.” 

More recently, a scandal has toppled Zhang Youxia (张又侠), the country’s most senior general, long known as a close ally of Xi Jinping. Under investigation for “serious violations of discipline and law,” Zhang is accused of undermining the “CMC chairman responsibility system” — suggesting serious breaches of the Party’s command structure. All told, the PLA’s culture of corruption has seriously damaged the institution’s authority and credibility. The fact that the “Junzhengping” account, which generally limits its posts to more important military matters, has goose-stepped into the aesthetics of streaming entertainment suggests even minor blemishes are regarded as an obstacle to the PLA’s efforts to save face.

The “Junzhengping” post clearly advocated for more muscular propaganda, as though the country’s defense depended upon it. “These rouge-and-powder ‘generals’ in period costume dramas cannot bear the social responsibility of cultivating masculine spirit,” it said. 

China has never had a free creative environment. Under Chinese law, all television dramas must be reviewed by the National Radio and Television Administration before broadcast. Content touching on politics, the military, diplomacy, ethnicity, religion, and related areas must also obtain sign-off from the relevant authorities. 

Whether costume romance dramas routinely pass through PLA review is unclear. What is clear is that since 2021, the Party has maintained specific lists of restrictions for all media, including a ban on so-called “effeminate” (娘炮), or niangpao, aesthetics — a term describing men whose appearance and mannerisms are deemed inconsistent with mainstream masculinity, and one considered highly vulgar and derogatory in Chinese.

“Is the invasion of Taiwan all sorted out already? I suppose there’s plenty of free time to be watching women’s historical romance dramas, huh?” —Comment to “Junzhengping” by a Chinese web user.

Elsewhere, the aptly named “Zhejiang Propaganda”  (浙江宣傳), a social media account under the provincial propaganda office of Zhejiang, complained that programs like Pursuit of Jade might spoil the nation’s youth — that stories and images that “blatantly violate historical context” would have “an adverse impact on the aesthetic and cultural values of young people.” The account, which Hong Kong’s Ming Pao reported was founded by Zhejiang’s deputy ministry of propaganda, Wang Gang (王綱), expressed concern that “values are giving way to lookism” (价值观在向颜值观让步).

Following the PLA Daily social post, the “General Foundation” meme trended on Weibo for more than 24 hours, as furious fans offered return fire. “Is the invasion of Taiwan all sorted out already?” one user asked snidely. “I suppose there’s plenty of free time to be watching women’s historical romance dramas, huh?”

Some users noted, however, that China’s official broadcaster, China Central Television (CCTV), had actually praised Pursuit of Jade, and that Zhu Fenglian (朱鳳蓮), a spokesperson at the Taiwan Affairs Office, had commended the drama for “fully demonstrating that Chinese culture is the shared root and belonging of both sides of the strait.”

In the end, the post appeared to most effectively expose the PLA’s own sense of vulnerability and insecurity, conveyed poignantly in its closing appeal: “We call for more works filled with masculine spirit, so that this toughness and sense of responsibility can become the most solid foundation of the spirit of our era.”

The post No Foundation for the PLA appeared first on China Media Project.

In a twist that would almost certainly perplex professional journalists elsewhere in the world, this talk about authenticity in portrayals of China unfolded at a forum uncritically proclaiming the virtues of artificial intelligence for media production. Understand the context, however, and this alliance of AI and untruth makes perfect sense, throwing into sharp relief AI’s emerging role in both domestic media control and global propaganda and disinformation.

The theme of this year’s Internet Media Forum, co-organized by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) and held in Henan province on March 28–29, was the “2026 Digital Intelligence Empowerment: Positive Energy Production and Dissemination Conference.” That is a mouthful, but the concept is simple enough: AI has the power to revolutionize the Chinese Communist Party’s demand that journalism and media serve its interests by emphasizing positives and suppressing critical coverage.

Across much of the world, the rise of artificial intelligence has prompted fierce and often anguished debate about the future of the media, and the role of the journalist. When is AI a “strategic ally” for the truth-seeking journalist? How can we balance the valuable aspects of AI with its myriad dangers? How can we make sure that substantive, relevant and even hard-hitting journalism — so critical for democracy — can be discovered amid the inundation of synthetic text, image and video?

In a recent report adding to a rising tide of output on the subject, the Center for News, Technology and Innovation (CNTI) weighed in earlier this month. “For newsrooms, the use of generative AI tools offers benefits for productivity and innovation,” the report said coolly. “At the same time, it risks inaccuracies, ethical issues and undermining public trust.” At a recent press talk in Vietnam on AI and the “crisis of trust” in news facing media, hosted by the Embassies of Canada, Norway, New Zealand, and Switzerland in collaboration with the United Nations Development Program, UNDP representative Ramla Khalidi returned to basics: “The most important thing in journalism, for me, is trust. When trust is lost, you are no longer a voice that can be relied upon.”

In China, where media are defined as tools to manufacture public trust in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the state, such concerns are not even secondary. If there are journalists in China wringing their hands over the impact of AI on professional reporting or public trust, those conversations are happening privately, and quietly. The whole notion of the public interest as fundamental to journalism has been eclipsed under the leadership of Xi Jinping by the most robust application of press controls seen at any time in the reform era since the late 1970s. The possible exception is the three years immediately following the Tiananmen Massacre, which gave rise to the concept of “public opinion guidance” — a policy that to this day delivers on the firm conviction that the CCP must control news and public discourse to maintain the stability of the regime.

In one of his earliest actions as the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping in 2013 introduced an internal Party directive called “Document 9” that expressly opposed the idea of public interest journalism, which it panned as “the West’s idea of journalism.” “The ultimate goal of advocating the West’s view of the media is to hawk the principle of abstract and absolute freedom of press, oppose the Party’s leadership in the media, and gouge an opening through which to infiltrate our ideology,” the directive said.

Later that same year, as Xi cracked down aggressively on more independent voices on Chinese social media — the now mostly forgotten “Big Vs” — the Party introduced the concept of “transmitting positive energy to society” (传播社会正能量). If the role of the press in China had become more ambiguous through the 2000s, amid a precarious but determined movement of journalistic professionalism, it had now become clear again. Its place was to serve the larger goals of the Party and the nation, not of the public.

Today, it is virtually impossible to talk about the truth in China in any way other than that bandied about on the stage at the 2026 Internet Media Forum. “Authenticity” is fundamentally about positivity. And this means that discussions in China about the impact of AI in the media revolve almost exclusively around its production-related advantages.

A series of thematic sessions held alongside the main forum in Zhengzhou is a case in point. Discussions treated propaganda and corporate public relations as a seamless continuum, discussing how official and corporate messaging can “go viral” by adding a more human touch to narratives. The session brought together participants including Chang’an Avenue Insider (长安街知事), a public account under the capital’s state-run Beijing Daily, the new media department of the CCP’s People’s Daily, and Weibo’s executive editor-in-chief.

On Monday, a commentary at People’s Daily Online drove the point home, suggesting that AI could be effective in “adding warmth” to positive energy — in other words, that propaganda could be made to feel more human and relatable. The piece, published the day after the forum closed, described AI as having “deeply penetrated the full chain of content planning, newsgathering, editing and distribution” in mainstream media. Once again, there was not the merest frisson of concern. The integration of AI with content meant for public consumption, and of course public opinion guidance, was celebrated as a milestone.

During panel discussions at the forum, the People’s Daily Online commentary noted, keywords like “professionalism,” “staying grounded,” “seizing trends,” and “innovation” were on everyone’s tongues. Even the deeply human concept of “empathy” (同理心), which has entered into sharply different discussions of journalism in the West, made an appearance. All of these are qualities with the potential to ground journalism in the human experience, and form the connective tissue between journalism and the public it is meant to serve. In this context, however, they are production techniques and rhetorical devices to be achieved with helping hand of artificial intelligence.

It was no accident that posters and images of the Zhengzhou forum came with the usual heavy dose of robot imagery. AI robots took to the stage alongside dancing child performers, the pairing an oddly dissonant state message about the humanity of AI. China’s dream of an army of compliant Edgar Snows, all reporting empathetically on the elevated humanity of the Party, cannot be far off.

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In a demonstration staged for CCTV reporters ahead of this month’s Consumer Rights Day on March 15 — a day each year when the state-run broadcaster, China Central Television (CCTV), dedicates an entire prime-time gala to naming and shaming corporate wrongdoers — an industry insider fabricated the Apollo-9 wristband in a single afternoon. The stunt was meant to demonstrate the perils of AI before a national audience during CCTV’s prime-time Consumer Day gala — even as the technology comes increasingly to symbolize the country’s technological power.

The Apollo-9 smartwatch segment centered on the dangers of what state media have lately termed “AI poisoning” (AI投毒). Related to the global phenomenon of “AI Recommendation Poisoning,” the term points to a growing industry of paid manipulation of what AI assistants say — and therefore what consumers believe — by embedding hidden instructions. In this case, the industry insider, at CCTV’s behest, used a software called the Liqing GEO Optimization System, purchased openly on a Chinese e-commerce platform, to conjure a state-of-the-art watch from thin air.

GEO — generative engine optimization — is a set of techniques designed to influence what AI models retrieve and endorse, inundating cyberspace with fake information until chatbots treat it as authentic reality. In the CCTV demonstration, the industry insider was able within hours to generate a fake product with fake specs, produce and disseminate AI-written reviews attributed to fictional consumers, and pushed by non-existent experts. Soon a popular AI chatbot was enthusiastically recommending the Apollo-9 smartwatch. Three days later, this fiction had taken root as fact — recommended without prompting by multiple platforms.

The differences between China’s “AI poisoning” and the simple concept of “AI Recommendation Poisoning” come in the way the former has already taken on a layer of political apprehensiveness, becoming folded into the wider Chinese Communist Party vocabulary of ideological threats to the regime.

In a piece for the Chinese Communist Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper on March 11, Miao Wei (苗圩), a senior member of the country’s nominal advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, warned that AI risks had already extended beyond data leaks and algorithmic bias into “value infiltration” (价值观渗透), “deep fakes” (深度伪造), and “cognitive manipulation” (认知操纵). The first of these, “value infiltration,” is language closely associated with rumblings in the leadership about the machinations of “hostile Western forces” (西方敌对势力). Miao cited “model poisoning” (模型投毒) among the dangers that have come with rapid AI advancement “exposing the shortcomings of traditional security measures.”

Far from being a personal register of concern over AI, Miao’s commentary, coming just four days ahead of the Consumer Rights Day coverage, was part of a coordinated top-down campaign on the issue.

Back in November, writing in National Governance (国家治理), a journal under the People’s Daily, the head of the Non-traditional Risks Center at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan addressed the issue of risk management in the application of AI to government affairs — warning of “data poisoning” risks and the threat of “attacks by hostile forces” (敌对势力攻击).

In late December, a WeChat post to the official account of the Ministry of State Security warned about the risks of AI tools in everyday use, and concretely sounded warning bells about models “systematically biased toward Western perspectives” (系统性偏向西方视角).

While the danger of “AI poisoning” may be relatively new in China, the toxic framing is not. Threats to public order have long been cast in the language of contamination and disease. In the early internet era, official discourse was thick with warnings about “harmful information” (有害信息) and calls to “purify” the online environment (净化网上空间). More recently, the Cyberspace Administration of China warned that “toxic idol worship” threatened to poison the minds of future generations, as the Party moved to crush fandom culture among Chinese youth. The vocabulary of “AI poisoning” slots neatly into this long tradition of framing new communications technologies as vectors of contamination that the state alone can cure.

In many of these cases, political and ideological concerns in the information space run alongside issues of public harm that are real and compelling, helping to legitimize restrictive measures that can overreach.

“AI poisoning” is just the latest case in point. The potential for real harm to consumers is apparent. Shanghai-based Sixth Tone, under the state-run Shanghai United Media Group, reported following the March 15 CCTV spot that GEO services are sold openly on e-commerce platforms like Taobao and JD.com in China. Three-month subscriptions for the services range anywhere from 3,600 yuan (520 USD) to 32,800 yuan (4,765 USD). One provider told CCTV it had served more than 200 clients across multiple industries over the past year, guaranteeing top-three placement on any AI platform. The founder of Lisi Culture Media Co., Ltd, identified in the CCTV exposé only as “Li,” was upfront about the services, and how they have been welcomed on the sales side. “Every business loves it,” he told the broadcaster. “They all hope others won’t engage in AI poisoning, even as they themselves do it.”

Since gala night, the Apollo-9 smartwatch story has fired across the state media landscape in China. The Global Times (环球时报) — a tabloid spinoff of the People’s Daily (人民日报) known for its nationalist editorial line — quoted economists warning that unchecked GEO practices risk “distorting market competition and undermining public trust in AI as a reliable information source.” The 21st Century Economic Herald (21世纪经济报道) reported that the AI models most vulnerable to poisoning pull heavily from social media platforms like Douyin, Bilibili, and Baidu’s Baijiahao, places where content production barriers are low and commercial manipulation runs rampant.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported on March 21 that “GEO poisoning offers a glimpse of the challenges likely to emerge elsewhere as AI assistants spread.” But its headline cut unknowingly to the heart of the matter as it posed a completely disingenuous question: “[Who] guards the truth in China’s chatbot era?”

The answer to this question has never been in doubt. The CCP has never relaxed its claim to truth, and it has marshaled vast human and technological resources to ensure it continues to dominate public opinion in the interest of political and ideological security. Control of AI is now central to that objective, and the toxic truth behind the wave of state media concern over “AI poisoning” is that an even more insidious form of state manipulation now guides the very nature of AI models in China, which are hardwired with political bias — with implications even for global information integrity.

Nevertheless, the state media-driven consumer rights frenzy this month over “AI poisoning” speaks to a deep ambivalence in how China’s leaders have come to regard artificial intelligence, mirroring the ambivalence that has attended all developments in information technology since the rise of the internet. On the one hand, AI is the technological promise of the moment — and of the future. Premier Li Qiang’s government work report to the National People’s Congress (NPC) this month mentioned AI seven times directly, and at many other points indirectly, a signal of how central the technology has become to China’s national development agenda. On the other hand, AI is a nest of dangers, something that can be “poisoned” and turned against society — and, far more troubling to the leadership, against the interests of the Party itself.

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Announcing the closure of two of its local channels this month, the top state-run broadcasting group in the municipality of Chongqing spoke of “optimizing and integrating media resources” and “adapting to new trends in media convergence.” In practice, this meant shutting down channels the government considers redundant and shifting resources — money, staff, and content — away from traditional broadcast and onto the internet and digital products. The announcement, released by China’s main broadcasting authority, SARFT, makes clear that Chongqing is following directives from the government and national work conferences. This isn’t a local editorial choice but a centrally directed plan.

Chongqing is not an isolated case. It is part of a nationwide wave of broadcast closures that has been accelerating since 2023, when SARFT launched its campaign to “streamline and specialize” China’s radio and television landscape. According to the Chinese industry tracker website Shexiangren Wang (摄像人网), at least 51 TV channels were shut down across China in 2024, and in 2025 that number jumped to at least 75, hitting provincial-level broadcasters in Shanghai, Gansu, Shaanxi, Jiangxi, Xinjiang, and Hunan, among others. Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province, became the first provincial capital in the country to be reduced to a single television channel in 2025. A separate report from SARFT’s research center confirmed that 79 channels and frequencies were formally eliminated in 2024.

Part of the story is how uncompetitive local channels have become, owing both to technological change and to institutional inertia: CCP-run media tend to be inflexible and formulaic, shaped by the bureaucratic structures that govern them. Shexiangren Wang notes that education channels offered little beyond policy meetings. TV shopping, with its long-duration pitches and infrequent purchases, could not match the speed and scale of e-commerce — what Shexiangren Wang called the “short, fast, and flat” model of online retail. Movie and drama channels, meanwhile, were stuck with aging content and shrinking advertising revenue. The closures have targeted public channels, education channels, shopping channels, and movie and drama channels — categories the government considers redundant or uncompetitive with internet platforms, all outpaced by digital offerings delivering the same content faster and on demand.

The campaign of attrition at local broadcasters does not seem to be slowing down. The Shexiangren Wang report indicates that Guangdong, Sichuan, and Shenzhen are all expected to close or merge additional channels in 2026. The broader pattern is clear: the government is shrinking traditional broadcast — meaning fewer channels and fewer editorial voices — while redirecting money, talent, and content toward digital offerings.

Rather than a simple retreat from broadcast, the closures reflect a deliberate reorientation. The Chongqing announcement calls on the group to “fortify the main position of internet communication” (筑牢互联网传播主阵地) — language drawn from a broader Party framework that treats media platforms as ideological territory to be held and defended. It also calls for “systematically transforming mainstream media” (推进主流媒体系统性变革) — a phrase that carries specific weight in the Chinese context, where “mainstream media” refers to Party-run outlets tasked with setting the public agenda and shaping opinion. A 2025 People’s Daily article used the same language to describe Party media’s role as the frontline of ideological control, calling on mainstream state outlets to “advance onto the internet main battlefield” (挺进互联网主战场) as a “main force” (主力军).

The imperative is to remake those outlets into something citizens will actually use. That is a hard sell in a media landscape dominated by platforms like Bilibili, a video site built on user-generated entertainment, and Xiaohongshu, known outside China as RedNote, a lifestyle and social commerce platform where hundreds of millions of users go for content that is personal, playful, and not entirely oriented around the ideological goals of the party-state.

Rather than a simple retreat from broadcast, the closures reflect a deliberate reorientation.

While real success in the media market will likely remain a challenge, the authorities seem encouraged by the numbers for new state-led digital offerings. Provincial state media app downloads grew by an average of nearly 35 percent in 2024 — 34.9 percent in downloads and 45.2 percent in registered users — according to SARFT’s research center’s annual report. Platforms like Mango TV (芒果TV), a video streaming platform under the state-run Hunan Broadcasting System; Elephant News (大象新闻), an app-based news product from Henan’s provincial broadcaster; and Touch News (触电新闻), the digital product from Guangdong’s provincial broadcaster, each crossed 100 million downloads, with 28 provincial apps surpassing 10 million.

The closures and the digital push are, in the end, two sides of the same coin: a leaner broadcast sector that costs less to maintain, and a rebuilt online presence the Party hopes will keep it not just relevant, but dominant, where the public’s attention has shifted.

One issue conspicuously absent from the official framing of these closures is what happens to the people who worked there. The announcements speak of “optimizing resources,” but say nothing about how employees at Chongqing Economic Radio or the Fashion Shopping Channel — the outlets impacted by the most recent restructuring in Chongqing — might have been affected. Precise figures on job losses across the sector are difficult to come by. Official announcements are silent on the question, and broadcasters do not typically publish staff counts. The data that does exist points in one direction. Beijing’s broadcast sector alone shed more than 2,600 jobs in 2024, according to an annual statistical report from its city-level broadcast authority. The nationwide toll, across more than 125 channels closed in 2024 and 2025, is almost certainly substantial.

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To learn more about the trend of local “media convergence” in China and the remaking of the infrastructure of “international communication” (国际传播), or “external propaganda” (外宣), download our CENTRALIZATION+ paper below, produced with funding from the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency (MPF).

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The Guangxi International Communication Center (廣西國際傳播中心), or GICC, and the Hong Kong Commercial Daily (香港商報) jointly launched “GBA Insights” (湾區講你知) on February 25. The debut episode sent journalists aboard the high-speed rail connecting Nanning to Hong Kong’s West Kowloon station, where they documented passengers reflecting on how the direct route had simplified their lives. “Getting back to Nanning used to take half a day of hassle,” one frequent traveller told reporters. “Now with the direct high-speed rail, you can have morning tea in Hong Kong and be eating laoyou fen in Nanning by lunch.”

The Hong Kong Commercial Daily — a Chinese state-owned broadsheet published in Hong Kong by the Shenzhen Press Group and controlled by the Hong Kong Liaison Office, Beijing’s primary political arm in the city — was founded in 1952 as the first Chinese-language financial newspaper in Hong Kong and is one of only three Hong Kong newspapers permitted to circulate freely on the mainland.

The series was timed to coincide with an official Guangxi delegation visit to Hong Kong and Macao, a pairing that has become routine as provincial governments increasingly coordinate media outreach with political and economic missions to the city. Future episodes are planned around trade cooperation, cultural exchange, and youth entrepreneurship.

The collaboration between the Hong Kong Commercial Daily and the GICC is one of several recent media arrangements cementing ties between Hong Kong outlets and mainland state broadcasters. In June 2025, RTHK — Hong Kong’s longstanding public broadcaster — signed a memorandum of cooperation with the Guangzhou Broadcasting Network (廣州廣播電視台), or GZBN, including plans for joint productions marking the 80th anniversary of Japan’s wartime surrender and a co-produced radio drama on life in the Greater Bay Area.

RTHK’s director of broadcasting said the broadcaster would leverage its role “linking the interior and connecting the exterior” to foster a stronger sense of national identity among Hong Kong citizens. Months later, in September 2025, Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee met China Media Group (CMG) president Shen Haixiong (慎海雄) at Government House, where Lee expressed gratitude to CMG for “supporting the work of the Hong Kong SAR Government” (支持香港特區政府的工作). Lee pledged to “deepen co-operation with CMG” in order, he said, echoing Xi Jinping’s political language on global communication, to “jointly tell the world good stories of China and Hong Kong.”

The content these partnerships produce tends to foreground the practical rewards of integration: faster journeys, closer families, shared economic opportunity. The political case for convergence, in this framing, speaks for itself — or so China’s media strategists hope.

Guangxi, which lies outside the formal nine-city GBA cluster, has been particularly keen to attach itself to the Bay Area brand, using the Nanning–West Kowloon rail link as a centrepiece of that effort. The province’s state broadcaster, Guangxi Radio and Television (廣西廣播電視台),signed a strategic memorandum of understanding with RTHK in September 2025 on program resources and talent exchange — a deal struck at the China-ASEAN Expo in Nanning and witnessed by the National Radio and Television Administration (國家廣播電視總局), an agency under the Central Propaganda Department. State media said the partnership aimed to “tell China’s story well” to ASEAN nations, pointing to the broader role of south China in state-led communication efforts toward Southeast Asia.

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