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.

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.

The post AI Poisoning appeared first on China Media Project.

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.

The post Folding Hong Kong Into the China Story appeared first on China Media Project.

The headline results for 2025 are now in. So what observations can we now make about the standing of China’s top leader?

Before we jump into the analysis, it’s important to note again for those less familiar with CCP-run media that the People’s Daily is a constrained and consensus-based Party flagship paper with a high level of consistency in terms of pages and text density over its history — with highly formalized and repetitive language (more on that below). This is a key reason why the paper, a political signalling platform rather than a space for news or discussion, lends itself to frequency analysis. 

The Center Holds

First off, we saw no change in the decisiveness of Xi-centric discourse, nor did we see any rising challenges from other members of the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) — an important indicator of shifts at the top. In the full year 2025, Xi Jinping appeared in close to 600 headlines in the People’s Daily, more than three times the number of headlines logged by China’s premier, Li Qiang (李强), the country’s second ranking party official. 

At no point during the past year did this performance gap narrow in the flagship paper. Xi’s lead remained commanding, as it has done throughout his tenure. As readers can see from the graph below, the performance of all PSC members remained steady in 2025, with moderate declines for both Li Qiang and Zhao Leji (as well as Li Xi) against 2024 levels. 

You may notice that above we referred to Xi-centric discourse rather than Xi-centric “coverage.” This is an important distinction, and critical to understanding how CCP media operate within China’s political and media systems. The articles in the People’s Daily do not just “cover” events on the political calendar in the same way that media elsewhere in the world do. 

While coverage in a Western newspaper of a political leader’s attendance of a major diplomatic summit would warrant perhaps one report around key issues and points of relevance — with perhaps separate op-eds that reflect independent viewpoints — in China’s system of power signalling it results in a separate article for each diplomatic exchange that resulted. Consequently, a front page during a busy period for Chinese diplomacy can sometimes feel like a Xi Jinping identity parade. 

Why is this ridiculousness necessary? 

The Politics of Repetition

In the political system operated by the CCP, repetition is a crucial form of signaling and demonstrating power. This is an absolutely essential part of the People’s Daily’s role. Repetition is a basic way to instill the “main line” (主线) and ensure that the CCP media, as “mouthpieces” (喉舌) of the Party, are the “weathervanes” (风向标) pointing the political direction. This is why six handshakes at a single diplomatic summit become six distinct reports on the paper’s front page. 

Understanding the political role of repetition also helps us contextualize another important observation from our 2025 numbers — the fact that headline mentions of Xi Jinping, while decisively in the lead, are also notably down. 

When we look at headline appearances for members of the PSC (above), as well as front-page image counts (below), we can see that Xi had seen a notable decrease in appearances on both counts. 

What does this mean? 

In our analysis back in July last year, we noted that headline counts and images closely follow calendar events, and that over time the total counts can balance out. In other words, Xi’s counts may seem down in July, but then surge in August or October with a busy calendar or a concerted campaign of messaging around events such as Party plenums. Now, with all the data for 2025 accounted for, we can see that this downward trend was no error. 

Headline mentions of Xi Jinping, while decisively in the lead, are also notably down. 

It is true that Xi made fewer headline appearances this past year in the People’s Daily than in the two years previous. How dramatic was the shift? Xi’s appearances saw an overall drop of 21 percent in 2025. It was a similar story in image counts, where there was a 19 percent drop from the preceding two years. That is not negligible. And yet, as we said at the outset, name checks in front-page headlines for other PSC members remained uniform across all of these years — and far below the soaring heights enjoyed by Xi. 

Does this quantitative drop signal a power drain? 

While there is always room for error in the perilous business of CCP gazing, the broader context of People’s Daily signaling cautions against over-interpreting this decrease in frequency. First of all, we see continued wall-to-wall “coverage” — again, this is repetition and signalling — of Xi in People’s Daily, combined with a lack of any real challenger. This indicates that he is decisively in control of the narrative, and certainly that he remains the “core” (核心). 

Secondly, there are other ways, beyond imperiled leadership, to understand these numbers. One possibility is a general drop in the number of global trips Xi made in 2025. As reporters and analysts have noted, Xi has delegated appearances at major international summits to his premier, Li Qiang. Skipping some of these summits naturally lessened Xi’s 2025 tally — which is to say that it lessened instances not just of “coverage,” but of repetition. 

For those tempted to read too much into those absences, it’s important to note that Li’s attendance of these summits in particular did not drive a corresponding increase in article and image numbers for the premier. This is not because those events were not covered, but because they were not repeated like incessant drum beats to promote the leadership core. 

The repetition that to most of us appears senseless, and even ridiculous, is a privilege enjoyed only by the man at the apex. 

As we enter 2026 and Xi Jinping edges another year closer to the next Party Congress (2027), China’s repetition complex is something to carefully observe. Will the downward trend in his numbers continue? Only time will tell if there is real strength in Xi’s numbers. 

The post Xi Jinping: A Year in the Headlines appeared first on China Media Project.

The Communist Party’s flagship People’s Daily (人民日报) newspaper and the government’s official Xinhua News Agency ran New Year’s messages that followed similar lines. Both called blandly for a new journey in 2026, the country charging ahead. The New Year’s messages at some “mainstream media“ — a term that in China refers to Party-run media meant to set the tone for broader public opinion — took a more lyrical approach, with language that read more like whispered confidences to readers.

Shanghai’s The Paper (澎湃新闻), an outlet published by the state-run Shanghai Media Group (SMG), ran its message with the title “Until the Wind Blows” (直到风吹起). The message urged people to focus on themselves and cherish the beauty in life, awaiting the time — when the wind blows — that they could experience the true fullness of life. The meaning was at once evasive and conspicuous. The expected coming of the wind could be an allusion to favorable winds and the arrival of change, implying a current stasis or constraint that readers were meant to understand without naming.

Each New Year’s message was carefully crafted with beautiful prose. And many selected their own golden phrases that then were circulated widely on WeChat.

However, the most anticipated New Year’s message each year comes from the Guangzhou-based Southern Weekend (南方周末), once known for its more probing journalism. Southern Weekend‘s 2026 New Year’s message was titled “The Softest Power Can Also Build the Most Solid Human World” (最柔软的力量,也能修筑最坚固的人间). It was about returning to fundamental human values and connections in a time of upheaval, when individuals feel fragmented by rapid technological change, economic pressures, and social divisions. To date, the article has drawn more than 100,000 shares on WeChat and hundreds of comments. One passage read:

“The meaning of humanity is not to chase the future, but to go all out after confirming a direction worth pursuing; one person may not be strong, but countless of the softest powers can also build the most solid human world.”

But for some readers, the message about the “softest powers” was a pale echo of Southern Weekend‘s bolder New Year’s messages from years past. One post circulating on the social media platform Zhihu reminded readers of what a different kind of New Year’s message might look like — one that spoke more directly to the struggles and emotions of ordinary people navigating difficult times. “This year, have you felt anger, or have you become numb?” the post asked, alluding to several of the year’s controversies exposing the darker side of society. “When you saw the bullying in Mianyang, when you saw the earrings in Huangyang and Dianxi, the Nanjing Museum, the busiest group of five.”

Tradition and Constraint

Tracing back the history of New Year’s messages, People’s Daily actually had New Year’s messages as early as 1947. At that time, the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang-led government of the Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party was still in full swing, and the People’s Daily was the organ of the CCP’s Shanxi-Hebei-Shandong-Henan Central Bureau, and its New Year’s messages were mostly leaders’ calls to the people, discussing national construction and prospects.

It was not until 1997 that New Year’s messages appeared with different styles and themes from these messages chiefly praising the CCP and encouraging national development, shifting to focus on citizens as protagonists. Southern Weekend published an editor’s message at year-end in 1997, followed by another at the close of 1998 titled, “Give Power to the Powerless, Let the Pessimistic Move Forward” (让无力者有力,让悲观者前行). Then, on January 1, 1999, the paper published what would become its first annual New Year’s message: “There is Always a Power That Moves Us to Tears” (总有一种力量让我们泪流满面). It included this emotive passage:

“Sunshine falls on your face, warmth remains in our hearts. Why do our eyes always fill with tears? Because we love so deeply; why are we always full of spirit? Because we love so deeply; why do we constantly seek? Because we love so deeply. We love this country, and her people — they are kind, they are upright, they know how to care for one another.”

From the 1990s to the 2000s, as economic growth accelerated, the CCP began somewhat to relax control over ideology. Although the media and journalists could not openly call for press freedom, they worked hard to practice its spirit through their work by means of journalistic professionalism. During this period, in-depth reporting gradually emerged, and commentary discussing civic issues slowly developed too. New Year’s messages were written by the commentary departments within media organizations, often with a growing sense of idealism. During those ten-plus years, the media navigated between what could and could not be said — and they used “New Year’s messages” to set their hopes and intentions down in writing. 

Jiang Xue (江雪), an independent journalist who once served as director of the commentary department at an institutional media outlet (机构媒体), meaning that it had a license and was formally authorized to publish in China, shared her experience participating in writing New Year’s messages: “We would discuss the important news of the year, generally [topics] related to civil rights and values. At that time there was a certain degree of freedom of speech — although censorship was always in mind, we tried to express some things,” she said. “In institutional media, you still had to consider whether it could be published.” Before 2013, Southern Weekend‘s New Year’s messages were often related to civic resistance and fighting for rights.

“We would try to speak some human words, speak some truth. The principle in Chinese media is that you can’t say all the truth — speaking 100 percent truth makes it impossible to survive,” Jiang said. “So I say part of the truth, that part of the truth that benefits the public, and everyone is willing to make this compromise [to express it].”

Under conditions without press freedom, after a whole year of repression and frustration, there always needs to be an outlet for expression,” Jiang Xue said. She described New Year’s messages as “like walking at night and cheering yourself on, telling yourself not to be afraid of ghosts.” “I think media [in China] use New Year’s messages to encourage themselves,” she said.

Hong Kong also has several media outlets with a tradition of writing New Year’s messages. Chen Yin (陈音), a former Ming Pao (明报) reporter, said that New Year’s messages often do not depend on specific news events, but rather represent one of the few moments in a year when media can systematically express value judgments. In the Hong Kong context, New Year’s messages were previously understood as a media outlet’s annual statement of position. “Even if there aren’t many readers and circulation is limited, the editorial department still considers this an article that should be completed,” she said. “In recent years under the self-censorship system, much sensitive content, including criticism of the government, is avoided. It may not necessarily change reality, but it symbolizes that a newspaper still considers itself part of public discussion.”

Mr. Qiu, a senior editor who has long worked in Hong Kong’s press, said that publishing New Year’s messages on New Year’s Day has always been seen as a form of institutional writing in Hong Kong journalism, rather than simple holiday greetings. “It’s more like a media outlet’s summary of the past year’s public affairs, and also an affirmation of its own role,” he said.

In China, the 2013 incident at Southern Weekend marked a more fundamental shift (coverage from CMP in 2013 here). That year, just weeks after Xi Jinping came to power, the original draft of the New Year’s message written by the Southern Weekend editorial team, “China Dream, Constitutional Dream” (中国梦,宪政梦), was subjected by the authorities to deep revisions. First, the compromised title became, “Dreams Are Our Commitment to What Should Be” (梦想是我们对应然之事的承诺), but this was then subsequently edited by Guangdong Propaganda Office — in an unprecedented act of direct editorial involvement — to the even more positive, “We Are Closer to Our Dreams Than Ever Before” (我们比任何时候都更接近梦想).

The censorship provoked newsroom staff to post online criticisms of the damage being done to press freedom in China, and some joined a four-day strike. Public demonstrations against press censorship erupted outside Southern Weekend‘s headquarters in Guangzhou. The newspaper’s chief editor ultimately took responsibility for the incident, and the protests were suppressed. Though the newspaper continued to publish, the impact on the space for public discussion that had developed over many years — in what some now remember as a “golden age” for Chinese journalism — was devastating. In the months and years that followed, there came wave after wave of press restrictions.

In an article published in 2024, the now-defunct diaspora outlet Wainao (歪脑) reflected back on the events in January 2013: “This incident of the message being edited was actually the final blow to Southern Weekend: after this, Southern Weekend was no longer the same newspaper.”

The article also mentioned that after the Southern Weekend incident, imitations of the form of the New Year’s message proliferated, with every media outlet publishing its own New Year’s message. They became an even more popular form of “elegant writing” (美文) — a style emphasizing literary aesthetics over journalistic substance — and the collective New Year’s messages resembled an essay competition. “A unique literary style that stripped away journalistic professionalism and core values while emphasizing gorgeous prose began to prevail,” the Wainao article observed. Hong Kong’s institutional media still maintain this tradition too, but diaspora media have largely abandoned the practice of publishing New Year’s messages.

The independent Chinese-language media outlet Mangmang (莽莽) wrote New Year’s messages in 2023 and 2024, but stopped in 2025. Another independent media outlet, Aquarius Era (水瓶纪元), welcomed 2026 in the form of reporters’ reviews under the title “Stories Beyond Blue Backgrounds and White Text” (留下蓝底白字之外的故事), a reference to the simple factual bulletins so often released in recent years by police and government offices and shared by news outlets in lieu of actual journalism. The editor’s note at the beginning read: “Our thinking is simple: since things are important, we go to the scene; since we are at the scene, we don’t want to castrate or whitewash the facts in any way. . . . This country has such a large population, yet the stories being told are becoming fewer and fewer. There are still many such moments that show us journalism still matters.”

Speaking truth is the reason New Year’s messages carry weight. After leaving institutional media, Jiang Xue became an independent journalist focusing on human rights reporting. For several years, she continued to publish New Year’s messages on WeChat. “Stories defending human rights generally won’t be seen in institutional media. I wanted readers to see these stories of these silenced people, to let everyone see the interviews I did through the year,” she said. Writing New Year’s messages was to urge readers to pay attention to those important social issues — and this was her intention with one post called “Ten Days in Chang’an” (长安十日), which was eventually removed by online censors.

“Actually, writing ‘Ten Days in Chang’an’ was a kind of alternative New Year’s message,” Jiang Xue explains. “I wanted to record what was happening around me.” On January 4, 2022, she published the article through her WeChat public account “Mocun Gewu” (默存格物). “At that time I was in Xi’an, locked down for a month [during the pandemic]. By year’s end I kept thinking about writing something,” she said, “but then I thought about a friend saying New Year’s messages are linguistic corruption, which made me feel it wasn’t quite right to write.”

“For me, a New Year’s message is nothing more than a literary form, equally a vehicle for expressing journalistic pursuits,” Jiang Xue said. “Any vehicle will do.”

This feature was originally published at Tian Jian (田間), CMP’s Chinese-language outlet devoted to the discussion of journalism and media development. Tian Jian is also on Substack. 

The post A Tradition in Retreat appeared first on China Media Project.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post A Self-Serving Global Survey appeared first on China Media Project.

The piece, titled “The Four Great Global Initiatives: A Clear Roadmap to a Multipolar World” (四大全球倡议，迈向多极世界的清晰路线图), appears on page three under the “International Forum” (国际论坛) column — a typical and oft-used feature showcasing foreign voices that validate Beijing’s narratives. The byline belongs to Abdelkader Berrich, identified as an Algerian member of parliament and economist. His commentary faithfully echoes the framing from Xi’s Qiushi article, praising China’s “responsible major power role” (负责任的大国担当) in reshaping the international order. Berrich argues that each initiative “precisely responds to global challenges in specific domains,” together forming “a complete vision for pushing the world toward balanced development.”

This deployment of foreign voices is standard propaganda practice. By featuring ostensibly independent international commentators — particularly from the Global South — Chinese state media seek to demonstrate that Xi’s vision enjoys legitimacy beyond China’s borders. The timing of the “Four Great Initiatives” push is deliberate — coming ahead of next week’s plenum and the UN anniversary, as China tries to emphasize its role as a responsible, global power, and signal legitimacy internally within the party.

Echoing the language of yesterday’s promotional read-out on Xi Jinping’s featured article in the Party journal Qiushi (求是), the text of today’s article describes the “decline of the unipolar order” (单极秩序的式微) — a reference to the United States — as “an irreversible historical trend.” It positions China’s initiatives as the inevitable alternative.

The track record of the People’s Daily on foreign voices — in bylines as well as in direct quotes and paraphrases — urges caution around such examples of validation. Last month, the paper published a commentary under the byline of NBA star LeBron James, praising Chinese “enthusiasm and friendliness” and framing basketball as “a bridge that connects us.” Representatives for James quickly disavowed the piece, saying he had only ever conducted interviews with Chinese media. The People’s Daily issued no correction. When politics trump professionalism at the Party’s flagship newspaper, foreign endorsements — whether fabricated or faithfully rendered — serve the same propaganda purpose.

The post Foreign Voices for Xi’s Global Vision appeared first on China Media Project.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Xi Jinping’s Global Quartet appeared first on China Media Project.

Zhong Caiwen is a pen-name for a collaboration between writing groups at both the Central Propaganda Department (中宣部) and the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission (中央财经委员会), the bodies within the Chinese Communist Party that are responsible for political messaging and supervision of the financial system respectively. Such homophonous pen names are common in Party-state media, allowing powerful departments to voice official positions while signaling their authority to other Party insiders.

Roughly summarized, the series says that thanks to “Xi Jinping Economic Thought” (习近平经济思想) — this being the buzzword under Xi’s self-aggrandizing signature “banner term” dealing with economic policy — China’s economy is seeing steady development and resilience in the face of global turmoil and US tariffs. Through prioritizing innovation, social security and international openness, the two departments say the Party has improved livelihoods, consumption, graduate opportunities, and foreign investment opportunities. The eight-article prelude reads as an extended lecture on keeping faith with “Xi Jinping Economic Thought,” which has been something of a laggard among Xi’s banner term-related formulas as the economy has experienced difficult headwinds internationally.

Clearly, one key point of the series is to gainsay international economic detractors. “Recently,” one article in the series said on October 3, “some voices, both internationally and domestically, have argued that investment and development in China have passed their golden age and that opportunities are dwindling.” But there are hints of grudging admission too. On October 2, another article confessed that “prices remain sluggish,” businesses were seeing difficulties, and that domestic demand was “weak.”

The timing of the series also matters. It arrives just weeks ahead of the Fourth Plenum of the CCP’s Central Committee, scheduled for October 20-23, which will set the groundwork for China’s 15th Five-Year Plan covering 2026-2030. These plenary sessions are pivotal moments in Chinese policymaking and political positioning. Let’s remember: It was the Third Plenum in 1978 that launched “reform and opening up,” and the 2018 Second Plenum that eliminated presidential term limits for Xi. This year’s plenum faces the uncomfortable task of addressing mounting economic pressures, including a 29 percent drop in foreign direct investment and the ongoing impact of tariffs from the United States and the EU.

At base, the series is an attempt to set the tone for the Fourth Plenum before the harder conversations begin.

To this end, the series deploys a familiar tactic of redirection — looking aside from present and persisting problems to make a bigger sell on the future. The October 4 installment of the series says at one point that “China’s future is entirely predictable.” And repeated five times throughout the series is the phrase, borrowed from Xi Jinping’s March remarks to international businesspeople, that “to believe in China is to believe in tomorrow, and to invest in China is to invest in the future” (相信中国就是相信明天,投资中国就是投资未来).

But this bold declaration of confidence, republished by multiple media outlets within China, suffers from a fatal flaw hardwired into how China’s ruling Party continues to communicate even well into the 21st century — a kind of repetition complex. If someone reassures you that everything is just fine, you relax: Good, that’s good to hear. If they say it again, there is a frisson of doubt. And when the reassurance comes a third time, it begins to sound like something other than confidence. You are sure there is much more they are not saying.

Eight definitive declarations of confidence is enough to sow doubt in all but the firmest of believers.

The post The Repetition Complex appeared first on China Media Project.

How do things stand now at the close of July?

By our latest front-page count, Xi Jinping’s performance remains consistent. The dip since 2023 is consistent with historical patterns, where steep jumps in frequency for the top leader can be seen in the wake of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) congresses. The first half of 2023 understandably brought a sharp incline in the use of new buzzwords and phrases from the political report to the 20th National Congress of the CCP, held from October 16-22, 2022.

Terms like “Chinese-style modernization” (中国式现代化) and “new form of human civilization” (人类文明新形态) were naturally pushed with renewed vigor in the state media from January onward, defining the ideological status quo of the post-20th period. And other Xi Jinping staples, like the “Two Unshakeables” (两个毫不动摇), followed suit.

In the short term, it is not unusual to see apparent gaps with previous performance emerge. These can close as important events, such as plenary sessions or important foreign policy exchanges, drive a burst in front-page coverage.

The most crucial point to bear in mind is the extreme and persisting gap between Xi Jinping and all other members of the party’s Politburo Standing Committee (PSC). Xi maintains a commanding lead in the party’s internal messaging. We can also note that no other members of the PSC have made clear advances in terms of front-page performance.

For those asking whether or not a power struggle is underway in China, you are asking the wrong question. Of course there is struggle. This is the nature of politics under the CCP. The only real question is: What kind? As we near the next National Congress in 2027 — for which the midpoint passed in April this year — we can naturally expect various forms of jockeying and positioning. Our point is that these moves and shifts are not yet visible in the state media headlines.

We will certainly keep you posted.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The post Xi Jinping Still Strong in the Headlines appeared first on China Media Project.