Xi Jinping: A Year in the Headlines
China’s leader maintained a commanding lead in the headlines of the CCP’s flagship People’s Daily in 2025, despite a substantial decline over the past year. What do these mixed signals mean?
RTP and Zhejiang ICC Sign Agreement
On October 11, 2024, representatives from the Zhejiang International Communication Center (ZICC) and Portugal’s public broadcaster Rádio e Televisão de Portugal (RTP) signed a memorandum of understanding to broadcast the Chinese television drama “Just in Time” (時光正好), which follows three women navigating challenges in their personal and professional lives. Established in May 2024 under the guidance of the Zhejiang Provincial Propaganda Office, ZICC has described itself as a “provincial-level ‘central kitchen’ for international communication,” meaning it produces multimedia content intended to serve Xi Jinping’s external propaganda policy of “telling China’s story well.” The ICC is part of a nationwide strategy pushed by the central leadership since 2019, and accelerating since 2022, to enhance the country’s external propaganda and “discourse power” by leveraging the resources of provincial, city and even county-level media and propaganda offices.
Key Entities and Players Involved
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