Tag: China

Projecting Light in the Shadows

Written by Mang Mang on February 26, 2026. Posted in Features and Analysis. No Comments on Projecting Light in the Shadows

In November 6, 2025, just four days before the official opening of the IndieChina Film Festival in New York, the event’s director, Zhu Rikun (朱日坤), announced that it had been cancelled. In his statement, he said that if he did not halt the festival, given “the situation currently unfolding, anyone involved with the event — directors, forum participants, peripheral figures, volunteers, even audience members — could face threats or harassment.” He had made the “extraordinarily painful decision,” he said, not out of “fear or capitulation,” but out of consideration for the safety of all participants and audience members connected to the festival.

Before relocating to the United States, Zhu Rikun was for decades deeply involved in China’s independent film exhibition and production scene. He helped to organize the inaugural “China Documentary Exchange Week” (中国纪录片交流周) in 2003, and co-founded an independent film forum called, “The Human Way, the Cinematic Way” (人之道, 影之道), the forerunner of what would later become the Beijing Independent Film Festival (北京独立影像展).

Zhu’s own independent documentary, The Questioning (查房), captures the moment police interrogated him in a hotel room. And this work also helps to explain why the inaugural IndieChina festival he founded in New York became a target of transnational suppression by Chinese authorities.

The DVD cover of Zhu Rikun’s The Questioning. SOURCE: Zhu Rikun on X.

In reporting on the recent fate of IndieChina, media outlets have uniformly used the term “independent film festival” to describe this and other organized film screenings that have faced similar situations. When we look more closely at the various groups now trying to organize Chinese-language film screenings abroad, however, it becomes clear that the ecosystem of the “independent Chinese-language film screening” is much broader — and that the category itself is being pulled in different directions by the very different realities facing each event and the groups involved.

Through interviews with multiple independent Chinese-language screening groups in Europe, this reporter attempts to give readers a day-to-day sense of the circumstances facing acts of independent screening (独立放映).

Part One: Before the Screening

The independent Chinese-language screening groups currently active in Europe have emerged largely within the past five years. This is because a large number of Chinese people with an interest in film — and some with prior screening experience — emigrated to Europe during this period, making these groups a byproduct of the latest wave of emigration. Films, like the people who love them, literally ran (润) to Europe. Intertwined with the Covid-19 pandemic, China’s “dynamic zero-Covid” policy and the aftershocks of the anti-lockdown protests rippled out to Europe, and the stimulation of those external events prompted many of these new arrivals to start thinking about doing something here.

CMP Dictionary · May 18, 2022 · David Bandurski

An online neologism popular from April 2022, “Runology” (润学) derives from the English verb “run,” matching the pinyin of the Chinese character 润. It refers to the study of how to emigrate overseas — a response to worsening economic conditions and shrinking freedoms in China, particularly for young people.

The term surged during the Shanghai lockdown in spring 2022. It is often framed as one of three paths available to Chinese youth: grinding through “involution” (内卷) in a hyper-competitive job market with little reward; “lying flat” (躺平) by rejecting ambition altogether; or practicing Runology — and leaving.

Tang Mingxuan (唐明轩) had accumulated rich experience in independent film screening back in China, co-founding a film collective focused on sexuality and gender, and his professional background was also in film. When he arrived in Europe, he brought with him the operating model and programming approach of that earlier collective, and on this foundation built a new screening group in his adopted city.

Many people share a background similar to that of Tang Mingxuan, though Jiang Bu (蒋不) is perhaps a more typical example. Jiang was active in Chinese civil society even before he entered university, and he later studied at the Beijing Film Academy. Shaped partly by his experience in grassroots organizing and partly by his dissatisfaction with the atmosphere on campus, he always gravitated toward the kind of independent documentaries made by figures like Ai Weiwei (艾未未), Hu Jie (胡杰), and Ai Xiaoming (艾晓明). “For me around 2011, I genuinely believed that you could use this kind of work, making independent documentaries, to have an impact on Chinese society, what people called ‘the surrounding gaze transforming China.’ I thought it was a path for public intellectuals and artists to engage with reality and take part in public action.”

There are also many people who came to Europe with little or no screening experience, and essentially had to learn from scratch how to host a film screening. Chen Zhe (陈哲), one of the founders of “Xinfeng” (信风), had only the vaguest sense of what “independent screening” meant before trying to organize screenings locally, and had never attended a screening event before leaving China. Wei Wenxi (韦文熙) and Lin Aili (林艾历) had each been involved to varying degrees in screening activities before moving abroad, but both only encountered the finer details of organizing screenings after arriving in Europe.

CMP Dictionary · January 4, 2011 · David Bandurski

Rooted in Lu Xun’s concept of kanke wenhua (看客文化) — the cold indifference of crowds watching their fellows dragged off to execution — the “surrounding gaze” (围观) has taken on new meaning in the Internet age. Rather than passive spectatorship, it now describes the potential of networked publics to concentrate opinion around issues and events, nudging change through accumulated micro-participation.

The term is often associated with the slogan “the surrounding gaze changes China” (围观改变中国). Peking University professor Hu Yong has called it a “bottom-line” form of public participation: modest on its own, but capable of bridging the historic fracture between activist minorities and an indifferent majority — with micro-forces (微动力) doing the work that organized movements never could.

Despite his lack of experience, Chen Zhe still took that first step into organizing film screenings. As he describes his thinking at the time: “This is something that someone should be doing — and since it seems like no one is doing it, we might as well do it ourselves.” There were then a few Chinese-language works that he felt were really decent and were being screened and attracting some attention across Europe. He felt that naturally these films could be screened privately in homes or living rooms — but they also deserved to be seen in cinemas, where people could sit down together and even discuss them.

As Chen Zhe found that some European cities had cinematic screenings and his city did not, he felt that making it happen was his “inescapable responsibility” (责无旁贷). Seizing that opportunity, he and the other founders organized several screenings, which served as the seed from which “Xinfeng” later developed.

Lin Aili’s motivation for founding “79 Square Meters” (79平米) was similar to Chen Zhe’s. In Northern Europe, where Lin now lives, the cultural environment is relatively homogeneous, and opportunities to see Chinese-language films are rare. As contentious issues such as China’s “zero-Covid” policy sparked considerable discussion within the local Chinese community, she hoped to use Chinese-language films to bring people together for conversation — and so “79 Square Meters” held its first screening.

The motivations of these various “screeners” (放映员) may differ, but all have faced a common dilemma: Is film screening an end in itself, or a means to other goals? For Jiang Bu and his group, on-the-ground activism in Paris had gradually ebbed after China’s lockdown policies ended, and they wanted to create a space that was less overtly activist in orientation — one that could reach a broader audience and then engage like-minded people for possible future action. “No Change of Term” (不换届) was their attempt to integrate activism with everyday routines.

Index on Censorship • May 2008

“Memory Loss”

By Hu Jie • Translated by David Bandurski

Telling the story of China’s past confronts society’s greatest taboos.

Read the article ↗

Shen Jingping (沈静平) prefers to position their group as a “cultural salon” focused primarily on queer and feminist issues within Chinese-speaking communities, treating film screening as one among many possible activities. Shen might organize events around specific holidays or commemorations — for example, if there is a suitable film around Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20, they might screen the film. They also direct more resources toward independent filmmakers, reserving their limited screening opportunities for works that rarely get to meet audiences directly.

Among those interviewed for this article, Wei Wenxi is the one most inclined to see film screening as an end in itself. As a film lover, he felt keenly after arrival in Europe that Chinese-language films — and particularly independent films — were too seldom screened. So he joined multiple film screening groups in the hope of somehow making a contribution. He also found the process of curating screenings genuinely interesting. The groups he has been involved with range from those with an issue-oriented or activist focus, like those described above, to ones that are more commercially oriented and already better integrated with the film industry.

Part Two: The Screening Takes Shape

Each of these groups has forged its own distinctive form of “independent screening,” shaped by differing motivations, experience levels, missions, curatorial tastes, and strategies — and each has left its distinctive trace both on and off screen.

The screening groups run by Shen Jingping and Tang Mingxuan are both based in Western Europe, where Chinese communities are larger and local residents speak more complex languages and dialects. Given this relatively diverse and fluid audience composition, Shen and Tang must carefully anticipate on-site conditions, especially when making decisions about subtitling. “79 Square Meters,” located in Northern Europe, has a more fixed audience, and attendance at each screening is more predictable. The relationship between the group and its audience is often closer than in other independent screening contexts.

As Chen Zhe found that some European cities had cinematic screenings and his city did not, he felt that making it happen was his “inescapable responsibility.”

Compared to other groups, “No Change of Term” has a clearer activist character, and so leans toward screening independent documentaries on topics such as Uyghurs, Tibetans, and broader Chinese human rights issues. But because it also wants to lower the threshold for audience comprehension and engagement with discussion, it will sometimes choose works that are more art-oriented, even if the public or political dimension of these works is less explicit.

Choices about screening venues more directly reflect the realities — sometimes actively chosen, sometimes passively determined — that distinguish one independent screening operation from another. Screenings can take place in cinemas or in various kinds of cultural spaces. The cost of a venue, the group’s budget, the terms of cooperation with the venue, the kinds of interaction the space allows — all of these factors can be either constraints or motivations shaping a group’s choices.

By disposition and background, Jiang Bu is drawn to a more “guerrilla” (游击式) mode of screening. “If the content of a film suits that kind of format, we could grab twenty iPads and watch the whole thing in a subway car,” he says. But he also acknowledges that other members of “No Change of Term” had persuaded him on the reasons why screenings in proper cinemas still matter: “The reason we show these films is precisely because they never had a chance to be formally screened in China. We want people to sit down together and enjoy them fully.”

“79 Square Meters” has a strong preference for independent cultural spaces. In Lin Aili’s view, their group is more grassroots, and the potential audience in their city is not large enough to sustain the costs of cinema screenings. “I know that in Berlin or Paris, they screen Asian films in cinemas quite often. But we don’t really like that kind of formal setting. We want a place where people can have a drink and chat and get to know each other. I prefer a more intimate, community-oriented screening model.” “Xinfeng” also gravitates toward such spaces, though it does not rule out cinema screenings. As relative newcomers on the screening scene, however, they want to develop a better understanding of the diverse venues available locally, and so they are ready to seek out more possibilities as they arise.

Chinese indie filmmaker Huang Wenhai (黄文海), author of *The Exile Gaze* (放逐的凝视), a history of independent film since the 1990s, supported by the China Media Project.

Despite the variety of films screened, the diversity of audiences, and the range of venues, nearly all of these independent screening groups place a premium on the post-screening discussion. Jiang Bu goes so far as to say that for “No Change of Term,” the post-screening discussion is the real point. In many cases, it matters less which film they screen. Even when they use a cinema that charges by the hour, and the relative cost is high, their post-screening discussions can run for an hour or even 90 minutes. And precisely because the content of those discussions tends to be more sensitive, they almost never announce their post-screening guests in advance, nor do they publish summaries of the discussions.

The post-screening discussions hosted by other groups typically last somewhere from 30 minutes to an hour. When inviting particular guests to speak, “Xinfeng takes concrete measures to verify the reliability of their experiences and what they plan to share in advance, providing audiences with a foundation of mutual trust when more sensitive topics are to be discussed.

Part Three: Beyond the Screening

Independent screening groups also face pervasive challenges. For these mostly volunteer-run operations, the relatively heavy demands on funding and members’ time are a significant burden. In response, some groups have tried to broaden their range of activities. Over the past five years, many independent screening groups have emerged across Europe, but a considerable number have also gone quiet or ceased to be active. Their rise and fall is inseparable from these constraints.

For Jiang Bu, with his extensive experience in organizing, it is a constant challenge, amid these various constraints, deciding how to allocate work among members and coordinate progress. Most of the core members of “No Change of Term” live in Paris and have no immediate plans to leave, so the team is relatively stable and built on a foundation of mutual trust. Even so, it can be a challenge to align the varying areas of interest among members. “Personally, I’d like more different voices to be part of film selection decisions,” says Jiang. “But some members aren’t necessarily engaged at the selection stage — and sometimes even after a film has been circulated, only a handful of people will have watched it.” Still, he says, almost everyone shows up for every event, and are actively involved in the on-site work like ticketing and hosting. “I don’t see this as a problem or a failure of duty, but it’s true that different people have different understandings of their role,” Jiang says. “Some tend to see themselves as volunteers or on-site crew.”

Wei Wenxi has witnessed firsthand what Jiang Bu describes, but from a different vantage point. Based on his observations, some groups have a relatively clear leadership and management structure, with core members who hold more authority and decision-making power. When a screening plan prompts audience complaints on social media, some core members may respond hastily without internal consultation, creating unnecessary pressure that then spills over to ordinary members. Given this kind of hierarchical organizational structure, larger conflicts can erupt. Some volunteers have even publicly posted criticisms after leaving a screening group. Different positions within the hierarchy may determine why members interpret the same situation so disparately.

Funding is the lifeblood that sustains any screening organization. Venues can be costly, and screening in a cinema raises costs dramatically. Most films also require a one-time licensing fee for each screening from agents and distributors, even if a “friendly rate” discount is sometimes available in consideration of a group’s independent status. And this is before factoring in the cost of subtitle production, poster design, miscellaneous expenses, and of course the production of DCPs — or digital cinema packages, the standard format used worldwide for digital cinema projection. Although these groups largely depend on the spare time available to members, all of the groups interviewed for this article said they try, within their means, to provide some form of compensation to members and volunteers who contribute their time and labor.

The most direct way to break even is to charge audiences a registration fee. But if ticket prices are set too high and attendance is poor, not only does the organization absorb significant losses, but the event fails also to achieve the very purpose that motivated the screening in the first place — getting people to sit down together, watch a film, discuss it, and connect.

External grants are a realistic and viable option, but funding typically comes with conditions attached. “No Change of Term” is among the more actively grant-seeking organizations interviewed, but Jiang Bu acknowledges that funding can sometimes become a constraint. “We mainly apply for grants in the human rights field, and funders have corresponding expectations for projects,” he says. “For example, [they demand] that the films screened directly address Chinese human rights issues. That practical constraint has also shaped our current curatorial preferences.”

Chen Zhe’s attitude is thoroughly pragmatic — “cook according to the rice you have,” as he puts it. Unable to price tickets on par with mainstream cinemas, his group has tried to explore more flexible licensing arrangements, such as sharing revenue with rights holders based on actual ticket sales, rather than paying a flat licensing fee upfront. But Chen also stresses that lack of spare time among core members is the greater constraint on “Xinfeng,” more crucial than financial shortfalls. Planning and executing a screening requires a burst of effort over a short period, and he and the other core members all have their own primary jobs. With no new members currently joining, they cannot maintain year-round programming and can only hold events during seasons when members are relatively free.

Tang Mingxuan’s group has built a strong relationship of mutual trust with its venue, and so can use the space for free. The rights holders they have worked with do not always proactively charge licensing fees either, which means they can offer free admission to audiences. They have also tried collaborating with queer and feminist groups, selling self-made merchandise at screenings in hopes of covering other expenses.

Planning and executing a screening requires a burst of effort over a short period.

One distinctive feature of independent film screening, compared to other forms of activism, is that the entire screening network is tightly interconnected. To know what films are available to screen and how to reach rights holders, these organizations are pushed to build connections within the field and share information. Networks extend not only within Europe but also across Eurasia and across the Atlantic.

Jiang Bu, as someone who was active in China’s independent film community, carries with him a web of personal relationships that plays a vital role in “No Change of Term’s” day-to-day operations — allowing the group to reach out to a large number of filmmakers and secure screening opportunities. Once one screening organization successfully navigates all the steps to bring a film to the screen, that success story spreads rapidly through the network to other organizations and groups, ultimately allowing more audiences in Europe to see the film.

Among the longer-term plans at “No Change of Term” is to provide more material support for these informal connections. They are working to build an archive cataloguing the Chinese-language independent films available for screening, with an entry and description for each film as well as information on how to contact rights holders. Drawing on this archive, any independent screening organization or group could quickly find out what is available to screen and how to obtain a license. And their ambitions go further still. They hope to provide new screening groups with technical assistance and some financial support, enabling those groups to carry out low-cost screenings adapted to local conditions. This might ultimately achieve a vibrant Chinese-language independent screening network globally.

This vision at “No Change of Term” is one that Chen Zhe arrived at independently. For Chen, his original motivation for doing screenings was simply that no one was showing “the films I wanted to see.” Starting from this simple fact, he has a straightforward view of who should be screening films. Anyone can do it, he says, and everyone should be doing it together. “There are a lot of local community groups now, and I hope more of them, not necessarily independent screening groups per se, will start showing films so that we can all share the risk.” A dispersed, decentralized screening network is more in keeping with his tastes.

Coda: The Aftershocks of IndieChina

Precisely because of the tightly networked, cross-regional nature of independent screening, some of the people interviewed had been watching as Zhu Rikun, now outside of China, built IndieChina from the ground up — and had witnessed the festival’s eventual collapse. Jiang Bu, Chen Zhe, and Lin Aili all experienced this process firsthand; Jiang Bu in particular has had more personal contact with Zhu Rikun. After Zhu Rikun announced the cancellation of IndieChina, Jiang Bu offered him direct assistance, including helping him reach out to the media for coverage.

Each person’s circumstances and past experiences also shape how they interpret what happened to IndieChina. When Lin Aili first heard the news, she was very surprised. The entire IndieChina project had seemed so substantial, with such a long preparation period. If the Chinese authorities had truly wanted to interfere, she felt they could have done so much earlier, not just days before the festival was about to open. Jiang Bu, who has more understanding of the details with IndieChina, found the whole affair even more bewildering. “There have been all kinds of Chinese-language independent film festivals in New York before, and none of them have faced suppression this serious,” he says. “Many of the directors and staff members who were harassed in China are spread across multiple provinces, which means this was a coordinated cross-provincial operation.”

“They’ve really treated this thing as if it were some kind of existential threat,” he says of the Chinese authorities.

The “aftershocks” of the incident have gradually spread to screening organizations on the European side of the Atlantic. “Xinfeng” had at one point considered screening some of the films selected for IndieChina, and had planned to reach out to Zhu Rikun after the festival concluded. That possibility is now out of reach. Some independent filmmakers have also declined screening invitations from “No Change of Term,” citing the risk of spillover from the New York incident.

For Lin Aili and Shen Jingping, however, the incident has only strengthened their determination to screen more films. Lin Aili notes that “79 Square Meters” is focused primarily on women’s and queer issues. While there is some tension with state controls, it is not necessarily highly sensitive, and she believes that as long as they manage risk carefully and keep a low profile, they will not face similar suppression. For her, what happened to IndieChina is actually more of an inspiration to keep going.

Amid the daily grind and the occasional shock of extremes like IndieChina, there is the lingering knowledge that each time the screen lights up could be the last. Though each group faces its own challenges, all remain hopeful about the future. They navigate the murky terrain of everyday operations in search of more sustainable models, hoping to continue bringing Chinese-language films to local audiences. Their hopeful call, never stated outright but conveyed in unison through their actions, is simple: may we all meet again before the opening credits roll.

This article originally appeared in Chinese at Mang Mang. It is translated here with the permission of the outlet.

Note: The organization names “79 Square Meters” (79平米) and “Xinfeng” (信风), and the personal names Lin Aili (林艾历), Wei Wenxi (韦文熙), Tang Mingxuan (唐明轩), Shen Jingping (沈静平), and Chen Zhe (陈哲) are all pseudonyms. To protect the safety and privacy of those interviewed, some details — including times, locations, and personal backgrounds — have been lightly obscured where this does not affect factual accuracy.

Are You Dead Yet?

Written by Dalia Parete on January 13, 2026. Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on Are You Dead Yet?

Over the weekend, an app rather jarringly named “Are You Dead Yet?” (死了么) hit #1 on Apple’s paid charts in China — and quickly sparked debate over whether its blunt name crosses cultural lines around death and fortune. Developed by a startup based in Henan province released in March 2025, the app costs 8.00 yuan ($1.15 USD) and offers a simple yet increasingly necessary function: people who live alone check in daily (with one click) to confirm they’re okay. If consecutive check-ins are missed, the user’s emergency contacts receive automatic alerts about their well-being.

The app addresses a critical safety need for China’s surging solo-living population. As of 2020, there were 125 million single-person households, where sudden illness or accidents can often go unnoticed. That number is expected to balloon to 200 million by 2030. After the app’s launch, downloads jumped 100-fold to 12,000+ within less than 24 hours, according to Chinese media.

It was the name that sparked heated debate on Chinese social media this week. Netizens, particularly on the short-video platform Douyin (抖音), criticized the name as too harsh and inauspicious, saying it lacked positive vibes. Many proposed the softer “Are You Alive?” (活着么) as an alternative. This reaction reflects deeper tensions around Chinese taboos about death — the preference for positive expressions over direct confrontation with mortality. Developers pledged to consider renaming the app as they expand features like SMS notifications and elder-friendly versions. Beyond what we name it, this app shows how digital tools are stepping in where traditional support systems — family, friends, community — have grown weaker.

China Daily Partners with Egypt’s Al-Ahram

Written by Mark Chiu on January 12, 2026. Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on China Daily Partners with Egypt’s Al-Ahram

A partnership deal with Egypt’s most widely circulated daily newspaper, announced earlier this month, enables the government-run China Daily to distribute its English-language print edition to audiences in eight Egyptian cities, including the capital, Cairo. The arrangement, which appears to make use of the existing circulation network of Al-Ahram (金字塔報), one of the region’s most influential Arabic news sources, will place the China Daily in a wide range of locations — including embassies and consulates, government offices, universities, research institutions, hotels, and bookstores.

A video shared by the China Daily announcing the partnership showed copies of the China Daily running off presses at an unspecified Al-Ahram print facility before being placed on newsstands and in bookstores. The edition was identified under the masthead as “Global Weekly,” which elsewhere in the world is a 32-page China Daily tabloid released every Friday. The headline for the online and video report on the partnership declared: “China Daily Printed in Egypt for First Time.”

China Daily is operated by the Information Office of China’s State Council, which is essentially the foreign office of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department (中共中央宣傳部). The newspaper has struck similar arrangements with media outlets around the world, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Hindustan Times, Kenya’s Star newspaper, and many others. Last year, the paper, which China’s government regards as one of its chief propaganda voices overseas, partnered with France’s Le Figaro to publish the inaugural French edition of its “China Watch” supplement, which in Chinese is revealingly referred to as the “China International Image Special Issue” (中國國家形象專刊) — a testament to its role not as a news source but as government communication.

The deal with Al-Ahram, a state-owned Egyptian media outlet that, founded in 1875, is one of the oldest newspapers in the Arab world, is the latest move in China’s broader push to expand its media presence in North Africa and the Arab world.

Global Dreams in Small-Town China

Written by David Bandurski on December 12, 2025. Posted in Features and Analysis. No Comments on Global Dreams in Small-Town China

This week, the city of Yichun in China’s southern Jiangxi province announced the opening of its third international communication center — a special office dedicated to promoting the local image to the world and responding to Xi Jinping’s call to “tell China’s story well.” The office, which promises to showcase “Yichun’s charm,” is the latest manifestation of a far-reaching nationwide effort to build China’s “discourse power.” But it might also be a symptom that begs a serious question: Has Xi Jinping’s sprawling domestic campaign for global influence spread itself too thin?

International communication centers, or ICCs, are sprouting across China like mushrooms after the rain. According to some estimates, more than 200 such centers now operate nationwide, including 29 at the provincial level and, increasingly, at the city and county levels. Jing’an County’s new center — Yichun’s third — boasts somewhat unaccountably that its overseas social media platforms have attracted followers from over 70 countries and regions, with a reach exceeding 30 million people. This sounds more like bluster for the sake of political point-taking close to home than a realistic assessment of impact.

The center says it will “deepen local characteristics, shape communication brands,” and push content bearing “Chinese temperament, Jiangxi style, Yichun charm, and Jing’an characteristics” to the world. But is anyone in Yichun thinking about, well, the audience?

Provincial-Level ICCs in China

Provincial-Level International Communication Centers in China

Cumulative Growth, 2018–2025

Whatever the case, this push locally to amplify China’s voice internationally has intensified dramatically during the past five years. Since the Chinese Communist Party first conceived a soft power push nearly two decades ago under Hu Jintao, China’s leadership has obsessed over achieving greater global influence. Central to this effort has been developing “discourse power” — huayuquan (话语权) — commensurate with China’s comprehensive national power.

Under Xi, external propaganda has since August 2013 been combined with the softer-sounding notion of “telling China’s story well,” while framed toward Party officials in language redolent of the Cultural Revolution as a global “public opinion struggle.” By May 2021, speaking at a Politburo study session, Xi stated clearly that international discourse power was essential to creating “a favorable external public opinion environment for our country’s reform, development, and stability.”

Xi frames this as addressing what he calls the “third affliction” — the “suffering of criticism” from Western discourse hegemony, following Mao’s defeat of foreign aggression and Deng’s victory over poverty. In this worldview, the CCP’s legitimacy cannot be secured at home without dominance in the global information space.

Since 2018 Xi’s approach to this goal of greater “discourse power” has been a strategy that we have called at CMP “Centralization+” — essentially the idea that central-level propaganda resources like China Media Group, China Daily and Xinhua must be augmented by leveraging the strength of local and regional media groups and other actors. The strategy employs centralized messaging control while distributing operational capacity across provincial, city, and county-level actors — the most prominent of these being so-called international communication centers (国际传播中心). These local centers launch branded online platforms as well as social media accounts on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and X, generally with zero visibility about their state-run identity, flooding information spaces with content tailored to specific regions and languages.

The launch on December 11, 2025, of the Jing’an International Communication Center, a solemn affair.

In some cases, these centers can be well-resourced and effective. Clear examples can be found particularly along China’s southern border, where a handful of provincial-level ICCs are focusing their energy on Southeast Asia. These include the Guangxi International Communication Center, which aims to “tell the story of China and Guangxi to the outside world, and serve to build a closer China-ASEAN community with a shared future,” and the Yunnan South Asia and Southeast Asia ICC, which held at least eight international events between July and November this year (one drawing more than 500 participants from 110 countries).

But Yichun’s third ICC demonstrates how, when centralized ambition meets local implementation, the results can seem comically out of proportion. The Jing’an International Communication Center (靖安国际传播中心), which according to the official release will be “led by the Jing’an County Propaganda Office and operated by the Jing’an County Convergence Media Center,” promises to amplify “Jing’an’s positive energy.” But the tiny office, with its shiny new signboard, seems a caricature of the grandiose goals set out by Xi Jinping during a Politburo study session in late 2013, when he spoke of “strengthening the capacity for international communication and carefully constructing an external discourse system.”

When hundreds upon hundreds of counties across China each have their own international communication center taking to Facebook and Instagram and boasting millions of global fans from “England, France, Italy, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan,” who are they really communicating to? And who are they kidding?

Manufacturing Dissent

Written by Alex Colville on November 4, 2025. Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on Manufacturing Dissent

TikTok, often criticized in Western capitals as a vector for Chinese disinformation, has become a platform for distributing fake news about protests within China itself. Following the suspicious death of actor Yu Menglong (于朦朧) and what appeared to be a government cover-up in September, AI-generated videos falsely depicting mass anti-government rallies circulated widely on the platform, according to AFP’s fact-checking service. The terrifyingly realistic clips — betrayed at points only by slightly distorted faces and nonsensical Chinese characters — bore the watermark for Sora, the visual generation software from OpenAI. They originated from an account called “Team Taiwan Value” and garnered hundreds of thousands of views and comments.

Many users believed the fabricated protests were genuine, with commenters expressing solidarity. No evidence exists of actual large-scale rallies in China over Yu’s death, which Beijing police attributed to an accidental fall, prompting widespread questioning from fans, and related reports in Chinese-language outlets globally. The videos, including this one and this one, were taken down Tuesday afternoon.

Molding the Message

Written by Dalia Parete on October 14, 2025. Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on Molding the Message

In many countries, training the next generation of journalists means fostering the skills needed to go after the story and report in the public interest — serving the needs of the audience. In China, where media work is defined by the ruling Communist Party as essential to maintaining regime stability, journalism education takes a fundamentally different path. The profession exists not to hold power accountable, but to serve what Xi Jinping calls “the Party’s news and public opinion work” (党的新闻舆论工作).

That reality was on full display on October 11, 2025, when journalists, university representatives, and officials from the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department, the Ministry of Education, and the All-China Journalists Association (ACJA) convened in Beijing for the 2025 edition of the “China Journalism and Communication Forum” (中国新闻传播大讲堂). The ACJA, though ostensibly a “non-governmental organization,” in fact serves as an important layer of media control, regularly taking charge of training and licensing journalists to ensure compliance with the Party’s objectives.

Held every year running since 2020 — even through the years of Covid-19 lockdown, a sign of its critical nature — the journalism and communication forum serves as a key mechanism for synchronizing state media practices with academic training, ensuring that Party control over journalism flows seamlessly from classroom to newsroom. It functions as an annual training exercise, reinforcing the reporting frameworks that journalists and educators must follow to serve Party objectives. While the mandate to serve the Party has always been at the heart of media under the CCP, Xi Jinping has strongly reiterated the principle, telling media in February 2016 that they must be “surnamed Party” (必须姓党).

Marxist View of Journalism Definition

The “Marxist View of Journalism” is a shifting set of ideas that prescribe and justify the Chinese Communist Party’s dominance of the news media and application of controls on information. The concept defines journalism in China as fundamentally distinct from Western journalism, particularly rejecting the notion of the press as a fourth estate. At its core, it means that the CCP must and will control the media profession in order to maintain control over public opinion and maintain its hold on power. The concept is central to the training and licensing of journalists in China.

Since launching in 2020, the forum’s themes have consistently focused on news gathering standards and international communication — a crucial topic as China seeks to enhance its global media influence — and, since last year, the integration of artificial intelligence into journalism practice. Over the past six years, the forum has invited 199 news workers to deliver lectures, according to a read-out this week from the National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA), the official government press and publication regulator that is in fact the same body as the Party’s Propaganda Department. Successive forums have produced 192 long-form video courses and 500 short video courses that have, according to the NPPA, reached more than 200,000 journalism students and faculty at over 700 universities nationwide.

Held over the weekend at the Communication University of China (CUC), this year’s forum brought together 32 lead instructors from 22 news organizations, and was attended by representatives from 11 universities. But beyond skills-based capacity building, the focus is on fostering what the leadership calls the “Marxist View of Journalism” (马克思主义新闻观), which justifies CCP control of media to maintain social and political stability.

The theme of this year’s forum was not truth-telling, or how media can remain sustainable amid competition from digital platforms and social media, or any of the topics generally found at journalism-related events worldwide. It was “New Thought Leads the New Journey: Journalists’ Adherence to Principle and Innovation” (新思想引领新征程：记者的守正与创新). “Thought” in this context was a reference to “Xi Jinping Thought,” the ruling ideology of the country’s top leader. “Adherence to principle,” meanwhile, was about remaining true to Party orthodoxy. And “innovation”? This was simply the idea that media must adapt their methods and their models — even as they are, as ever, ideologically tethered to the Party.

Whitelist Wipeout

Written by Tian Jian on September 23, 2025. Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on Whitelist Wipeout

Last month, China’s top internet control body, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) released its latest “whitelist” of approved news sources from which internet platforms are legally permitted to repost news content — a system that has become a cornerstone of information control under Xi Jinping. Journalists over at our Chinese-language sister publication Tian Jian (田間) combed through the list last week to compare it with the 2021 version of the roster. What did they find?

The most noteworthy change was the omission of a more outspoken news outlet, Sanlian Life Weekly (三聯生活周刊), a respected news magazine that had recently published sensitive investigative reports, including coverage of Beijing flooding and a rare story about cross-regional arrests. Both stories were subsequently deleted from Chinese internet platforms.

The scrubbing of Sanlian from the roster echoes the 2021 removal of Caixin Media, another respected outlet that has struggled over the past decade to maintain professional space. The updated 2025 list grew from 1,358 to 1,459 approved sources, with most additions being local government platforms — likely reflecting Beijing’s strategy to strengthen propaganda capabilities at the local level. Guangdong province alone added 59 new government-affiliated outlets.

Hoops Oops

Written by LS Staff on September 23, 2025. Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on Hoops Oops

“Basketball is a bridge that connects us.” That was the headline of a commentary published in the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily newspaper earlier this month, with a soaring byline from none other than LeBron James, the LA Lakers star who is the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. “I’ve been deeply moved by the enthusiasm and friendliness of my Chinese friends,” the commentary began, with a typical CCP frame of people-to-people friendship. “What I can do in return is give my all in every game as a way to show my gratitude to everyone.” For a generally insipid Party-run mouthpiece, such a celebrity endorsement was too good to be true — and of course it was. Representatives for LeBron James quickly disavowed the story. The star, they said, had only ever conducted interviews with Chinese media.

What does this tell us? The flagship newspaper of the CCP feels it is perfectly acceptable to fake a commentary by one of the world’s most recognizable public figures if it suits the agenda, in this case talking up “friendship” and people-to-people exchange.

It should not surprise readers that this is not an isolated case. In 2016, after a commentary with a byline from a journalism professor in the New York state university system appeared in the paper decrying the falsehood of Western freedom of speech, CMP reached out to the professor in question. In an e-mail exchange, the shocked professor said she had only spoken on the phone with a People’s Daily reporter and raised issues of journalism ethics more generally. Sound familiar?

At the People’s Daily, politics always trump professionalism. In order to have his official press card re-issued back in January, the staff member behind the LeBron James commentary, sports reporter Wang Liang (王亮) would almost certainly have taken refresher courses on the Marxist View of Journalism and fealty to the Party. The most basic ethics and good practice? Not so important. The People’s Daily has issued no public correction on the LeBron James commentary. Don’t bother waiting for the buzzer.

Ars Censura

Written by LS Staff on September 9, 2025. Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on Ars Censura

Taiwan’s arts sector faces systematic Chinese influence, with publishers changing “Taiwan” to “Taipei” for Hong Kong awards and media companies replacing writers who express political views on China and Taiwan. That, anyway, is the conclusion reached by the independent Taiwanese outlet b.l!nk in a recent pair of reports published on September 5 and 6 (here and here). According to the reports, cultural exchange programs disguise unification messaging as business partnerships. One editor wrote: “Through media exchange programs, they give your company money while spreading unification ideas during activities.”