The New Generation
By all official accounts, the latest appointment for deputy editor-in-chief at the CCP’s flagship daily newspaper The People’s Daily (人民日報) represents a noteworthy development in Chinese politics. Du Shangze (杜尚澤) is just 44 years old, a member of the post-1980s generation, and — as many headlines pointed out — a woman.
The news even caught the eye of one of the country’s most influential commercial media outlets. Referencing a phrase from Mao Zedong marking the CCP orthodoxy on gender politics within the Party, Caixin reported earlier this month that “‘half the sky’ is stepping up in politics” (政壇“半邊天”發力).
The People’s Daily is a ministerial-level institution (正部級), under the direct control of the CCP Central Committee, with senior editors also holding administrative ranks within the Party. That makes Du officially the youngest official in China to hold a vice-ministerial rank and the first person born in the 1980s to get there. It’s a seniority level that Du’s colleagues in the state media apparatus, born in the mid-1970s, are only just beginning to reach. Huo Xiaoguang (霍小光), for example, vice president of Xinhua News Agency, the party’s newswire, was born in 1975 and assumed his position in 2024, when he was 48 years old.
The CCP leadership is famously senior, but a recent analysis shows that vice ministers, — whose average age is 57, average younger than full ministers, whose mean age is 62. Du’s appointment is also notable for her gender. Among the eight officials in the leadership of the People’s Daily, Du is one of only two women.
Du’s rise at the newspaper happened gradually. A 20-year veteran of the CCP flagship daily often accompanying top leadership, her profile rose in 2014, when under the pen name “Du Xiaodu” (杜小杜), she covered the informal exchanges between then-U.S. president Barack Obama and Xi Jinping in Beijing for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Her 2019 report on Xi’s trip to Europe won the 2020 China News Awards (中國新聞獎), a national award for top journalism that in the past decade has skewed heavily toward creative pro-Party communication and even direct propaganda. The Europe write-up circulated across government channels, state media, and even the BBC, for its standout quote from Xi Jinping: “I will forget myself for the people” (我將無我, 不負人民).
Not forgetting that the chief role of the People’s Daily is to “guide public opinion,” the Party’s buzzword for media control, Du’s report and its international reception could be regarded as a runaway success.
