It is true that China quickly dispatched reporters to the scene. It is also true that limited information about the disaster circulated widely across online media, news apps and social media channels. However, it is crucial to recognize how the centralized containment of reporting and release of information about this tragedy fits within the broader historical development of information controls in the country. Drawing on the news and social media monitoring platform Wisers as well as searches of archived Chinese-language newspapers and online coverage, the China Media Project explored a single critical question: Who produced the core information that circulated inside China, including through millions of social media accounts and thousands of posts on platforms like WeChat and RedNote. 

Our findings show that Chinese authorities were essentially effective in ensuring that the source of information on the breaking story was contained to a small number of central-level Party-state media, including the government-run Xinhua News Agency and the various outlets — such as China Central Television (CCTV) and China Radio International (CRI) — under the powerful China Media Group (CMG), the conglomerate directly under the Central Propaganda Department.

Despite Foreign Ministry Spokesman Guo Jiakun’s insistence on August 31 that “China has been open, transparent and timely in information release,” this story should be read as yet another unmistakable sign that Xi Jinping has completely rewritten the script for China’s domestic media.

Shock and Interest

During the first five hours after the disaster, no news reports appeared in China’s media, either from central or provincial CCP-run news outlets or their commercial counterparts. Given the real potential commercial media have still — even after years of constraint under Xi — to reach sources on the ground, this five-hour silence almost certainly reflects the presence of an immediate ban (禁令) against original reporting. It is likely media outlets were held back and told to await an “authoritative” account from Xinhua.

To put coverage of this tragedy in context, it is important to understand that China’s commercial metropolitan press, epitomized by now fully digitalized outlets like The Beijing News and Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily, tended in the past to pursue breaking stories like this one, often in direct violation of directives from the leadership. In the 2000s and into the early 2010s, more enterprising editorial teams at outlets like these sought ways to capitalize on the moments of opportunity — often before the system had time to react. The clearest example, a crucial backdrop to the Tibet-Nepal disaster, was the May 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, during which scores of media, and literally hundreds of reporters, openly violated an initial ban from the Central Propaganda Department to head to the scene and report first-hand.

As the leadership huddled on August 26 to frame its response, there appear to have been no such breaches of media protocol.

As media outlets sat on their hands awaiting the first Xinhua missive, meanwhile, interest in the story from the public was immediate. Posts quickly circulated on social media. As China Digital Times (CDT) has documented, users on WeChat attempted, unsuccessfully, to share two video clips of the border gate at Gyirong as it was struck by a flash flood wave. Both videos were shared overseas later in the day by the dissident X account “Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher.”

Searching for related video content on the messaging app WeChat and social media platforms on September 1, nearly a week after the disaster, CMP found that the keywords “Tibet” (西藏) and “mudslide” (泥石流) did not return the original Gyirong port video. Most videos, in fact, dealt either with the rescue operations — keeping close to the official framing of active government response — or with the collapse of melting ice and snow on the Nepalese side of the pass. When the Gyirong port video was referenced, as it was by several media through social media channels, the frame again was the sacrificial care shown by authorities and police. One short segment posted by the account “Qianjiang Video”(钱江视频), a WeChat-based video channel run by the official Zhejiang Media Group (浙江广播电视集团), showed a policeman trying to evacuate people seconds before the water struck the port. The text over the top read:

“The last 30 seconds before the mudslide struck Gyirong port.”
“Crowds ran to evacuate, one after another.”
“Only one police officer went against the flow of the crowd, waving and shouting.”

On August 27 and 28, more than 700 topics related to Gyirong trended on the popular social media platform Weibo before disappearing. This included at least one trending topic around 15:00 on August 27, again documented by CDT, in which users questioned why the Gyirong port had been reopened just six months earlier after repairs following a hugely damaging flash flood.

Such discussion, quickly snuffed out, helps to explain why China’s leadership views apparent acts of nature with such trepidation.

In fact, the CCP has always regarded breaking news, including disaster stories, as highly sensitive. Contrary to more simplistic understandings of what is generally termed “censorship,” which imagines “sensitive” political information being targeted for deletion, China’s leadership carries out what it calls “public opinion guidance” (舆论导向) — a more expansive manipulation of ideas through the media to ensure the stability of the regime. Irrespective of the nature of any form of content, one of the leadership’s key objectives is to ensure that mass interest does not cohere around a given topic. Mass attention always has the potential to become criticism at scale in ways that are difficult to predict. The question of why the Gyirong port was reopened just months ago may seem rudimentary; the Party views all such questions as dangerous.

For the leadership, achieving “guidance” is not just about containment, but about driving and controlling the narrative about a news event. The first effort by the Party-state to achieve this came five hours after the disaster, at around 3:30 on August 26, in the form of an official news release, or tonggao (通稿), from the government-run Xinhua News Agency.

Seizing the Story

The Xinhua tonggao is more than just a news story. It is Xinhua’s first political framing of the story, as a disaster receiving the swift action of the top CCP leadership. Certainly, the key factual content is that Xi has demanded officials “do everything possible to search for and rescue missing persons.” But the point is not to deliver news. In fact, the release contains the shortest of informational scene setters before diving headlong into the most important message — that the leadership is responding: 

Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, August 26 — At approximately 10:30 AM on August 26, a mudslide on the Nepalese side caused significant casualties and left many people missing at the Gyirong Port in Gyirong County, Shigatse City, Tibet. Following the disaster, Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, President of the People’s Republic of China, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, attached great importance to the situation and issued important instructions . . . . 

Neither is Xinhua’s statement that Xi Jinping issued “important instructions” (重要指示) a factual claim about an action with significance. “Important instructions” is a specialized political phrase that since 2013 has been reserved exclusively for Xi, signaling his unassailable leadership of the CCP even as it conveys a decided action. The same report notes that the premier, Li Qiang (李強), the number-two ranking member of the Politburo Standing Committee, offered his “written comments” (批示) to the CCP decision. This is a mark of lesser authority, asserting the proper hierarchy of the Xi era.

It is critical to note the structure of such official releases, for the obvious reason that doing so allows us to clearly distinguish them from news reporting.

The release immediately spread across the online and social media landscape, hitting the website of the official People’s Daily minutes after its release, and the website of the powerful internet control body, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), within 25 minutes. It also appeared that afternoon on the official website of the Tibetan regional government. 

The next release from Xinhua did not come until nearly 11 PM that night, and provided only a brief first account of the dead and missing:

Xinhua News Agency, Lhasa, August 26 — On August 26, a mudslide struck Gyirong County in Shigatse City, Tibet. According to information obtained by a reporter from the on-site command center, as of 8:00 PM on August 26, preliminary verified statistics indicate that the mudslide has claimed the lives of three people, with 265 others still unaccounted for. The exact number of casualties is still being verified, and rescue efforts are proceeding in an orderly manner.

This was the extent of the news update, which was accompanied by a black-and-white image from the disaster scene — the same image that would appear on news reports the next day, including inset on the front page of the Southern Metropolis Daily.

Mirrors and Echoes

The Xinhua tonggao on Xi Jinping’s “important instructions” from the previous day ran directly under the masthead of the CCP’s official People’s Daily newspaper on August 27, the day after the disaster. This treatment of the story, which offered nothing beyond the official statement of action, set the pattern for coverage — to use this term generally — for days to come across not just central-level official outlets, but also across provincial and city-level CCP dailies. And in a pattern entirely unique to the Xi era, the front pages of commercial metro newspapers also closely mirrored this approach.

In fact, treatment of the story in Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily, historically one of the country’s most professional news outlets, provides a startling picture of just how compliant Chinese media were on this breaking story. On the morning of August 27, the newspaper’s front page contrasted noticeably with that of the People’s Daily, running a full-page image of the scene of the disaster, with the above-mentioned black-and-white photograph from Xinhua inset.

At first glance, this front page resembles the more audience-oriented approach typical of such commercial media outlets compared to their Party paper (党报) counterparts. The larger headline announces the story boldly: “Mudslide Slams China-Nepal Border Crossing” (泥石流沖袭中尼口岸). The image, meanwhile, instantly conveys a sense of the scale of the disaster.

But the content is entirely from Xinhua, and the small headline again centers the story on the top leader: “Xi Jinping’s Instructions Emphasize All Efforts Must Be Made to Find and Rescue the Missing.” A jump directs readers to page three, where the stories are again from Xinhua and China Central Television.

Even more illustrative is the fact that the Tibet-Nepal disaster never again makes the front page of the paper. The next day, August 28, a local book fair takes the entire front page, and a two-page spread based entirely on Xinhua news reports is pushed to the back of the paper. On August 29, the front page is dominated by real estate policy, and the disaster story is mentioned only at the top of page three, a verbatim reprint of the notice from the CCP Politburo meeting the previous day — a perfect mirror of the content under the masthead of the People’s Daily.

In the days that follow there is no coverage whatsoever of the disaster in the newspaper, not even echoes of Xinhua or CCTV. We might imagine that this is neglect on the part of the editors. But it is just as likely a conscientious choice responding to a desperate situation. Because independent reporting of any kind was not possible, the only option available to the outlet was to echo Party-state media from on high, which editors may have found unthinkable. Just consider: If Southern Metropolis Daily had decided to lead with the flood story for its August 29 edition, the only way to do so would have been to place the Politburo story on the front page — a complete act of capitulation.

Editors at other professionally-minded outlets across the country faced the same choice: mimic, or fall silent.

To understand the larger significance of the leadership’s information management over the past two weeks, it is crucial to recognize that this mirroring pattern is a relatively recent development in the modern history of Chinese media. The moment of pivot in the handling of disaster stories came in June 2015, by which time Xi Jinping had spent two and half years asserting an unprecedented level of control over the domestic news media. On June 1, 2015, the river cruise ship Oriental Star capsized on the Yangtze River during a thunderstorm, resulting in 442 deaths. As commercial media across the country ran the story the next day, they used identical Xinhua copy, with nearly identical page layouts — a practice that to that time had been witnessed only among Party dailies, which routinely parroted the read-outs appearing on the front page of the People’s Daily.

Stopping the Mouths

The Oriental Star cruise ship tragedy was a striking case study in news management. It showed that China’s commercial metro newspapers, which for years had developed a reputation for pushing the envelope on sensitive breaking news stories — from the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to the 2011 Wenzhou train collision — had largely been brought to heel. Once testing the lines on the periphery, they now played a primary role in amplifying the agenda from the center.

This shift, to a large extent, marked the unraveling of a consensus that had emerged in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS epidemic, the idea that information suppression carries its own catastrophic effects. Seven years before the capsizing of the Oriental Star, in the aftermath of the earthquake, Hu Jintao had built his media strategy around the idea that information must be released rapidly, with central Party-state media seizing the initiative — an approach the China Media Project at the time dubbed “Control 2.0.” This strategy, known as “public opinion channeling” (舆论引导), proved only intermittently effective during Hu Jintao’s second term. But Xi Jinping’s restraints on the commercial press, combined with draconian controls on cyberspace, arguably sealed the deal.

Xi Jinping’s formal media policy was announced like a hammer blow in February 2016, when he told journalists during a visit to the People’s Daily and CCTV that all media must be “surnamed Party” (必须姓党) — meaning they belong, unquestionably, to the Party family. This circle-the-wagons approach was stated clearly in one passage in particular:

All work of the Party’s news and public opinion media must reflect the will of the Party, mirror the views of the Party, preserve the authority of the Party, preserve the unity of the Party, and achieve love of the Party, protection of the Party and acting for the Party; they must all increase their consciousness of falling in line, maintaining a high level of uniformity with the Party in ideology, politics and action.

This work has been complemented by robust controls on the internet and social media. A more revealing example comes from a fire that broke out in April 2023 at Beijing’s Changfeng Hospital (长峰医院), killing 29 people. It took eight hours before any news of the tragedy reached news journalists and the public, despite the hospital’s location in a heavily populated district, where residents later told reporters they had posted eyewitness videos, images and accounts. The case suggested that internet controls had reached a level of sophistication capable of erasing nearly all trace of a breaking story. “In the past,” one local news reporter eventually told the Initium outlet, “at least you could see fragments of information.”

Insistent Voices

Controls on cyberspace, however insistent, can be messy, uneven and difficult to trace. In the case of the Tibet-Nepal tragedy, Chinese citizens showed the usual determination to share and discuss whatever information was available, and a good roundup of this push and pull can be found over at CDT.

Even so, we should not lose sight of the larger story: how completely and effectively first-hand information was controlled by the authorities at the central level. The personal voices of sources on the ground have been almost entirely absent from China’s narrative, part of a familiar playbook. In our timeline of coverage below, there is only one real exception: a report on August 26, the day of the tragedy, by Hunan’s Xiaoxiang Morning Herald (潇湘晨报), coming less than three hours after the initial Xinhua release. Citing basic facts from the state-run CCTV, it went on to offer exclusive reporting from a lone voice at the scene:

On the afternoon of the 26th, survivor Ms. Fang told a reporter from Xiaoxiang Morning Herald‘s Chenshipin video unit that she and her companions had planned to travel to Nepal that morning, setting out from Gyirong town. They’d originally intended to leave at 9am but were delayed until around 10am after oversleeping. Gyirong town is about 20 kilometers from Gyirong port, normally a 40-minute drive. When they reached a point about four kilometers from the port, she said: “The trees and power poles up ahead had all fallen. The floodwater came rushing at us, crushing everything in its path. We didn’t dare turn around, so we could only reverse.”

In the days that followed, this passage, shared in overseas media as well as outlets such as Phoenix Online, stood out as a rare and authentic account amid an official record built entirely from footage of self-sacrificing leaders and courageous rescuers. That a single fragment of independent reporting should stand out at all, amid the volume of central media coverage, is itself the measure of how far China’s information controls have progressed.

Over the weekend, after two weeks closely managing access to the scene in Tibet, China made its latest grand gesture of supposed openness. It invited a select group of foreign journalists on a curated tour of the area that for so many critical days had been strikingly inaccessible. In photographs released by the Foreign Ministry through foreign social media platforms blocked within China itself, journalists could be seen conducting group interviews at the scene — not with survivors, mind you, but with rescue workers.

___________________

The following interactive timeline is built on a selection of the key media reports we analyzed in our study.

The post Taming News of a Border Tragedy appeared first on China Media Project.

The multi-lingual production, the report said, had aired through Kyrgyzstan’s national broadcaster on Sunday, the day of the Chinese leader’s arrival. It had showcased to millions of viewers “the outstanding political wisdom of President Xi.” 

At first glance, this front-page story looks like more of the same from the flagship paper of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — straight up propaganda promoting the global charisma of the man at the top of the political pack. In fact, this example is something more. It is meta-propaganda, and it points to the broader global infrastructure China builds and leverages, day in and day out, to promote its political system and interests abroad. 

In this case, as is often true when it comes to parsing official CCP discourse, “reading” between the lines is about grappling with the structures beyond the text — and taking them seriously.

The Xi broadcast that aired Sunday on Kyrgyzstan’s National Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (NTRK), a network that reaches close to 40 percent of the country’s population, ran on at least nine other outlets in Eurasia, South Asia and the Middle East, all corresponding with the Bishkek summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Eurasian regional political and economic organization. Broadcast partners included Kazakhstan’s national television network, the Belarussian outlet Belteleradio, Kazakhstan’s state-run Khabar Agency as well as its presidential broadcast service, Russian state television and the Russian government outlet Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the Russian-led regional news organization MTPK, Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), and Pakistan’s state-run PTV. 

According to Chinese state media reports, the same broadcast of “Classics Quoted by Xi Jinping” (平语近人), an hour of saccharine propaganda about the wisdom and learning of the man said to have inspired China’s success and its benefits for the world, also aired on outlets in India. It was additionally broadcast through China’s state-run broadcast channels overseas, including CGTN America, which claims to reach 30 million households in the US, and China Central Television’s feed at the United Nations. 

We might dismiss this program as pure nonsense. And we might therefore dismiss the People’s Daily missive as meta-nonsense — like studio applause for the CCP’s own performance. 

But the larger point here is that the foundation of this performance was laid down months, even years, in advance through media-diplomacy partnerships cultivated with exactly this purpose: to amplify China’s preferred narratives whenever politics and diplomacy warrant. This is not the first time, in fact, that “Classics Quoted by Xi Jinping” has been trundled out in this way. Such media campaigns, purchased in advance with money and “friendship,” are core to how China does diplomacy.

To offer a taste of how media and diplomatic calendars align, the interactive timeline below provides a selection of dates for international broadcasts of “Classics Quoted by Xi Jinping, ”and how these correspond to diplomatic engagements.

The same pattern plays out for other diplomatic dates, anniversaries and initiatives, and the pattern is made possible because China pursues media partnerships and exchanges with relentless determination. These media engagement activities — as they are documented at CMP’s Lingua Sinica global monitoring project — are only ever superficially about the business and practice of media. They are about framing diplomacy in the present, and about shoring up the relationships at the national and subnational levels that can allow China to push its key domestic and international talking points.

Consider that more than a year ago, on June 16, 2025, the China Media Group (CMG), the media mega-conglomerate directly under the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department that runs China Central Television and other state media, closed three media deals with separate media in Kazakhstan. Signed during the Second China-Central Asia Summit, the deals included cooperation with the state-run Khabar Agency on joint media projects and content exchange. Little surprise, then, that Khabar Agency was among the outlets airing “Classics Quoted by Xi Jinping” in recent days. At the same summit, the government-run Xinhua News Agency signed a pair of deals with national media from Kazakhstan — just two points among the many thousands of global deals through which the news agency impacts what people read daily about China.

Seen as isolated fragments of propaganda, or as isolated instances of borrowed broadcasting, cases like these can seem insignificant, even comical. The larger pattern, however, is an insistent claiming of the space that can impact in very real ways not just the material content, but also how journalists and media behave.

So next time you sit down with the People’s Daily, suppress your laughter, set aside your AI translator, and ready carefully — beyond the page.

The post Borrowed Boats for Bishkek appeared first on China Media Project.

Just below the masthead in the Monday edition of the paper, a bright red column title announced the solicitude of the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, and claimed substantive victories where it matters to everyone: “The General Secretary’s Concern and Its Echoes on the Ground” (总书记的关切，落地的回响).

But as is far more rarely seen, this header was displayed across a pair of vertical columns of nearly identical design, in near-perfect symmetry. On the left, a headline and profile declaring the benefits that China’s AI policies have had for all Chinese at home. On the right, a headline and profile making the case for the immense contributions China’s leadership says it is making, and plans to make, toward global development of AI — in ways that selflessly benefit the entire world, and especially the Global South.

The unusual column design, with its carefully conceived symmetry — a propaganda appropriation of the traditional parallel saying, or duilian (对联) — is meant no doubt to be a powerful parallelism announcing the Chinese Communist Party leadership’s twin convictions on artificial intelligence, for the country and for the world. The joint column is a claim to the internal and external legitimacy of China’s approach to AI, with the conviction that the technology will shape social, cultural, and political life in the 21st century. 

What concrete message does this parallelism convey?

Domestically, on the left, the first article, “Striving for Excellence and Goodness,” is about Xi Jinping’s conviction to “promote the healthy and orderly development of China’s artificial intelligence in a way that is beneficial, safe, and equitable.” You will not be placed in danger, it says, by this emerging and rapidly changing technology. Rather, we — the CCP leadership — will guarantee that development will be beneficial (有益), safe (安全) and equitable (公平) for all Chinese.

Internationally, on the right, the second article, “Bridging the Gap,” is about a cooperative global approach to AI development, ensuring that the advancements led by China as an AI powerhouse become human advancements shared by all, particularly those in the less developed Global South.

This point builds on Xi’s remarks at the opening ceremony of the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai back in July, which are printed right across the top of the article: “We must actively pursue international cooperation to help countries in the Global South strengthen their capacity-building efforts, bridge the digital and technological divide, promote sustainable development, and prevent the creation of new historical injustices in the field of artificial intelligence.”

In both cases, these enlightened approaches and attitudes — for that is how they are presented — arise from uniquely “Chinese wisdom” (中国智慧), and from a superior political system (the not-so-subtly implied message) that emphasizes national, coordinated leadership (发挥新型举国体制优势) over short-term, zero-sum calculations. 

This pitch carries political costs that remain largely hidden from view, not least within China’s emphasis on state power over the agency of citizens. The community backlash against AI data centers unfolding across the United States, in the UK, in Germany and elsewhere is not something we are likely to see in China, where AI futures are a promise from on high, not a conversation boiling up from below.

But the proposition in yesterday’s People’s Daily is clear enough. When it comes to AI development, the CCP is offering fairness, balance, order, and that most duplicitous of promised goods: harmony.

The post Hanging a Banner for Chinese AI appeared first on China Media Project.

It seemed that nothing could break the dream — until last week, when Fang Taozi began promoting NUT NUT Look brand contact lenses for an Anhui manufacturer. “I wore them all day long,” she declared in a promotional video, “and it was comfortable the whole time!” 

The problem: Fang Taozi may command a very real six figures, but she is an artificial influencer generated by state-of-the-art AI. She has no physical body. Nor does she have any real concept of comfort and discomfort. 

Should she be remarking on human experience at all?

As the promotional video had Fang Taozi trending on social media — ”How can she test these?” asked one user; “She doesn’t even have eyes!” — these were the questions raised by Beijing Business Today (北京商报), a business newspaper published under the state-run Beijing Daily Newspaper Group. In a commentary stating the obvious, that AI characters do not have bodily experiences and cannot wear, feel, or evaluate physical products, the paper questioned Fang’s authority and the credibility of the marketers. “Advertisements may be able to fabricate appearances, but they cannot fabricate the reality of consumption,” the paper wrote. 

There were legal blind spots as well, the outlet reported, drawing on the analysis of real-life lawyers. Virtual images created with artificial intelligence could not be legal persons, they said, and therefore could not qualify as “endorsers” (广告代言人) under Chinese law. Moreover, under Chinese regulations, the colored contact lenses sold by Anhui Huaxin Enterprise Management Co., Ltd., the makers of NUT NUT Look, would be considered Class III medical devices, which under advertising laws cannot be promoted by endorsers. 

Convincing Bruises 

The Fang Taozi discussion this month is sure to be the first of many that explore the implications of a world in which corporations and other institutions and entities can impersonate individuals in an AI-driven world.

‹

A History of China’s AI Influencers

From 2020 to 2026

›

2020

翎

Ling

Regarded as one of the first hyperreal virtual influencers. Built with an East Asian beauty ideal and a persona rooted in Peking opera and calligraphy, she appeared on the cover of Vogue China.

2020

阿喜

Ah Xi (Angie)

Purposefully imperfect, having noticeable skin texture, pimples, and slightly misaligned teeth. She gained a Douyin following thanks to her relatable attitude, which distinguished her from glossier virtual influencers.

2021

柳夜熙

Liu Yexi

A beauty influencer known as a demon-hunting makeup artist. Her debut video mixed cinematic special effects with beauty content and went viral within hours.

2021

AYAYI

AYAYI

She became famous after she posted a single photo on the social media platform Xiaohongshu (小红书). She later became online retailer shop Tmall’s digital brand ambassador and partnered with luxury brands.

2022

天妤

Tianyu

Tianyu is a Chinese virtual influencer with Tang-dynasty-style makeup and fashion. She launched in April 2022 and went viral fast, with 2 million followers within a month. She also built an overseas following on TikTok.

2026

方桃子

Fang Taozi

A fully AI-generated actress and influencer, starring in the short drama “The Girl Who Was Laid Off” (被裁掉的女孩). She crossed over into an independent lifestyle vlog persona.

2026

周以衡

Zhou Yiheng

The AI-generated male co-lead alongside Fang Taozi in the short drama “The Laid-off Girl.” After the drama’s popularity, he gained followers on his social media account, becoming an influencer too.

1 of 7

These days, the dreams can seem startlingly real. Amid the more than 220,000 AI dramas that aired in China during just the first half of this year — 90 percent of them failing to draw audiences — Fang Taozi stood apart because of how unpolished and authentic she appeared on her social media page. Her makeup altered between posts, leaving her convincingly bare-faced or smudged after what were supposedly long and tiring days. She had real apparent skin texture, including moles and tired circles under her eyes. Such fictional imperfections made her more convincing to her audience. 

So how does the very authentic looking Fang Taozi, trying to make it as a model in the big city, connect to the real world? 

Fang Taozi is the creation of a small team led by a writer-director identified by the pseudonym "Feifei Fei" (菲菲飞). She is managed as an AI talent by the show’s production company, Guangzhou-based My Film & TV Media Co. (广州我的影视文化传媒有限公司), founded in 2019 and majority owned (75 percent) by Fang Fei (方菲), the real-life former model behind the “Feifei Fei” pseudonym, who once modeled for fashion magazines like ViVi (昕薇). My Film, which also offers videography and business consulting services, is 25 percent owned by Guangzhou Thirteen Culture Communication Co., Ltd. (广州十三文化传播有限公司), which calls itself one of China’s “top content and e-commerce MCN platforms.” MCNs, or "multi-channel networks," are companies that manage, package and monetize a growing range of content creators such as livestreamers, influencers and video creators whose content is distributed on services like Douyin, the social e-commerce platform RedNote (小红书), the short-video platform Kuaishou (快手) and Weibo. 

The fictional Fang Taozi, the young woman trying to realize her dreams, will of course not see a single yuan of the revenue generated by successes of “The Girl Who Was Laid Off,” which was reportedly created with the help of LibTV, an AI video-making service that allows users to submit a story concept and receive an AI-generated film. Those earnings will fly directly into the accounts of My Film and its two shareholders, once the platforms have taken their share. There will be no need, as is standard with human influencers, to pay commissions out to talent agencies or managers. 

The problem with “Peach Fang” is one that is not unique to China, and that will continue to be a topic of discussion, debate — and probably regulation. AI influencers such as Lil Miquela from Brazil and Rozy from South Korea have also dominated social media and faced similar controversies. In each of these cases, audiences have enjoyed and consumed synthetic characters, but been jarred from their dreams when these AI personalities have pretended to real-life experiences that have a claim on our human materiality — like contact lenses they cannot have tested. 

Fang Taozi’s first controversy came to a close last weekend with the quiet removal of the NUT NUT Look video, reported by Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily (南方都市报) newspaper. The report, quoting lawyer Chen Zekun (陈泽坤), also sounded another warning about the real-life legal limits of virtuality. “The fact that a virtual person lacks legal personality,” he said, “does not mean that the team and the related entities behind it are exempt."

The post The Problem With Peach appeared first on China Media Project.

Produced by a consortium of investors with a reported budget of 500 million yuan (about 70 million dollars), and backed by the state-owned Changchun Film Studio, The Belief centers on the 1683 naval battle at Penghu, an island 50 kilometers from the main island of present-day Taiwan, a country official policy in Beijing insists has been “an inalienable part of Chinese territory since ancient times.” The setting is the outset of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), as Qing forces seek to defeat remnants of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) holding out in Taiwan.

The allegorical connection to present-day tensions, which have resulted in persistent military exercises in the strait and containment of Taiwan internationally, is so plain it scarcely needs mentioning. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regards the island as unresolved business from a civil war fought in the 1940s with the Kuomintang, now one of several political parties in a democratic Taiwan.

The Belief has been heavily promoted by state media, including the CCP’s People’s Daily, since its first trailer dropped on October 25, 2025, the 80th anniversary of Taiwan’s “retrocession” from Japanese colonial rule at the end of World War II. An announcement on May 22 said it would be released on July 25. But the film, with its swashbuckling scenes of battles at sea, has so far not set sail — leading to speculation about what calculations China might be making. 

And this is reportedly not the first delay the film has faced. According to BBC Chinese, it was already pulled from a planned Lunar New Year release back in February — prior to the May reschedule giving it the summer release date that passed on Saturday.

Media outside China have noted over the past week that the film’s official Weibo account has not been updated since June, and that the film remains unavailable on China’s domestic movie-ticketing website.

The film has stimulated heated discussion in the media in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and beyond. The Taipei Times noted in an editorial that the film’s tagline, “the unification of Taiwan is an unstoppable trend,” was lifted straight from a speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping. Storm Media quoted Liu Hsing-jen (劉性仁), an associate professor at Chinese Culture University’s Institute for National Development and Cross-Strait Studies, warning that the film’s marketing — casting a historical civil war as a clash of “us or them” — could send the international community the wrong signal that China was preparing for war, undercutting Beijing’s actual strategy of favoring “peaceful unification” while applying gray-zone pressure.

Taiwan outlets ETtoday and Newtalk both cited Fan Shih-ping (范世平), a professor of East Asian studies at National Taiwan Normal University, as saying the film has likely courted controversy on several fronts. First, it risks being read by audiences as an implicit rebuke of China’s leadership for not acting on its strong rhetoric about the “reunification” of Taiwan, in contrast to the conquering Shi Lang. 

Further, it glosses over an inconvenient historical fact, according to Newtalk’s account of Fan’s analysis. Shi Lang’s attack on Taiwan was essentially a military conquest, not something the Taiwanese people actively welcomed, said the professor. If history is romanticized this way, he argued, the international community may more readily conclude that a Chinese military invasion of Taiwan would likewise constitute an act of aggression — seriously damaging Beijing’s international image.

Perhaps adding to the trouble, Shi Lang, the film’s protagonist, is a historically fraught choice of hero. 

Media in Taiwan have generally referred to The Belief as a “force-unification blockbuster” (武統大片), giving the invasion scenario it depicts exactly that sense of unwantedness. “And that’s not really unfair,” Hong Kong’s HK01 noted in a related report.

Perhaps adding to the trouble, Shi Lang, the film’s protagonist, is a historically fraught choice of hero. He originally served Zheng Chenggong (鄭成功), the Ming loyalist commander, before defecting to the Qing and leading the campaign to crush Zheng’s successors. This betrayal, as Newtalk and others have reported, has made him the target of online accusations that he was in fact a “Han traitor” (漢奸).

Understandably, the film has also sparked lively debate online among so-called “Han nationalists,” also known as Huang Han (皇漢). These nationalists subscribe to a narrative called the “1644 historic perspective” (1644史觀), whose intellectual roots trace back to the Republic of China era (1912-1949), when some scholars attributed China’s modern-day weakness and humiliation entirely to Qing rule, casting the Manchus, the ethnic group that founded the dynasty, as colonizers. A related trend of “Ming fans” (明粉) emerged in China about twenty years ago, driven by the runaway popularity of a bestselling history book Those Things in Ming Dynasty (明朝那些事兒), which told the stories of Ming-era figures in an accessible, humorous style. The book was originally published in an online forum. 

The current controversy, however, has more recent origins. According to BBC Chinese, it emerged in China last year with a claim by a Chinese video blogger that the classical novel Dream of the Red Chamber was secretly a coded work of anti-Qing, pro-Ming loyalism. The perspective is sharply at odds with the ethos of The Belief, a state-backed “main melody” (主旋律) film in which the Qing invaders are cast as heroes.

While it is unclear exactly why The Belief has been shelved, the contested status of the Qing conquerors valorized in the film could be at least part of the reason. Chinese authorities have been wary of the impact of the “1644 historic perspective,” which drew a harsh official rebuttal on December 17, 2025, when Zhejiang province’s provincial propaganda office published a commentary using the phrase and warning against politicizing history, saying some social media accounts had misled the public by “cherry-picking fragmented historical materials” (截取碎片化史料).

One core aspect of China’s understanding and insistence over its “sovereignty” over Taiwan has been the fact that the island was annexed by the Qing dynasty in 1683, after which the Qing court began establishing administrative institutions there. This expansion of administrative bodies (扩增行政机构) is also perhaps the most concrete claim to historical sovereignty in The Taiwan Question and China’s Reunification in the New Era, the white paper China’s government issued in the wake of a visit to Taiwan by then-Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi in August 2022.

Amid unwanted chatter about the significance of 1644, the film’s positioning of Qing conquerors as heroes of national unity has been problematized by a countervailing narrative casting those same conquerors as illegitimate outsiders. The suspended state of The Belief likely has something to do with these contradictions — which China’s leaders cannot afford to amplify through entertainment. That could spell trouble for a film that invested its box office hopes in stirring up patriotic sentiment over Taiwan.

The post Taiwan Conquest Film Shelved appeared first on China Media Project.

In a recent piece for Qiushi (求是), the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship theoretical journal, China Daily president and editor-in-chief Qu Yingpu (曲莹璞) writes that artificial intelligence is shifting from a tool that helps state media better parse and understand global audiences to one that can directly do the work of reaching those audiences. Qu describes this as AI evolving from a “cognitive tool” (认知工具) to an “action tool” (行动工具).

What does that “action tool” role look like in practice? China Daily‘s 2025 social responsibility report provides one example.

In November 2025, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told the National Diet, the country’s legislature, that Japan would face an “existential crisis” if China attacked Taiwan, triggering a diplomatic feud between the two countries. In response, China Daily‘s in-house AI Inspiration Studio (AI灵感工作室) produced a rapid-response commentary video reacting to Japan’s defense buildup, which Chinese state media have in recent months framed as a revival of “neo-militarism” (新型军国主义). The video, titled “The Ghost of Militarism Will Only Lure Japan Into the Abyss” (军国主义幽灵只会把日本诱入深渊), combined political cartoon animation with AI-generated imagery, a format the report calls “current-affairs cartoon plus AI creativity” (时政漫画+AI创意). The report claims the video reached more than seventy million views.

The AI studio’s objective, it appears, is to create quick turnaround rapid responses to breaking global flashpoints and discussions. That responsiveness is what Qu means when he talks about “action tools.” And this approach has been evident in other cases this year.

On January 23, 2026, the White House posted an AI-generated image of Trump walking alongside a penguin in Greenland, captioned “Embrace the Penguin,” reigniting the dispute over Trump’s bid to acquire the Danish territory (where there are no penguins). China Daily responded the same day with an AI-generated video called “I Don’t Care” and featuring an animated Uncle Sam, grinning and cackling, set to a song declaring “I don’t care what you say!” The video goes beyond Greenland, invoking other Trump-era grievances including global tariffs and threats against Iran.

Qu’s essay frames this shift in AI application within three pillars of institutional overhaul. The first pillar, “deep integration” (深度融合), calls for merging China Daily‘s newspaper, website, and social media operations into a single production system, following the general pattern of media transition pushed across China’s state-run media under Xi Jinping. “Integration,” or “convergence,” has been a buzzword in China’s state media system since around 2014, and this decade-long push toward digital transformation has more recently become part of a national strategy to leverage provinces and cities in service of external propaganda, what CMP has termed “Centralization+.”

The second pillar, “AI-driven operations” (数智驱动), is about applying AI directly across this digital ecosystem. Qu mentions specific new initiatives and experiments, including an AI-generated persona named Yuanxi (元曦), which he calls a “digital employee” (数字员工), along with AI agents (智能体), digital museums (数字博物馆), and virtual exhibition halls (云展厅). All of these aim explicitly, he says, to reach broader and more diverse global audiences.

China Daily has already moved on the AI-agent front specifically, contracting Tencent Cloud in 2024 to build what the companies call a “communication agent” (传播智能体) system for automating news production and content review. Other central state media have pursued similar tools under their own branding. Xinhua News Agency launched an AI current-affairs agent called “Xinhua Yudian” (新华语典), less than two weeks ago.

The third pillar, “ecosystem operation” (生态运营), is about building partnerships with government ministries, think tanks, and universities abroad. China Daily has already built ties in this mold. It leads the South and Southeast Asian Media Network, a state-backed media coalition launched in January 2024 in collaboration with a provincial-level international communication center, or ICC, in Yunnan. According to state media, that network has drawn more than ninety overseas and domestic media organizations pledging to cooperate on content-sharing and resource pooling.

This network, one among many, is an example of how state media like China Daily work at the leadership’s direction to build broader, global networks of cooperation, networks that can then be used to distribute the products of the “action tool” approach Qu describes. This key strategy of ecosystem creation and operation globally is being applied across China’s vast and growing external propaganda infrastructure. In an analysis last month, CMP’s Lingua Sinica looked at how the ICC in Chongqing was prioritizing the building of “friends” networks internationally, including with major influencers, in its hiring of talent.

AI-Enabled Rapid Response

Qu’s piece in Qiushi makes clear that what AI is now making possible is the rapid production of video and other content in response to international news stories, with the potential to cater and cadence media products so that they can have maximum impact. Even with the power of AI, however, it is worth pausing to understand how difficult successful messaging can be — particularly as it emerges from rigid political and media cultures like that in China.

In December last year, AI enabled the rapid production by the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command of a dramatic animated propaganda video of shark-like torpedoes and bee-like micro-drones, and android soldiers, being mobilized to “thwart Taiwanese indepedence.” The video was shared across the full array of state media social accounts overseas, like the Global Times and CCTV on Facebook, and CGTN on YouTube. But the combined “likes” for the video on all three of these accounts, which have a combined 133 million followers and subscribers, according to account statistics, was less than 20,000. A common remark in the comment section on YouTube was to dismiss the video as “AI slop.” “My god, Chinese propaganda is made by old men who don’t have a clue,” read another comment.

AI may enable greater responsiveness and “action.” But can the political culture respond with equal deftness of message?

Qu concludes his Qiushi piece by noting that this expanded role for AI comes with the usual conditions. New technologies, he writes, may only be deployed once proven “safe, reliable, and controllable” (安全、可靠、可控). They can and must be used, he says, but only “on the basis of maintaining a strict hold on the political direction” (严把政治方向).

And there, once again, is the rub that has always exerted downward pressure on creativity in China’s media space. Everyone seizing their “action tools” in China Daily‘s AI Inspiration Studio will be asking themselves: Is this OK?

The post The Propaganda Promise of AI appeared first on China Media Project.

For nearly 22 hours, in an odd departure from the general practice of releasing an official news release, or tonggao (通稿), to set out the basic facts and direct subsequent media coverage, not a single report appeared from the country’s central state media. From the government’s Xinhua News Agency, the standard “authoritative” source of such reports — nothing. From China Central Television, the state broadcast network — nothing.

It was only late on Saturday that the first whisper of news came through official channels about this astonishing story unfolding just miles from the seat of power at Zhongnanhai. But even this notice was peripheral, a situation bulletin, or tongbao (通报), issued through an official social media account of Beijing’s Chaoyang District, where the CITIC Tower is located:

“Beijing Chaoyang” (北京朝阳) is the official information release platform of the local government in Chaoyang District, which covers much of the most vibrant central urban area in the capital, and is home to most of the city’s foreign embassies. But this “situation bulletin,” which in fact failed even to identify the iconic CITIC Tower, was not taken up — as a tonggao from Xinhua generally would be — by other state-run media and other websites across the country.

A search in the Wisers media database returns more than 1,400 Chinese-language results since Friday for the keywords “small plane” (小飞机) and “CITIC Tower” (中信大廈), including news media reports and social media posts. Just 10 of those recorded in the database appear on platforms inside China — WeChat, Zhihu and Weibo. And all of these posts have now been deleted from the platforms where they originally appeared.

An additional search for the key phrase “light sport aircraft” (轻型运动航空器), which appears as the description in the situation bulletin, returns again just 10 results, on platforms including Toutiao and Netease, a major online news portal, as well as Sputnik.cn, the Chinese-language portal of the Russian government-run Sputnik News. Versions of the story at Netease like this one, and at Toutiao like this one, were deleted over the weekend. Oddly, and probably owing to the “partnership without limits” between China and Russia, the Sputnik.cn version remains live. There are no results for major news outlets.

Our Wisers search confirms what we observed on Friday and through the weekend when searching for news coverage — any news coverage — of the collision in Beijing. There has been a total, or near total, information blackout.

Without historical context, we might imagine that such a vacuum is normal for a Chinese Communist Party leadership obsessed with the control of information and public opinion. Is this not simply how news censors behave in an authoritarian system?

In fact, far from being typical practice, the silence we are witnessing over the past week is the result of a thorough dismantling under Xi Jinping of a consensus on information policy that emerged in China’s leadership nearly two decades ago — namely, that complete information suppression is untenable owing to its potentially calamitous knock-on effects.

Balancing Control with Information Release

In the late 2000s — when Xi Jinping was a junior member of the top leadership — one of the clearest expressions of this consensus shift was the country’s Emergency Response Law (突发事件应对法), which took effect in November 2007. Understanding that local-level government and Party officials had a clear vested interest in keeping under wraps incidents that might impact their political performance, the law required government bodies handling “sudden-breaking incidents,” or tufa shijian (突发事件), to release information on its development and response in a “unified, accurate, and timely” manner.

The clearest impetus for the new law was the 2003 SARS epidemic, when cover-ups in Guangdong and Beijing let the virus spread for months before central authorities admitted its scale. The suppression was so damaging to China’s international standing that it was compared at the time to the Soviet Union’s handling of the April 1986 Chernobyl disaster, when a reactor at Ukraine’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded.

Without historical context, we might imagine that such a vacuum is normal for a Chinese Communist Party leadership obsessed with the control of information and public opinion. Is this not simply how news censors behave in an authoritarian system?

But another political shift, in 2008, further defined this evolving balance between control and information release. In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic Sichuan earthquake on May 12 of that year, Chinese media, knowing that the demand for information would be unstoppable, had defied an initial central-level ban on reporting from the scene. It was a full week before press control authorities could reassert control over the narrative, and in the process they came to understand how essential it was that the public have access to at least basic information to ensure that information vacuums were not filled with rumors and hysteria.

The next month, in his first official speech on media policy, Hu Jintao offered a compromise of sorts. He urged authorities to “release authoritative information at the earliest moment” (第一时间发布权威信息), introducing a policy under which central media such as Xinhua would move quickly to report breaking stories, seizing the initiative in setting the public agenda rather than relying on suppression alone. CMP dubbed this policy at the time Control 2.0.

The idea that suppressed information could itself become dangerous even entered the political vocabulary of the moment in 2008. That spring, landslides had dammed rivers across the quake zone, forming unstable “barrier lakes,” or yansaihu (堰塞湖), which were a concern because their collapse might at any moment send floodwaters coursing through areas already devastated by the quake. During a training session in the weeks after the quake, then-Guangdong party secretary Wang Yang (汪洋) — who nearly a decade later would become the fourth-ranking member of the Party’s elite Politburo Standing Committee — warned cadres against building “language barrier lakes,” or yansaihu (言塞湖). Wang suggested that blocking the flow of public opinion resulted in the same kind of catastrophic pressure as a dammed river. The phrase was picked up widely in official media, including in a commentary in a Wuhan-based official CCP newspaper arguing that stemming such “language barrier lakes” required more scrutiny, not less, of local governance failures.

By the time Xi Jinping came to power in late 2012, there was already an emerging consensus about the need to ensure a definite level of information release on sudden-breaking incidents in order to avoid information vacuums that had the potential to destabilize — and in order to check local corruption and malfeasance.

Turning Back the Clock

What we are witnessing in the CITIC Tower case is the unfortunate result of more than a decade of reassertion of CCP control over the media, and the parallel rise of ever more effective and all-encompassing cyber controls.

As already indicated, there has been a complete lack of domestic media coverage, including from central state media, which ordinarily might be employed to set the agenda. This is not just a story about powerful restraints under Xi Jinping since 2013 on the capacity of Chinese media to pursue real reporting, as they did insistently on so many breaking news stories through the 2000s. It is also a story about how China’s leadership under Xi has turned back the clock on the Hu-era policy of strategic information release over outright suppression as a means of information control.

How can the leadership feel so self-assured in suppressing information outright without destabilizing information vacuums — or “language barrier lakes” — of the kind that spawned the SARS crisis? This likely has to do with another key aspect of this story, the apparent effectiveness of cyber controls.

For a similar case of effective social media blackout, we can look back to the Changfeng Hospital fire in April 2023, in which 29 people died when a fire broke out in a private hospital in Beijing’s Fengtai District. Despite the fact that the fire unfolded in the early afternoon in a populated urban district, it went unreported for almost eight hours. A follow-up report from Initium Media, translated by CMP, noted the astonishment of local reporters that such a serious sudden-breaking story had been so effectively suppressed, many not learning of it until an evening bulletin was released by Beijing Daily, the city’s official CCP outlet. There had of course been eyewitness video and accounts on social media, but these had been scrubbed within minutes of being posted, stopping wider information sharing in its tracks.

There has been a complete lack of domestic media coverage, including from central state media, which ordinarily might be employed to set the agenda.

Tellingly, a brief wave of media coverage followed the release of the Beijing Daily bulletin, which came alongside a press conference on the incident at which the deputy head of Beijing’s health department addressed the fire directly. The release, far more detailed than the “Beijing Chaoyang” situation bulletin on Saturday, informed follow-up reports by such outlets as China Newsweekly. And even when more robust controls on media coverage came down 24 hours later, the bulletin remained visible nationwide, re-published in media across the country, including at the news portal Netease.

The third aspect worthy of note in the CITIC Tower story is the complete reversion to local responsibility for news and information release, a growing trend in the Xi era that goes directly against the consensus emerging in the late 2000s — that rapid release is necessary, and that central state media should play a primary role.

We can see this local dynamic quite plainly in the latest whiff of information we have, released only yesterday, a full six days after the plane collided into the CITIC Tower.

Released at 4:03 PM on Thursday, the second notice, again a “situation bulletin,” is once again from the social media account “Beijing Chaoyang.” This is the same local government information account for the district where the incident occurred. To reiterate the key point above, this information release is happening against the backdrop of a total vacuum at the top of China’s information hierarchy — nothing still from Xinhua, and nothing from other central-level media outlets.

The new bulletin supplies some additional details about last Friday’s incident, including the make and model of the plane — an Aquila SA60L, a single-engine, two-seat propeller light aircraft, with registration number B-12PP — and the age and surname of the pilot. On the pilot’s details, the bulletin seems eager to tie this story off with a personal explanation for what precipitated the dramatic events nearly a week ago. The pilot, a 66-year-old man surnamed Liu, was suffering from psychological problems, including chronic insomnia and anxiety. The bulletin even cites diary entries making repeated references to “ending his life.”

The bulletin’s last line amounts to a declaration that the story is over — nothing more to see here. “A comprehensive investigation determined that this was an incident endangering public safety caused by personal reasons,” it reads.

Bulletin? What Bulletin?

But the oddest thing of all, one week on from this bizarre incident unfolding in the heart of Beijing’s central business district, in full view of thousands, is how the second situation bulletin has been instantly secreted from the Chinese public. It appears nowhere on the websites, social media accounts, or news apps of major media outlets, and its circulation is again being curtailed across social media more broadly

Shortly after the bulletin appeared yesterday, some news media did attempt coverage. A news search turns up the link to a post relaying the news of the situation bulletin’s release that comes from Nanfang Daily (南方日报), the official CCP outlet in China’s southern Guangdong province. Click on the post and it is already gone, leaving a 404 message in its wake. Yangcheng Evening News, a commercial news outlet operated under the city of Guangzhou, also apparently attempted to post the situation bulletin, but the content is no longer available.

News of the bulletin in Chinese is everywhere today — but struggling to find any foothold in the headlines inside China. It appears across Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, in outlets like Ming Pao and Hong Kong Economic Times, in the Taiwan-based Yahoo! News, and nearly everywhere on Facebook and Threads, which are not accessible inside China.

There is one live re-post as of noon today on the fringe website Red Song Online (红歌会网), and there are scores of database mentions on Wisers for social media platforms like Weibo, where users sharing the situation bulletin seem to be doing so in their isolated cubicles, without comment or engagement by others. One Beijing-based user posted on Weibo just before noon, “Geez, flying a plane to off oneself?” This was a re-post with comment of a post from the official Weibo account of Beijing Daily, the aforementioned official CCP-run outlet in the capital, that reported the second “Beijing Chaoyang” bulletin verbatim. The Beijing Daily post seems to be driving what little mention the story has inside China. Tellingly, though, it had only just over 800 comments by early afternoon today — and reposts of it, like the one above, appear to have comments disabled entirely.

The strategy, it seems, is to leave people in social news isolation, with only the most limited facts required to declare “The End” on this story one full week after it unfolded.

To recap, the absence of the story in mainstream news outlets, outside the social account of Beijing Daily, is astounding. An online news search for Chinese outlets this afternoon turns up a solitary link for the news portal Sohu.com. A sliver of light, perhaps? Has a portal site found its way through the thicket of controls? But no, that online post too has been deleted, yielding the message: “Yikes! We can’t find the page you are looking for.”

Yikes, indeed. Or aiya! (哎呀) as the deletion notice is rendered in Chinese.

Aiya! The word offers perhaps the most cogent concluding remark on the significance and shock value of this instance of media and information control on a globally visible story unfolding at the very center of the capital city of the world’s second-largest economy. China has become an information dead zone, where journalists cannot report, where only county, district and city-level officials have the power to determine the facts and speak through their private digital megaphones — and where, incredibly, even those megaphones often cannot be heard by a public whose ears can be plugged at will.

Aiya! What does this information dead zone at the center of a global power mean for the rest of the world?

The post After Impact appeared first on China Media Project.

The acquisitions follow an April announcement by the Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO), the official Chinese body overseeing cross-strait policy, of ten cross-strait exchange measures permitting Taiwanese dramas on Chinese satellite channels, provided they are “correctly guided,” a phrase that echoes the Chinese Communist Party’s policy ofpublic opinion guidance demanding media serve key political objectives. 

Southeast TV is a satellite channel of the Fujian Media Group, a broadcast conglomerate directly under the provincial government in Fujian that is a key part of the vast communication array China directs at Taiwan — much of it propaganda and cognitive warfare designed to destabilize the country’s open and democratic society. 

The April TAO announcement came amid what China’s leadership has hoped could be warming relations driven by a visit to China by Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), chair of Taiwan’s main opposition Kuomintang (國民黨), or KMT. Scripted or not, entertainment television became a core theme of cross-strait messaging during that visit. In a radio interview shortly after her return to Taiwan, Cheng recalled how young women in the KMT delegation had joked that cross-strait relations could be solved simply by sending actor Zhang Linghe (張凌赫), the male lead of the hit costume drama Pursuit of Jade (逐玉), to Taiwan. 

In fact, Cheng at first mispronounced Zhang Linghe’s name as “Zhang Lingyi” before being corrected by the host. Quickly pivoting, the KMT chairwoman laughed and said: “Send Zhang Linghe to Taiwan and that will do!” The quip was quickly amplified by Chinese state media.

In May, the Taiwan Affairs Office said it “delighted in seeing” news that the Taipei Artist Agency Association (台北演藝經紀文化交流協會) had called for mainland artists including Zhang Linghe to visit Taiwan. The office was referring to remarks made at a China-hosted cultural exchange event, and that had been reported exclusively in Chinese state media.

Posts on Chinese official social media accounts pointed to favorable comments on this news story as reported on the program “Strait Talk” (兩岸做伙講) as evidence of popular support in Taiwan for a visit by Zhang. In fact, the “Strait Talk” program is run by China Daily, the Chinese government’s English-language external propaganda outlet.

On June 13 at the 18th Straits Forum, an annual event hosted by the Chinese government to promote cross-strait exchanges, Zhang Linghe delivered a surprise speech calling for deeper cross-strait cultural exchanges. This was the first time ever that a Chinese actor was invited to speak at the forum’s main session. 

The pattern of Zhang Linghe diplomacy extends beyond Taiwan. In the Philippines, where relations with China have grown deeply strained over the past year over South China Sea territorial disputes, the Chinese ambassador extended a personal invitation  in June for Zhang to visit Manila after he said he had learned of the actor’s growing popularity among Filipino audiences. 

China’s drama diplomacy comes as military tensions have intensified in the strait. Last week, Taiwan launched five-day combat readiness drills, designed to test how quickly its armed forces can shift from peacetime to wartime footing. Earlier this month, Taiwan’s president also called for swift US approval of a major arms sale package.

The post Drama Diplomacy appeared first on China Media Project.

In 2025, as restrictions on public expression tightened and controls expanded, economic conditions deteriorated further. The Central Propaganda Department and the Cyberspace Administration of China moved to further limit how news media, privately operated “self-media” accounts on social media platforms like WeChat, and individual internet users could describe the country’s economic troubles. Platform operators, news organizations, and journalists have had to be increasingly cautious in handling economic topics deemed negative — including real estate issues, business conditions, and unemployment.

Because of safety concerns and the professional risks of speaking openly about censorship in China, the journalists interviewed by Tian Jian (田間) — Li Xi, Liu Yang, and Hu Yue — as well as the self-media practitioners identified here as S and K, are referred to in this article by pseudonyms, upon request and at the discretion of Tian Jian’s editors.

Li Xi, a financial journalist at a Beijing media outlet, told Tian Jian that beginning in the first half of last year, his publication introduced new rules governing coverage of “negative” economic conditions. These included a long list of topics — the property market slump, the collapse of local government revenues from land sales, declining household incomes, existential challenges facing businesses, corporate layoffs and unemployment, and the banning of coal-burning for rural household heating. All of these were marked as demanding “caution.” “Our editors have repeatedly told us to be careful with our pitches,” Li said, “and instead to ‘sing the praises of a bright future,’ and not spread bad news.”

“Writing about which stocks are underwater, about rising social security contributions, about farmers not being allowed to burn coal for heat — none of that is acceptable,” Li added. 

Stories on these topics, said Li Xi, have gradually come to be classified as “high-risk story pitches.” Even when they are not explicitly prohibited, they tend to be rejected at the pitch stage, and rarely do they ever find their way into real editorial discussions. “At our meetings, we don’t even bring up these kinds of negative pitches anymore,” he said.

In many rural areas, the impact of the economic downturn has been compounded by other restrictive policy measures that can be keenly felt. In parts of rural Hebei, for example, local residents have told reporters that environmental policies such as the “clean heating” (清潔取暖) push have required households to stop burning coal for heat. The mandated switch to natural gas or electricity has come just as heating costs have risen significantly. Some families have struggled as a result to stay warm through the winter. They have reduced their gas use, and in some cases simply endured the cold. 

In many rural areas, the impact of the economic downturn has been compounded by other restrictive policy measures that can be keenly felt. 

Those interviewed for this article said that the coal-burning practices on which they had long depended were abruptly halted, and this change came with limited subsidies. Costs have been an added strain on rural incomes. 

Such issues are not reported in China’s state-controlled media, and related discussion can only happen privately among villagers, or in a scattered fashion on social media platforms. 

On January 9 this year, the Chinese agricultural and food media outlet Foodthink (食通社) published a commentary on its WeChat public account about the hardships caused by the coal burning bans. But the post was quickly deleted. 

Liu Yang, a veteran economic reporter who has worked at several metropolitan newspapers, told Tian Jian that much economic journalism in China is still weighed against political standards — assessing whether it serves political imperatives. And constraints have tightened notably of late, he said. 

“In the past, newsrooms would still cover stalled construction projects, reporting from the ground on deteriorating business conditions and homeowners asserting their rights,” Liu told Tian Jian. “But over the past two years, and especially in the past year, that kind of pitch has dropped off sharply. Both editors and reporters are restraining themselves.”

“It’s not that no one knows about the problems — everyone knows perfectly well that this kind of story can’t make it through the editorial process,” Liu said. 

At one story meeting, he recalled, he proposed coverage of a second-tier city where a large number of new apartments were sitting unsold and being offered at half price. His editor did not reject the idea outright, but quickly redirected the conversation, asking whether the piece could instead take the angle of “policy support” or “expectations of a market recovery.” 

“At that moment you understand clearly,” he said. “The pitch as you’ve presented the story is already unsuitable.”

Soft Words for a Hard Environment

The constraints are especially pronounced in coverage of China’s real estate sector. Three journalists who have long covered the property beat noted that for some time now reporting has declined substantially on such issues as funding shortfalls among property developers, delayed project handovers, construction stoppages, and homeowners asserting their rights. And story pitches that would once have seemed routine — such as developer debt defaults, idle construction sites, and collective homeowner complaints — have become nearly impossible to shepherd through the approval process.

Even where construction stoppages and delayed handovers are ongoing, such situations are harder to present as standalone news stories, Liu Yang said. Instead, they must be downplayed, or glossed briefly as background. “Every day we receive dozens of messages from homeowners, wage-seekers, and rights advocates, but most of the time we have no choice but to let these story leads go,” he said. “We used to be able to visit construction sites and track down homeowners. Now, a lot of the time, you know from the outset that this approach simply won’t work.”

Moving away from these stories, most Chinese newsrooms now gravitate toward angles emphasizing corporate financing progress, bank credit support, and local government policies to stabilize the property market — topics centering on the “restoration of market confidence” (市場信心修復). During an online gathering with journalists in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu province, Tian Jian spoke with at least three reporters who said that when covering real estate, their stories more readily took shape around developers securing new loans, rolling over debt, or benefiting from local government support policies. The emphasis, they said, has shifted gradually from exposing real-world risks to stressing policy stability and financing arrangements — and to the language of expectation management: “improvement” (改善), “recovery” (回暖), and “boosting confidence” (提振信心).

Hu Yue, a veteran editor at Dahe Daily in Henan province, said that even in coverage of a single company, editorial departments tend to play up positive signals — recovered financing channels, say, or rebounding sales figures — while glossing over or omitting entirely that same company’s debt pressures and stalled construction projects. “Very often, when reporters write real estate news, they can only come at it from angles like government support or an improving environment, things like an active secondhand housing market, or recovering homeowner confidence,” he told Tian Jian. “Content like that doesn’t really attract attention, but it’s relatively safe.”

Xiao Yao, a graduate of the journalism program at Shanghai’s Fudan University who has worked for years in Chinese financial media, told Tian Jian that she initially found many things worth writing about when she started covering the economics beat. In recent years, however, the range of possible stories has narrowed considerably. “The kinds of stories that are accepted now tend to focus on language emphasizing that developers are ‘flush with funds,’ or ‘bank support is increasing,’ or ‘the policy floor is showing results,'” she said. “Even when your on-the-ground reporting shows that sales are struggling, you can’t simply write a piece about a downward trend.”

“Sometimes you don’t even need to be explicitly told. You just know which words you can’t use.”

After a time, she added, such decisions become second nature. “Sometimes you don’t even need to be explicitly told. You just know which words you can’t use — words like ‘slump,’ ‘collapse,’ or ‘freefall.’ Editors will gravitate toward vague, softened language instead.”

Wang Yi, a retired lecturer in the journalism department at Fudan University, told Tian Jian that economic journalism’s loss of voice (失語) in China does not stem from journalists’ lack of ability or a decline in professional standards. Rather, it is the result of an institutional environment shaped over many years. In the current climate, where the space for public expression continues to narrow, economic news tends to be viewed as a sensitive domain with potential social implications, said Wang. How it is presented is inevitably constrained by the imperative of political stability.

“When words like ‘risk,’ ‘downturn,’ and ‘contradiction’ are persistently carved out of the language, journalism naturally drifts toward vagueness and abstraction,” said Wang. “My personal sense is that the 1990s were actually a period of relative openness in journalism.”

Wang Yi said the repeated emphasis on “confidence,” “expectations,” and “stability” in the practice of journalism has fundamentally displaced the basic function of economic reporting — from reflecting real problems to serving macro-narratives and policy objectives. “This doesn’t mean the problems don’t exist,” he said. “It means they have been transformed into a background presence that doesn’t need to be discussed openly. In the long run, this approach undermines the public’s ability to understand through journalism how the economy actually functions.”

The No-Go Space of Land Revenue

Another direct consequence of the decline in China’s property market has been a sustained drop in local government revenue from land sales. But this topic, too, has rarely made it into published coverage. Pitches touching on local fiscal strain, shrinking land transaction volumes, and mounting financing pressures on local governments tend to be flagged as “high risk” from the outset, and rarely survive editorial discussion.

Speaking about recent shifts in official messaging, a retired official surnamed Zhou, formerly of the Propaganda Office of the Guizhou Provincial Communist Party Committee, told Tian Jian that the land-revenue question has always been treated as acutely sensitive at the local level. “A decline in land-sale revenues directly touches on local fiscal conditions, debt, and the functioning of government. Once problems like this are discussed openly, people very quickly start drawing connections,” he said. “The propaganda authorities generally don’t encourage the media to explore the topic in depth. The preference is for stabilizing expectations and stabilizing confidence.”

The official recalled that even in internal discussions in the past, officials were expected to couch such matters in the most technical and ambiguous terms possible, to avoid any reading that local finances faced systemic risk.

He also noted that official language in recent years has leaned increasingly on “code words” (暗語) to soften the tone — and so calm the public mood. “Unemployment, for instance, gets called ‘flexible employment’ (靈活就業). Layoffs become ‘personnel optimization’ (人員優化). Business difficulties are glossed as ‘phase-specific pressures’ (階段性壓力). Fiscal strain is rendered as ‘pressure on the revenue-expenditure balance’ (收支平衡承壓) or ‘structural adjustment’ (結構性調整).” Such formulations, he said, have become standard in internal communications. “The purpose is not to deny the problem, but to avoid triggering panic.”

The same silence pervades coverage at the corporate level. Business closures, layoffs, and operational hardship have become the norm across many industries, yet these tend to be presented in coverage as “isolated cases,” making it difficult to see the broader story.  Stories about clusters of business shutdowns or widening employment pressures rarely receive sustained treatment in the state-run media and their commercial counterparts. To some extent, self-media have tried to step into the gap left by official news outlets, but they face strict constraints.

Xiao Qiao, a self-media operator based in Nanjing, told Tian Jian that he once tried to document a wave of closures among small and medium-sized enterprises in Suzhou and Kunshan, publishing his interviews as short videos. “A lot of small and medium-sized enterprises in Kunshan have shut down. Foreign and Taiwanese capital are pulling out, and a lot of people who’ve lost their jobs can’t find new work,” he said. “I put my interviews online, and within half an hour they had several hundred views. Then they were quickly blocked and taken down.”

This was no isolated case, Xiao Qiao added. “Several of my online friends also went out to film business closures and interview laid-off workers, and their content basically couldn’t get through review.” Nothing like this had happened before, he said — and it left him feeling helpless.

On employment and income, the silence takes the form of a shift in framing. Unemployment, pay cuts, and the struggle to find work are not entirely off-limits — but coverage tends to confine them to individual experience, where they cannot cohere into any larger story about the system itself.

Yu Ping, an editor at a digital media outlet, told Tian Jian that employment topics are more easily packaged as stories of “personal perseverance” (個人奮鬥) or “successful transitions” (轉型成功) than as discussions of deeper changes in the labor market. “When something negative happens, we package it according to the requirements of the authorities,” he said. “You can write about how one person found work again. What you can’t write about is why finding work has gotten harder for everyone.”

On platforms like Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, and WeChat, posts about quiet shopping streets, falling consumer spending, or mounting layoffs are more likely to be throttled or blocked outright, and rarely circulate for long.

S, a self-media operator who has long run a lifestyle-oriented account, told Tian Jian that he had published several videos about vacant storefronts and diminishing foot traffic, only to see his viewership drop sharply. “Later on I learned that as soon as a video is found to contain words like ‘closure’ or ‘shutting down,’ the [online censorship] system suppresses it and traffic [to your account] is kept extremely low,” he said.

K, a user on Xiaohongshu who documented her search for a new job after she was let go from her previous position, said that posts sharing her experience had been subject to noticeably longer review times or clearly limited distribution. “You gradually learn to rephrase things,” she said, “or you just stop writing altogether.”

Sentiment Management

Sun Shu, a Beijing-based scholar who researches digitalization, told Tian Jian that there is no single, clearly defined red line in the censorship of economic-downturn coverage. In practice, however, platforms tend to suppress content that risks producing “emotional clustering” (情緒聚集). “Stories of individual hardship are generally not a problem,” he said, “but when similar content appears in concentrated form, the system tends to read it as a risk.” In platform algorithms, keywords, interaction density, and emotional sentiment jointly determine how visible a piece of content becomes.

“What platforms worry about more is any judgment about the overall trend (趨勢判斷),” Sun said. “Once content is read as describing a general downturn, it can be throttled.” Under this mechanism, Sun said, economic reality is never denied outright. Instead, it is taken apart and scattered, so that sustained, visible public discussion is never allowed to take shape.

In China today, economic questions are no longer topics open for meaningful discussion. Rather, they have become the very ground where institutional risk and the limits of journalistic expression meet. This loss of voice in the press on economic issues does not stem from any scarcity of facts, but from which facts are permitted to enter public view — and that space is still narrowing.

Tian Yu (田雨) is a Chinese-language journalist covering politics and social issues, and an independent researcher who has long followed China’s media environment, public governance, and changes in grassroots livelihoods. 

This article was translated from the original at Tian Jian (田間), a Chinese-language outlet under CMP about journalism and media development and professionalism.

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In the People’s Daily on Tuesday, this obsessively decorative approach to diplomacy was on garish display — and it was, you could say, entirely the point. Xi’s visit to Pyongyang, in fact, provides the perfect opportunity to revisit the mystifying mechanics of China’s Party-run media, and how they package and perform power.

It goes without saying that the People’s Daily, which the CCP unapologetically terms a “mouthpiece” (喉舌), does not report news of the Pyongyang meeting. What it does, through every choreographed image and carefully chose phrase, is frame the moment like a perfect picture of “friendship” (友谊).

This seemingly simple word, “friendship,” is in fact one of the core terms to parse in the midst of these proceedings. It appears no fewer than nine times in the title article under the masthead alone, and elsewhere on today’s front page 17 more times. The article we are told Xi penned for North Korean media, also published on the front page, is called “Writing a New Chapter in the Traditional Friendship Between China and North Korea.” The previous night’s festivities, we are told, closed with a soaring performance of an anthem called “The Korea-China Friendship: Green Across the Ages” (朝中友谊万古长青). The next day, spoiler alert, a visit to the China-DPRK Friendship Tower will be on the agenda.

When the BBC asked in its own headline on Monday whether Xi’s visit is about friendship or leverage, it was missing something rudimentary about how the CCP deploys the language and symbolism of friendship as leverage.

The basic reading of the visit’s significance in the foreign news media this week has been more or less accurate. This is about consolidating the bilateral relationship — the word “strengthening” is everywhere too — and sending Kim Jong-un a clear message about the terms of the relationship. Russia, the United States and Japan are certainly looming in the shadows. And because the People’s Daily is not a newspaper, not really, it’s important to focus primarily not on what it said textually, but on how it said, packaged and portrayed.

So let’s take a closer look at the surreality Tuesday (the word “decalcomania” is an apt choice) of China’s most important official “newspaper.”

Stop Reading, Start Observing

Immediately, beyond the red carpets, the red flags, the military pageantry, and the literal theatrics — all quite intentional visual repetitions of pomp and ceremony — we may note that every single one of the headlines on the front page leads with “Xi Jinping.”

This idiosyncratic touch, and it is crucial to remind ourselves just how bizarre it really is, would be allowed by no self-respecting newspaper editor anywhere in the world. In any normal press context, where one’s business is the news, such a treatment would be monstrous.

A single headline like the one to the right of the masthead on this page, in the space known in Chinese media language as the “newspaper eye” (报眼), would be more than sufficient. “Xi Jinping Arrives in Pyongyang.” So why is it not?

Apart from the facts of this bilateral engagement, the ritual incantation of Xi’s name in this Party mouthpiece is precisely the point. When it comes to political “news,” Xi Jinping is always the subject of the sentence. Even if China’s premier is presiding and speaking at an event, as with Li Qiang (李强) on page two of yesterday’s edition about a constitutional oath ceremony for newly appointed department and agency officials, the piece is front-weighted with language about Xi and adhering to “Xi Jinping Thought.”

Xi Jinping’s name is the drumbeat that sustains the monotonous rhythm of the entire political system.

When we turn to the People’s Daily readout on the talks, we find an equally ritualistic presentation of what happened. The item comes directly below the masthead, marking its place of importance as a report — using that word cautiously — of the real import of the serious, high-level discussions.

As we read such official language, we must remain alert to its ideological packaging. In China’s political culture, as was the case in the political cultures of the Soviet Union and the former Soviet Bloc, language is always meta-language. Text, images and acts should be understood as what Vaclav Havel called, in his 1978 essay Power of the Powerless, “ritual communication within the system of power.” This is half the secret of properly reading any Party text, and Havel’s essay remains, as I only half-jokingly told an audience in Taipei last week, the most perceptive work on Chinese political discourse in the 21st century.

One rudimentary structural aspect of yesterday’s signature article, “Xi Jinping Holds Talks with Kim Jong Un” (习近平同金正恩举行会谈), is its hierarchy of “Xi Jinping pointed out” (习近平指出), “Xi Jinping stressed” (习近平强调), and “Kim Jong-un said” (金正恩表示), language that starts out each paragraph in succession (again, authoritarian rhythm). After a simple line about the fact that the two sides “held talks,” we have Xi Jinping holding forth and setting out, with authority, the basic terms of the relationship.

Xi “points out” from his position of authority that this visit will “strengthen the top-level design and strategic guidance of China-North Korea relations in the new era.” Our eyes may glaze over, but the basic meaning here is that China is in the driving seat, taking the lead in defining the relationship, which not at all incidentally is temporally situated also in Xi’s “New Era.”

The next paragraph follows with the tonally stronger “Xi Jinping stressed” (习近平强调), which signals weight and urgency. Here, Xi “stresses” three unchangeable principles in the relationship, which are the “traditional friendship,” the commitment to Kim’s leadership of “the North Korean socialist project,” and the commitment to preserving mutual interests and a “favorable strategic environment.”

As with all CCP official discourse, there is a lot to unpack in this notion of a “favorable strategic environment” (良好战略环境), the third aspect of what in recent days state media have termed, with the usual penchant for the neat packaging of formulas, the “Three Unchangings” (三个不会改变), or the “Three Will Not Changes.” As we parse official discourse in China, the formulas and framings, or tifa (提法), are like keys that unlock one another.

That may sound mysterious, but it need not be overly so.

The key approach to unlocking tifa like the “Three Unchangings” is to seek out complementary analysis and explication within the official discourse, such as in theoretical journals like Seeking Truth (求是). This is what I sometimes call “taking the side doors.” It is a time-consuming process — and, no, AI cannot do it for you — but the keys are all there. Fair warning: there are no magic eureka moments. You do not open chests and discover discursive treasure. You are not reading tea leaves. But you can see how the building blocks of this peculiar political discourse system, the language of power, fit together — and sometimes, how they might be shifting.

Not surprisingly, there are a number of side rooms this week in the state media dealing with the “Three Unchangings.” A related article in Guangdong’s official Nanfang Daily on Tuesday, republished by Seeking Truth, purported to “read” the significance of the phrase. There are limits to what it elucidates, but it does make clear that the “favorable strategic environment” mentioned in the readout above means opposing what the article calls “hegemonism and power politics,” a standard CCP formulation referring to the United States, and also “the revival of militarism” — a clear reference to Japan, which China has in recent months loudly accused of “neo-militarism.”

To a large extent, we can read this as an oblique reference to the strategic considerations that make the iron-clad “friendship” between China and North Korea so crucial from China’s perspective. Another reading published by Xinhua today, and (over-)promising a “blueprint,” tells us that “Xi Jinping emphasized China’s consistent commitment to developing China-DPRK relations with the ‘Three Unchangings.'” Unpacking the meaning of this returns us — perhaps without satisfaction — to China’s strategic framing of “friendship”:

Against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving era marked by profound historical changes, the “Three Unchangings” underscore that, despite the passage of time and shifting circumstances, the traditional friendship between China and North Korea remains unbreakable and grows stronger with time.

Once again, there are few revelations to be had, once we have cleared away the framing and pompous pageantry. But the ritual of the discourse is more than half the point. China’s state-run press this week is a banquet of symbolism insisting again and again on the unbreakable nature of the friendship between China and North Korea, surpassing (Take that, Putin!) all other bilateral relationships.

Meanwhile, Down in the Provinces

It should not surprise us that the ritualistic approach to Xi’s Pyongyang visit was replayed in the official CCP media at the provincial level. Once again, the entire story was a ritual of conditional “friendship” as unconditionally strong. The layouts at the provincial and even the city level are effectively identical to that of the People’s Daily. 

But because one of the most important functions of political discourse in the system is the ritual signaling of consensus as defined by the center, the communication in this case has a further layer of messaging — directed upward. The echo says, much like the sign the green grocer hangs in the shop window in Havel’s Power of the Powerless: We leaders in _____ province have fallen in line, and communicated the line to our cadres.

The echo is like a ritual bow. And to consistent but varying extents every single day, all Party media follow this formula. If they differ from the People’s Daily at all, it is only in how they balance messaging from the central leadership with messaging downward and outward within the province — as well as upward on province related matters, because in the world of political point-making, they are also trying to be seen.

This balancing act is the only thing that makes these pages remotely interesting in terms of variance from the center. The layouts yesterday are an excellent case in point. Above are six Party papers, all at the provincial level: Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shanghai and Beijing. Interestingly, the papers in this group that most closely echo the People’s Daily are Guangdong’s Nanfang Daily, which was once among the more adventurous media groups but was brought to heel early in the Xi Jinping era, and Fujian Daily. Both have the same pattern of Xi headlines on the Pyongyang visit — and nothing whatsoever else.

All six of these papers lead with the story of the “talks” in Pyongyang, the top story under the masthead in the People’s Daily, though there is slight variance in choice on content for the “newspaper eye.” Zhejiang focuses on the banquet story, while Jiangsu and Shanghai fill the space with the story about Xi Jinping’s article appearing in North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun, its equivalent to the People’s Daily.

The papers from Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shanghai and Beijing manage to squeeze provincial-level messaging onto the front page in the bottom one-third or one-fourth of the space. In Shanghai, CCP Secretary Chen Jining (陈吉宁), is meeting with an executive from the American tech company TE Connectivity, a manufacturer of electrical and electronic components; and Mayor Gong Zheng (龚正) is chairing a meeting with city leaders on its modern logistics system. In Jiangsu, CCP Secretary Xin Changxing (信长星) is traveling across the province, urging other Party leaders to heed the words of Xi Jinping on anti-corruption.

In keeping with the nature of China’s wooden political discourse, and the signaling role of the CCP’s press system, these treatments are more performative than informative. Secretary Xin, echoing language at the top, says cadres in Jiangsu must “thoroughly study and implement the important directives of General Secretary Xi Jinping and the decisions and plans of the CCP Central Committee.”

None of this is anything, as we say, to write home about. But it is important to recognize how language is working, at the provincial level and below, in exactly the same way as it is above. The deft use of this power discourse is a key aspect of political performance, which is why, talk as they might about the dangers of “formalism” (形式主义) — going through the motions without doing real things — the Chinese Communist Party cannot root out such behavior. Even treatises on “speaking the truth” descend rapidly into chasms of ideological nonsense.

in a China-watching world increasingly geared toward quick takes and AI slop sinology (including daily “readings” of the People’s Daily), it’s crucial to remain conscious and conscientious about the language and logic of China’s system — which for all of its signboard obviousness can too often be taken for granted. December this year marks the 90th anniversary of the birth of Vaclav Havel, the playwright and statesman who was not just a leading proponent of human rights and the dignity of the individual, but who also understood and elucidated so well the terrible strangeness of political bureaucracy and its dominance of society in a post-totalitarian system.

Next time you sit down with a sleep-inducing missive from the Chinese Communist Party, or report on an extravagantly choreographed state visit, try first jolting yourself into clear-mindedness by reciting the first line from Section III of Havel’s Power of the Powerless:

The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world?

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