Unlike
the media landscape in most countries
worldwide, the media landscape in Mainland China remains that of censorship and control at the very top of the country, and also in which discontent has grown many fold among the billions of “ordinary” citizens in recent years. Today, the primary media outlets over in the
Mainland are CCTV (China/Chinese Central Television), the People’s Daily (newspapers),
and the Xinhua News Agency (various).
Back in 1931, however, that wasn’t the case, as that was when the “’Red
China’ News Agency”, the former name of Xinhua,
was founded, to be followed by the People’s Daily in 1948 (about a year before one
Mao Zedong took over control of the country), and CCTV, known alternatingly as “Beijing
Television”, and the “China People’s Television Network”, in 1958. Of the “big
3” media outlets over there, CCTV reaches the most Chinese by far, at over 1.2 billion, or about a staggering 89% of the country’s approx. 1.35 billion people,
with 15 channels reaching the mainland alone
(“general”, finance, art, sports, movies, military/agriculture, “TV
series”, documentaries, science, opera, law, news, children’s programming, and
music), while Xinhua captures about
500 million, and the People’s Daily reaches “only” about 4 million.
In terms of international reach,
however, the figures seem to be reversed,
almost: Xinhua has just 5
international-language outlets (Arabic, English, French, Russian, and Spanish),
CCTV has 6 (Arabic, 2 in English, French, Russian, Spanish; the network had a Japanese-language channel a few
years ago, and will have a
Portuguese-language channel at an indefinite future time), and the People’s Daily has 7 “major
language” editions (Arabic, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and
Spanish), along with 5 more “regional
dialect” editions (Kazakh, Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Zhuang).
When it comes to “just audio”, that’s where China
National Radio, the main radio outlet out of over 3,000 of those, comes in; 10 different stations broadcast reports
from 40 national bureaus over the course of about 200 hours every week: the
Voice of China, business, music, talk, 2 Taiwanese stations, a Hong Kong/Macau
station, a station broadcasting in the country’s many “regional dialects”, a
literary station, an “elderly” station, a “general entertainment” station, a
traffic station, and more Hong Kong/regional stations. However, despite their
differing reaches between them individually, aspects of the Chinese Communist
Party control all of the outlets –
the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television controls CCTV; the
Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party controls the People’s Daily, and, last but not least, the State Council of the People’s
Republic of China controls Xinhua,
meaning, among other things, that the
billboard atop 1 Times Square shows nothing
except for official Chinese
government “propaganda”, in essence, to the international
audience gathered there seemingly on a 24/7/365 basis, with little input from said audience on what
gets displayed up there.
Perhaps
to understand the overwhelming connections
between government and media in China, it is important to understand the absolute best-known incident outside China that occurred within the
Mainland’s borders was the Tiananmen Square incident of mid-April through early
June of 1989, especially the events
of April 26/27, when the People’s Daily published a front-page (just to “drive the message home”,
perhaps…) editorial headlined/titled “It is necessary to take a clear-cut stand
against disturbances”, which, by then, had drawn hundreds of thousands of (mostly) students over the previous week
or 2; the editorial stated, in part:
“Some abnormal
phenomena have also occurred during the mourning activities. Taking advantage
of the situation, an extremely small number of people spread rumors, attacked
party and state leaders by name, and instigated the masses to break into the
Xinhua Gate at Zhongnanhai, where the party Central Committee and the State
Council are located. Some people even shouted such reactionary slogans as, down
with the Communist Party. In Xi'an and Changsha, there have been serious
incidents in which some lawbreakers carried out beating, smashing, looting, and
burning.
Taking into consideration the feelings of grief suffered by the masses,
the party and government have adopted an attitude of tolerance and restraint
toward some improper words uttered and actions carried out by the young
students when they were emotionally agitated. On April 22, before the memorial
meeting was held, some students had already showed up at Tiananmen Square, but
they were not asked to leave, as they normally would have been. Instead, they
were asked to observe discipline and join in the mourning for Comrade Hu
Yaobang. The students on the square were themselves able to consciously
maintain order. [Beijing Xinhua Domestic Service in Chinese at 1400 GMT on
April 25, reporting on the April 26 Renmin ribao editorial, deletes this
sentence.] Owing to the joint efforts by all concerned, it was possible for the
memorial meeting to proceed in a solemn and respectful manner.
However, after the
memorial meeting, an extremely small number of people with ulterior purposes
continued to take advantage of the young students' feelings of grief for
Comrade Hu Yaobang to spread all kinds of rumors to poison and confuse people's
minds. Using both big- and small-character posters, they vilified, hurled
invectives at, and attacked party and state leaders. Blatantly violating the
Constitution, they called for opposition to the leadership by the Communist
Party and the socialist system. In some of the institutions of higher learning,
illegal organizations were formed to seize power from the student unions. In
some cases, they even forcibly took over the broadcasting systems on the
campuses. In some institutions of higher learning, they instigated the students
and teachers to go on strike and even went to the extent of forcibly preventing
students from going to classes, usurped the name of the workers' organizations to
distribute reactionary handbills, and established ties everywhere in an attempt
to create even more serious incidents.”
The excerpt, and the
editorial from which that was taken, enraged
the already agitated student
population, which had claimed to be
protesting such themes as corruption
and inflation, not overthrowing the CPC, as the editorial had suggested;
reportedly, the Beijing Students’ Autonomous Federation, which
represented/still represents various universities there, had already planned 4/27 protests even before the People’s Daily editorial.
To attempt to disrupt the
(apparently) already planned
protests, then-Chinese President Yang Shangkun ordered the 38th Army
division of the overall People’s Liberation Army, led by General Xu Qinxian,
into Tiananmen Square, where it apparently
entered into a standoff of its own, with the 27th Army division,
which wanted to use brute force, beyond the worst nightmares that
any person could have possibly imagined. In the end, however,
the protests there, mostly between the students and groups of Beijing police/38th
and 27th Army divisions of the PLA, and were, ironically enough, mostly peaceful, with Canadian
journalist Scott Simmie estimating for his novel by the same name, Tiananmen Square, that somewhere around
500,000+ protesters traveled along the road leading up to Tiananmen Square, and
that the minimal arrests actually seemed to galvanize the students into recognizing that fighting the regime
had consequences.
While the Chinese media might still be prone to “toeing
the party line” in today’s day and age, the country’s economy has become wide open to outside influence,
particularly when it comes to industry,
which, today, accounts for over 49%
of the country’s total GDP (gross domestic product), and produces all sorts of products/services that
would have been unthinkable to the
country’s 1950s society, and even to the 1980s/90s Tiananmen-era society. The
growth of “luxury goods”, in particular, has been especially striking in recent years, with the Mainland’s population
getting opened up more and more with each year to outside influence, particularly
Western influence, which, again, the country most likely would have officially denounced throughout the
better part of the 20th century. Since 2013, when the most recent
figures were published, sales of automobiles and jewelry have mostly increased, while watches hit their sales peak earlier in the decade, before slowing
down over the past year or two. An April 2013 report from the New York Times proclaims that G.M.
(General Motors) was, at the time, at the beginning of introducing 9 new models
by 2018, and adding 6,000 positions across 4 new factories to meet those goals,
while Chrysler was planning on introducing the Jeep Cherokee to the country by
year’s end (2014), Ford introduced the Lincoln Motor Company to China, and
S.U.V. sales increased 49%, bringing overall
auto sales up about 14%, by about 21 million new cars sold. Around that
same month, Business Insider reported
that retail sales increased 12.8%, with jewelry sales especially leading the increase there, as those jumped a staggering 72% that month, leading Kit
Juckes of Société Générale in France
to note that “…apparently (to the Chinese), buying jewelry is a sign of saving, not consumption…”, while, ironically, watches reached their peak in 2012, as shipments from
Switzerland, especially, reached record highs, and those figures showed up as a
-26% drop from Switzerland to the Mainland, -9% to Hong Kong, and luxury
spending there jumped to over 25% overall, surpassing
the U.S., which took about 20% of the world’s “luxury goods” market that
year (2012), essentially rendering crushing
tax rates, ranging anywhere between 20 and 70% on any “luxury goods”, with certain “lesser luxuries” getting the lower end of that 50% range, and “more
luxurious” goods getting placed into the upper
reaches of that range. Overall, the increased focus on such “luxury goods”
should at least keep pace with the
rest of the world, especially in
times when the $ and € inevitably
rebound from their current “downturns”,
and even in times like 2008-present, with the $ appreciating against everything, yet still being challenged.
