a look at the Chinese economic/media landscapes

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 38^th 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 27^th 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/38^th and 27^th 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 20^th 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.