Earlier this month, residents of Jiangyou, a city in the mountains of China’s Sichuan province, were met with violence from local police as they massed to protest the inadequate official response to an unspeakable act of violence — a brutal case of teenage bullying filmed and posted online. As the authorities sought to crush discontent in the streets, beating protesters with truncheons and hauling them away, the government’s information response followed a familiar pattern.| China Media Project
After a company boss destroyed a journalist's camera earlier this month, state media rushed to the defense, sounding off about the "right to report." This moral signaling distracts from the systemic violence against journalism that is the real policy of the state.| China Media Project
A forum in Bangkok this month underscored China’s ambition to work with local partners in Southeast Asia to impact public opinion there. A closer look at one of the propaganda vehicles meant to accomplish this goal suggests carelessness reigns down below such high-level exchanges.| China Media Project
Tours organized for foreign journalists in China by propaganda officials and organizations like the All-China Journalists Association may be deployed with slightly more subtlety than those for domestic "news workers." But the goal is the same — to guide coverage in ways favorable to the leadership.| China Media Project
China’s leadership is actively pushing culture throughout the country’s vast rural hinterland, including through hundreds of thousands of "rural bookrooms." But the overriding goal is to push the Party’s continued dominance at China’s grassroots — to the detriment of real cultural development.| China Media Project
Internet control authorities in China routinely portray "online rumors" as a threat to public well-being. But the real concern, which has nothing to do with factualness or accuracy, is that they might be harmful to the Party's well-being — a fact that inflates the value of rumors, including truly false information.| China Media Project
The latest outpost for China’s nascent International Communication Centers has been unveiled in Lanzhou New Area, a satellite city on the edge of the Gobi that has been dismissed as a ghost town. What does this tell us about China’s external propaganda efforts directed westward to Belt and Road partners?| China Media Project
With the addition of a grandiose new buzzword in China for culture and civilization, it may seem that a towering future is on the horizon. We take a hard look at the foundations of "Xi Jinping Thought on Culture."| China Media Project
