By Wu Qiang, published: October 12, 2015 “The coming new Cold War will be nothing less than a fight for our own freedom, a conflict in which the free world will be forced to contend with a China that is reverting to a 1984-style totalitarian state.”    Perhaps Sino-American relations really have reached a turning point: during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent week-long official visit to the United States, his only contact with American President Barack Obama was one state dinner and a single day of talks. Nor did the long-awaited summit – the run-up to which began on September 3, 2015, with a massive military parade in Beijing to mark the 70th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in WWII – yield any stunning achievements. At […]

By Rogier Creemers, published: September 18, 2013 First published at ChinaFile.com as part of the conversation What’s Behind China’s Recent Internet Crackdown   I’d say that the current rumor crackdown is just the tip of a very large policy iceberg. Internet control sits at the confluence of a number of policy streams, which together caused the situation on China’s Internet we see today: enormous commercial developments on the one side, and a government that is trying to regain control through increasingly harsh methods on the other. A first major undercurrent is the increasing clout of the propaganda department. While propaganda and culture had never completely disappeared from the political view, the drive towards development of the cultural industries and the expansion of its turf, thanks to the […]

By Song Zhibiao, published: April 28, 2013   Recently, the standing vice-director of Shaanxi provincial propaganda department Ren Xianliang (任贤良) published an article entitled How the Party Should Manage the Media in the New Era in which he evaluated the present media circumstances (China Media Project has a roundup about Ren Xianliang’s article). Although his logic and conclusions are both questionable, it seems as though we may agree on one point:  Even if this article, issued in the Red Flag Journal (《红旗文稿》), is meant to test the waters, it reflects the anxiety of the Party’s propaganda system and the latest judgment of high level officials in the propaganda system concerning public opinion. Media professionals should not treat this article with ridicule; others should also think […]