The media history of China addresses communication-enabling systems and technology throughout China's history. In the modern era the reach of Chinese communication networks has expanded and their format has shifted from preindustrial paper media towards various digital and mass media technologies.
This article provides a timeline of China's media-related history, including print publishing networks, its contemporary mass media, news media, computer technology, and the history of the Internet.
Imperial Dynasties Woodblock printing was invented during the Tang dynasty, and would later come to be the most popular medium of serial literary production in imperial China. Yet, it was only during the later Song that print media expanded to occupy a crucial position in the empire's state and literary spheres. The tradition of court gazettes based on official reports from the capital dates to the Song dynasty period.
By the Ming dynasty, the state no longer demanded regulation or licensing of publishers, and both central and local government bodies issued their own print materials. From the mid-fifteenth century, Ming-era print culture flourished, both in woodblock and movable type technology.
The exceptional volume of information supported by China's print media networks was notable to outside observers. When Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci arrived in the late sixteenth century to evangelize to China, he noted the "exceedingly large number of books in circulation." Ricci commented on the wider availability and use of paper. Being European, Ricci's understanding of paper was based on expensive production technologies and materials like vellum or rag, while Chinese methods using pulped hemp and plant fibers rendered paper comparatively cheap.
In late Ming society, a community unified by print literature formed consisting of authors, their readers, and the merchant-scholar publishers connecting them through the growing commercial publishing industry. This print-oriented literary public sphere mediated a new literary field of public opinion. The primary vehicles of literary consensus were considered to be books themselves, but alternate channels coexisted with the books themselves, and reinforced their impact as a medium. Commercial networks of publishing and print technology enabled institutions that relied on print books, such as literary societies and government gazettes, to further integrate the literate public.
The transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasty during the mid seventeenth century brought disruption and development in the Chinese media system. After an initial decline in printing and publishing during the violent transition, the literary infrastructure of China recovered and spread out under the new dynasty. At the same time, the state’s role as media organizer expanded through the Qing’s distribution of dibao, state publications used to deliver official notices.
Although both provincial and capital authorities had circulated gazettes during dynasties going back at least to the Song, the Qing’s attention to their jingbao (lit. capital report), surpassed that of previous dynasties. From the very beginning of their imperial rule out of Beijing, the Qing established their gazette as an authoritative source credited by government officials and peasants alike. Although the clear primary purpose of the jingbao was for use by officials in the coordination of governance, over the course of the Qing period an increasingly public audience of interested readers came to use the gazette as a casual source of news.
Opium Wars through end of Qing Following the Qing dynasty's defeat in the Opium Wars, the western powers forced China to open treaty ports for foreign trade. The earliest newspapers in China developed in the treaty ports. Among them was China's first modern newspaper, Shanghai Xinbao, which began publishing in 1861. Throughout the late 19th century, printed newspapers began to increase in popularity.
Telegraphy arrived in China in 1870s. Telegraphed circulars circulated news intended for publication in newspaper and became a common mechanism for propaganda.
By the time of the First Sino-Japanese War, most of China's newspapers were owned by foreign missionaries and foreign merchants in the treaty ports. Foreign-owned newspapers and principles of extraterritoriality imposed by the foreign powers in the treaty port decreased the Qing dynasty's ability to censor and control the flow of information. Through foreign ownership, underlying mercantile interests, and the profit motive, newspapers in the late Qing era had significant limitations and bias in their reporting.
The Qing dynasty's defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War resulted in political agitation and a rapid increase in the number of Chinese-owned political newspapers. Newspapers became increasingly popular in the early 20th century. Through the early 20th century, the distinctions between newspapers and magazine periodicals were not sharp; in form, newspapers were also typically thin booklets.
1911 through founding of PRC China was significantly politically fragmented between 1911 and 1927. In this environment, those who held political power and military power embraced the use of modern media to compete for power and to shape public opinion. Newspapers in the early 20th century proliferated among intellectuals and the urban bourgeois but distribution remained limited, taking days or weeks to reach even nearby villages into the late 1920s.
The "four great papers of the Republican period" were Shenbao (based in Shanghai), Yishibao, Dagongbao, and Mingguoribao (a Nationalist daily).
In 1920, Li Da founded the first Chinese Communist Party (CCP) publication in China, The Communist.
The CCP during its 2nd National Congress in July 1922 decided to establish an authoritative publication to disseminate its views on anti-imperialism and revolution. This resulted in the founding of The Guide Weekly in Shanghai. It was the first openly-published newspaper of the central organ of the CCP.
Radio technology first arrived in China in the winter of 1922-1923. At the time, mass media in China was slow or non-existent in many areas, and much of the population was illiterate.
On 11 December 1931, the Chinese Soviet Republic government established its official newspaper, Red China.
A Japanese air raid against Shanghai on January 28, 1932, destroyed a significant amount of China's film industry and resulted in the loss of many early Chinese films. It also prompted an increase in news film production in China.
On 24 April 1937, Liberation Weekly was founded. It was the CCP's most authoritative political and theoretical magazine from 1937 to 1941.
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Nationalists had mobile projectionists travel in rural China to play anti-Japanese propaganda films.
In 1944, the CCP welcomed a large group of foreign (primarily American) journalists to Yan'an. In an effort to contrast the party with the Nationalists, the CCP generally did not censor these foreign reports. In December 1945, the CCP Central Committee instructed the party to facilitate the work of American journalists out of the hope that it would have an influence on American policies toward China.
Among the points of negotiation in the Second United Front was the ability of the CCP to openly publish newspapers and periodicals in KMT areas. In late August 1937, Zhou Enlai and KMT Central Publicity Department head Shao Lizi agreed that the newspapers Xinhua Daily and Chuin Chung Weekly would be published in these areas.
After Japan's defeat in the Second Sino-Japanese War, Mao Zedong instructed CCP cadres to immediately enter Wuhan, Nanjing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai to begin news agencies and publishing in advance of the Nationalists' arrival.
Mao stated that the masses should be involved in journalism. In his widely publicized remarks with journalists at Jin-Sui Daily in 1948, Mao said, "With our newspapers, too, we must rely on everybody, on the masses of the people, on the whole Party to run them, not merely on a few persons behind closed doors."
In late 1948, the CCP required that foreigners obtain approval from the CCP Central Committee before publishing newspapers or magazines, asserting that "the vast majority of these propaganda apparatuses are controlled by reactionaries". This decision reflected the party's view that news media was a site of class struggle.
1950s In both the Yan'an era of the 1930s and the early 1950s, the CCP encouraged grassroots journalism in the form of "worker-peasant correspondents," an idea originating from the Soviet Union.
At the PRC's founding in 1949, there were less than 600 movie theatres in the country. Projectionists traveled through rural China showing films, a process modeled on the Soviet Union's use of mobile film teams to spread revolutionary culture. In the 1950s and the 1960s, the CCP built cinemas (among other cultural buildings) in industrial districts on urban peripheries. Rural mobile projectionist teams and urban movie theaters were generally managed through the PRC's cultural bureaucracy. Trade Unions and People's Liberation Army (PLA) propaganda departments also operated film exhibition networks. In 1950s China, a common view of film was that it served as "socialist distance horizon education". For example, films promoted rural collectivization.
Newspapers and journals in the 1950s encompassed a broad range of voices and differences in terms of public and private influence. People's Daily was closely edited and vetted by Hu Qiaomu. Regional and municipal newspapers often followed the model of People's Daily and Xinhua News Agency, but also pursued different interests in terms of content editorial stance. At newspapers like Guangming Daily and Wenhui Bao, editors operated with relatively free decision-making, but were subject to patron-client relationships and impacted by their own changing analysis of the Communist Party and Mao Zedong's leadership. Literary journals had varying degrees of oversight by central or regional party bodies. Student newspapers, newsletters, journals, and big character posters supplied another layer of perspectives and affiliations.
After the PRC's founding, the CCP ousted most American reporters. Various European news agency like Reuters and Agence France-Presse, and the Canadian Globe and Mail, were allowed to remain. China invited some American reporters to China in 1956, but the administration of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused, upholding its ban on travel to China. U.S. newspapers criticized the Eisenhower's administration decision as antithetical to the free press.
In 1950, 1,800 projectionists from around the country traveled to Nanjing for a training program. These projectionists replicated the training program in their own home provinces to develop more projectionists. Nanjing was later termed a "Cradle of People's Cinema." The PRC sought to recruit women and ethnic minority projectionists in an effort to more effectively reach marginalized communities.
In 1950, approximately 1 million radio sets existed in China, mostly in bourgeois urban households. The PRC began establishing a radio reception network assigning "radio receptionists" in schools, army units, and factories. These receptionists organized group listening sessions and also transcribed and distributed written content of radio broadcasts. Through the practice of rooftop broadcasting, village criers using homemade megaphones would also relay the content of radio broadcasts. Radio receptionists and rooftop broadcasting remained a significant component of broadcasting practices until wireless broadcasting became widespread in the 1960s and 1970s.