Media history of China

A timeline of China's media-related history, including computer hardware, software development, the history of the Internet, etc.

Qing dynasty era

Following the Qing dynasty's defeat in the Opium Wars, the foreign powers forced China to open treaty ports for foreign settlement. The earliest newspapers in China developed in the treaty ports.

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.

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.

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.

During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Nationalists had mobile projectionists travel in rural China to play anti-Japanese propaganda films.

In 1944, the Chinese Communist Party (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.

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 communists 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.

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.

In 1956, the “Long-Range Plan for the Development of Science and Technology from 1956-1967” commissioned a group of scientists and researchers to develop computer technology for national defense. The Plan's goals included furthering radio, telecommunication, and atomic energy projects. Shortly thereafter, the first state-sanctioned computer development program began with the Chinese Academy of Sciences affiliated Beijing Institute of Computing Technology (ICT).

In 1958, the first Chinese-made computer was developed by the Institute of Military Engineering at the University of Harbin as part of the ICT. The computer, dubbed the 901, was a vacuum-tube computer. The 901 was a copy of an earlier Soviet model.

1960s

After the Chinese stopped receiving Soviet technical and financial assistance in 1960, there was a deeply felt loss of technical expertise that stunted development. Additionally, the Cultural Revolution slowed technological progress. However, transistor-based computers including the 109B, 109C, DJS-21, DJS-5 and C-2 were developed during the 1960s. Despite the large improvements in the computing power of these machines, and advances in the hardware like integrated-circuitry there is little evidence that computers were being designed for widespread consumer use.

During this period of Chinese "self-reliance," the computers developed in the second half of the 1960s did not resemble Soviet computers nor their Western counterparts. The new transistor-based machines were distinctly Chinese creations.

As part of the Socialist Education Movement, mobile film projectionist units showed films and slideshows that emphasized class struggle and encouraged audience members to discuss bitter experiences onstage.

After the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, Chinese media printed many articles which favorably depicted U.S. anti-war demonstrations. In response to U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, China launched the Resist America, Aid Vietnam campaign, which among other forms of expression, used media such as film and photography exhibitions to denounce U.S. aggression and praise Vietnamese resistance.

During the early period (1966-1968) of the Cultural Revolution, freedom of the press in China was at its peak. While the number of newspapers declined in this period, the number of independent publications by mass political organizations grew. Mao used mass media to encourage rebels to establish their own independent mass political organizations and their own publications. According to China's National Bureau of Statistics, the number of newspapers dropped from 343 in 1965, to 49 in 1966, and then to a 20th-century low of 43 in 1967. At the same time, the number of publications by mass organizations such as Red Guards grew to an estimated number as high as 10,000.

Independent political groups could publish broadsheets and handbills, as well as leaders' speeches and meeting transcripts which would normally have been considered highly classified. From 1966 to 1969, at least 5,000 new broadsheets by independent political groups were published. Several Red Guard organizations also operated independent printing presses to publish newspapers, articles, speeches, and big-character posters. For example, the largest student organization in Shanghai, the Red Revolutionaries, established a newspaper that had a print run of 800,000 copies by the end of 1966. Government controls on restricted literature also collapsed during the Cultural Revolution.

Mobile film units brought Chinese cinema to the countryside and were crucial to the standardization and popularization of cultural during this period, particularly including revolutionary model operas. During the Cultural Revolution's early years, mobile film teams traveled to rural areas with news reels of Mao meeting with Red Guards and Tiananmen Square parades, and welcomed ceremoniously in rural communities. These news reels became known as hong bao pian ("red treasure films"), analogous to how the Little Red Books were dubbed hong bao shu ("red treasure books"). The release of the filmed versions of the revolutionary model operas resulted in a re-organization and expansion of China's film exhibition network.

From 1965 to 1976, the number of film projection units in China quadrupled, total film audiences nearly tripled, and the national film attendance rate doubled. The Cultural Revolution Group drastically reduced ticket prices which, in its view, would allow film to better serve the needs of workers and of socialism.

Rusticated youths with an interest in broadcast technology frequently operated the rural radio stations after 1968. Rusticated youths likewise constituted a significant portion of film projectionists.

1970s

The Cultural Revolution continued to severely stagnate technological development in the first half of the 1970s.

American journalists first returned to China in 1971 with the U.S. table top tennis delegation as part of ping-pong diplomacy.

Loudspeakers (mostly wired) remained the dominant aspect of the Chinese audio technology until 1976. Despite transistorization of radios in the 1960s, private radios continued to lag behind loudspeakers due to the comparatively high cost of transistor radios a well as concerns about private radio listening to "enemy" shortwave broadcasts.

Until the 1976 invention of the Cangjie input method, computing technologies lacked an efficient way of inputting Chinese characters into computers. The Cangjie method uses Chinese character radicals to construct characters.

In 1977, the first microcomputer, the DJS-050 was developed.

In 1978, China's aggressive plan for technological development was announced at the Chinese National Conference on Science and Technology. Further developing microcomputers, integrated circuits, and national databases were all declared priorities.

Beginning in the late 1970s, increased marketization and privatization of the Chinese media led to an increase in the increase of economic incentives in news reporting and thereby impacted news reporting.

1980s

In the early 1983, there were approximately 162,000 film projection units in China. Most of these were used by mobile movie teams which showed films outdoors in rural and urban areas.

In 1980, the Chinese computing technology was estimated to be about 15 years behind United States technology. From the early 1980s on, China's leaders recognized that their nationalistic development strategy was inhibiting their scientific competitiveness with the West. Therefore, imports from the United States and Japanese companies such as IBM, DEC, Unisys, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and NEC greatly increased. However, high tariffs discouraged the direct import of computers, instead encouraging foreign corporations to provide hardware and software to domestic enterprises.

In 1980, the GB 2312 Code of Chinese Graphic Character Set for Information Interchange-Primary Set was created allowing for 99% of contemporary characters to be easily expressed.

In 1982, the Shanghai Bureau of Education chose 8 elementary students and 8 middle-school students from each district, and gave them very basic computer training. This is the first experiment using a computer in Chinese children's education.

In 1983, the first Chinese supercomputer,"Galaxy," was developed.

In 1984, the New Technology Developer Inc. (the predecessor of the Legend Group and now known as Lenovo) was funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In 1985, the Great Wall 0520CH, was the first personal computer that used Chinese character generation and display technology, therefore capable of processing information in Chinese. The Great Wall models commanded a substantial share of the domestic computer market for the next decade.

The 1986, Seventh Development Plan marked a turning point in China's commercial computer industry, as the electronics industry was designated as a "pillar" that would help drive the entire Chinese economy.

In 1987, Professor Qian Tianbai sent the first email from China, signifying China's first use of the Internet. The email message was "Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world."

1990s

In 1990, Professor Qian Prof. Werner Zorn registered the country code top level domain .CN.

In 1994, the National Computing & Networking Facilities of China project opened a 64K dedicated circuit to the Internet, Since then, China has been officially recognized as a country with full functional Internet accessibility.

In 1996, CHINANET was completed and operational. Nationwide internet services are available to the general public. China's first Internet café soon followed.

The 1996 Ninth Five Year National Development Plan emphasized the development of technical infrastructure and expanding the personal computer industry.

The State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) began the Connecting Every Village with Radio and TV project in 1998; the program extended radio and television broadcasting to every village in China.

In 1999, the National Research Center for Intelligent Computing Systems announced that it developed a super server system capable of conducting 20 billion floating-point operations per second, making China one of the few nations in the world that have developed high-performance servers.

By the end of 1999, there were approximately 20 million PCs in operation in China.

The late 1990s through the early 2000s were a high point for investigative journalism in China.

2000s

In 2004, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology began the Connecting Every Village Project to promote universal access to telecommunication and internet services in rural China. The MIIT required that six state-owned companies, including the main telecommunications and internet providers China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom, build the communications infrastructure and assist in financing the project. The program's implementation was influenced by SARFT's earlier success in the Connecting Every Village with Radio and TV Project. Beginning in late 2009, the program began building rural telecenters each of which had at least one telephone, computer, and internet connectivity. Approximately 90,000 rural telecenters were built by 2011. As of December 2019, 135 million rural households had used broadband internet. The program successfully extended internet infrastructure throughout rural China and promoted development of the internet.

2010s

China began implementing a National Broadband Strategy in 2013. The program aimed to increase the speed, quality, and adoption of broadband and 4G networks. As of 2018, 96% of administrative villages had fiber optic networks and 95% had 4G networks.

2020s

In 2020, China was the world's largest jailor of journalists with at least 118 detained.

In 2020, China's market for films surpassed the U.S. market to become the largest such market in the world.