China Central Television
Encyclopedia
State media
State media or state-owned media is media for mass communication which is ultimately controlled and/or funded by the state. These news outlets may be the sole media outlet or may exist in competition with privately-controlled media.-Overview:...
television broadcaster
Television network
A television network is a telecommunications network for distribution of television program content, whereby a central operation provides programming to many television stations or pay TV providers. Until the mid-1980s, television programming in most countries of the world was dominated by a small...
in mainland China
Mainland China
Mainland China, the Chinese mainland or simply the mainland, is a geopolitical term that refers to the area under the jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China . According to the Taipei-based Mainland Affairs Council, the term excludes the PRC Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and...
. CCTV has a network of 19 channels broadcasting different programmes and is accessible to more than one billion viewers. Most of its programmes are a mixture of documentary, comedy, entertainment, and drama, the majority of which consists of Chinese soap operas and entertainment.
History
CCTV Peking (Beijing) Television (北京电视台) broadcast its first program on 2 September 1958. Due to increasing demands, it soon launched its second channel in the 1960s. Starting from 1 May 1973, Peking Television began broadcasting experimentally in colour on its second channel every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday using the PAL-DPAL
PAL, short for Phase Alternating Line, is an analogue television colour encoding system used in broadcast television systems in many countries. Other common analogue television systems are NTSC and SECAM. This page primarily discusses the PAL colour encoding system...
system, and fully converted to colour broadcasting by 1977. The network changed its name to CCTV on 1 May 1978.
Until the late 1970s, CCTV held only evening broadcasts, usually closing down at midnight. During the summer and winter academic vacations, it occasionally transmitted daytime programming for students. In 1980 CCTV experimented with news relays from local and central television studios via microwave
Microwave
Microwaves, a subset of radio waves, have wavelengths ranging from as long as one meter to as short as one millimeter, or equivalently, with frequencies between 300 MHz and 300 GHz. This broad definition includes both UHF and EHF , and various sources use different boundaries...
. By 1985, CCTV had already become a leading television network in China. In 1987 CCTV's popularity soared due to the adaptation and presentation of Dream of the Red Chamber
Dream of the Red Chamber (1987 TV series)
Dream of the Red Chamber , released in 1987, was a television series produced by CCTV adapted from the classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber. It gained enormous popularity with its superb music, cast, and plot adaptation. It was first filmed in Beijing in Mandarin. Then it was translated...
. The 36-episode TV series—the first Chinese television drama to enter the global market— still remains popular in the international market. In the same year, CCTV exported 10,216 programmes to 77 foreign television stations.
Initially, the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee issued directive censorship
Censorship in the People's Republic of China
Censorship in the People's Republic of China is implemented or mandated by the PRC's ruling party, the Communist Party of China . The special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau have their own legal systems and are largely self-governing, so these censorship policies do not apply...
of programs. During reform in the 1990s, the Party adopted new standards for CCTV, "affordability" and "acceptability", loosening the previous government control. Affordability refers to purchasing ability of programs, while acceptability requires that a programme has acceptable content, preventing broadcasts of material that contains inappropriate content or holds against the Communist Party of China
Communist Party of China
The Communist Party of China , also known as the Chinese Communist Party , is the founding and ruling political party of the People's Republic of China...
.
On 2 September 2008 the new CCTV Headquarters
CCTV Headquarters
The CCTV Headquarters is a , 44-storey skyscraper in the Beijing Central Business District and serves as headquarters for China Central Television . Groundbreaking took place on 1 June 2004 and the building's facade was completed in 1 January 2008...
was opened on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of CCTV.
In July 2009 CCTV expanded its coverage and target audience by launching CCTV-العربية, its international channel in Arabic language
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
.
Today, CCTV has 16 national channels, most of them airing 24 hours a day.
Organization
State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television
The State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television is an executive branch under the State Council of the People's Republic of China...
which is in turn subordinate to the State Council of the People's Republic of China
State Council of the People's Republic of China
The State Council of the People's Republic of China , which is largely synonymous with the Central People's Government after 1954, is the chief administrative authority of the People's Republic of China. It is chaired by the Premier and includes the heads of each governmental department and agency...
. A Vice Minister of the state council serves as chairman of CCTV. The organisation has relationships with regional television stations run by local governments, which must reserve up to two channels for the national broadcaster.
The organization is considered one of the "big three" media outlets in China, along with the People's Daily
People's Daily
The People's Daily is a daily newspaper in the People's Republic of China. The paper is an organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China , published worldwide with a circulation of 3 to 4 million. In addition to its main Chinese-language edition, it has editions in English,...
and Xinhua.
Criticism
The network's principal directors and other officers are appointed by the State, and so are the top officials at local conventional television stations in mainland China; nearly all of them are restricted to broadcasting within their own province or municipality. Editorial independenceEditorial independence
Editorial independence is the freedom of editors to make decisions without interference from the owners of a publication. Editorial independence is tested, for instance, if a newspaper runs articles that may be unpopular with its advertising clientele....
is subject to government policy considerations, and as a result, it has been charged with being "propaganda aimed at brainwashing the audience" in its history and news programmes in a letter written by a number of Chinese intellectuals who also called for a boycott of state media was posted on a US-based website and has circulated through Chinese websites.
Journalists working for CCTV-9, the network's English-language international channel (now known as CCTV News), are under constant pressure to present a positive account of China, according to Anne-Marie Brady's study published in 2008. "In August 2005, a series of items reported factually on coal mining disaster in China; soon after the channel's leaders received a warning from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that its reports were harming China's international image. Following this incident, senior editorial staff and journalists were all forced to write self-criticisms."
Brady says that while the channel's equipment is state-of-the-art, the employees are not well trained in how to use it, so there are frequent errors during broadcast. "The political controls on the station contribute to a general low level of morale and initiative among station staff," she writes.
Controversies
- On 27 December 2007, Xinwen LianboXinwen LianboXinwen Lianbo is a daily news programme produced by China Central Television . It is shown simultaneously by most terrestrial television channels in mainland China, making it one of the world's most watched television programmes...
aired a report about the wide and easy availability of explicit content on the internet. The report appealed to juristic institutions and government to hurry to make relevant legislation in order to purify the internet environment. In the report, a young student described a pop-up advertisement she saw as being "very erotic very violent". After the airing of the report, many parodiesKusoKuso is the term used in East Asia for the internet culture that generally includes all types of camp and parody. In Japanese, means shit, and is often uttered as an interjection. It is considered milder than its English counterpart, more comparable to damn. It is also used to describe outrageous...
were posted by internet users ridiculing the comment and CCTV's credibility in part. The incident also questioned the reliability of Xinwen Lianbo, noting the unlikelihood of a web page being both violent and erotic at the same time (even though such pages do exist), and the age of the student interviewed. Personal information of the interviewed girl was later also leaked, identifying the girl in the report by name. Online message boards were populated by large threads about the incident, and a satirical work even stated that CCTV's website was the number one "very erotic very violent" website on the internet, with some users even creating their own toplists of sites which meet these criteria, the "top 8 very erotic very violent sports events" and even identifying things that are yellowYellowYellow is the color evoked by light that stimulates both the L and M cone cells of the retina about equally, with no significant stimulation of the S cone cells. Light with a wavelength of 570–590 nm is yellow, as is light with a suitable mixture of red and green...
as being erotic (since 黄, huáng, the Mandarin character for "yellow", also means "erotic").
- On January 23, 2011 the CCTV news program Xinwen LianboXinwen LianboXinwen Lianbo is a daily news programme produced by China Central Television . It is shown simultaneously by most terrestrial television channels in mainland China, making it one of the world's most watched television programmes...
showcased the Chengdu J-10Chengdu J-10The Chengdu J-10 is a multirole fighter aircraft designed and produced by the People's Republic of China's Chengdu Aircraft Industry Corporation for the People's Liberation Army Air Force...
in the air by firing a missile at an airplane, the target plane then exploded. This footage lasted half a second and the destroyed airplane shown was later identified as that of an F-5E, US fighter jet. It turns out the clip was taken from the 1986 US movie Top GunTop Gun (film)Top Gun is a 1986 American action drama film directed by Tony Scott, and produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, in association with the Paramount Pictures company...
.
Programmes
CCTV produces its own news broadcasts three times a day and is the country's most powerful and prolific television program producer.Its thirty-minute evening news, Xinwen Lianbo
Xinwen Lianbo
Xinwen Lianbo is a daily news programme produced by China Central Television . It is shown simultaneously by most terrestrial television channels in mainland China, making it one of the world's most watched television programmes...
("News Simulcast"), goes on air daily at 7:00 pm Beijing time. All local stations are required to carry CCTV's news broadcast. An internal CCTV survey indicates that nearly 500 million people countrywide regularly watch this program. However, the figure has slumped in recent years; the program now has 10% of the ratings market, compared to 40% before 1998.
Focus, first introduced in 1994, is a popular programme on CCTV. This discussion programme regularly exposes the wrongdoings of local officials, which attracts serious attention from higher levels of government. The programme also exposes the Chinese Government's response to the corrupt charges.
The CCTV New Year's Gala
CCTV New Year's Gala
The CCTV New Year's Gala is a Chinese New Year special produced by China Central Television. Broadcast on the eve of Chinese New Year on its flagship CCTV-1, satellite channels CCTV-4, CCTV-9, CCTV-E, CCTV-F, and CCTV-HD, the broadcast has a yearly viewership of over 700 million viewers, making it...
—a yearly special program for the Chinese New Year—is the most-watched CCTV programme. Research in 2007 showed that the Gala was watched by over 800 million people worldwide.
In 2003 CCTV launched its first 24-hour news
24-hour news cycle
The 24-hour news cycle arrived with the advent of television channels dedicated to news, and brought about a much faster pace of news production with increased demand for stories that can be presented as news, as opposed to the day-by-day pace of the news cycle of printed daily newspapers...
channel, initially available to cable viewers.
Audience share
In 2007 China's television audience rose to 1.2 billion. The 2008 Summer Olympics2008 Summer Olympics
The 2008 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, was a major international multi-sport event that took place in Beijing, China, from August 8 to August 24, 2008. A total of 11,028 athletes from 204 National Olympic Committees competed in 28 sports and 302 events...
coverage on CCTV resulted in an aggregate 41% audience share across its network. As content becomes more diversified, there have been concerns about the audience share, as CCTV is losing out to cable, satellite and regional networks. In Guangzhou
Guangzhou
Guangzhou , known historically as Canton or Kwangchow, is the capital and largest city of the Guangdong province in the People's Republic of China. Located in southern China on the Pearl River, about north-northwest of Hong Kong, Guangzhou is a key national transportation hub and trading port...
for example, CCTV programming only accounts for 45% of the weekly audience share, compared to 78% of Hong Kong's TVB Jade
TVB Jade
TVB Jade is a flagship TV channel in Hong Kong, established by Television Broadcasts Limited, and is one of the free-to-air Cantonese language television channels in Hong Kong, the other being its arch-rival ATV Home...
and ATV
Asia Television Limited
Asia Television Limited is one of the two free-to-air television broadcasters in Hong Kong, the other being rival Television Broadcasts Limited . It launched in 1957 under the name Rediffusion Television as the first television station in Hong Kong...
and 80% for Guangzhou TV. Similarly, Shanghai's local stations reported a 71% audience share over CCTV. However, the CCTV New Year's Gala remains extremely popular; it acquires more than 90% audience share over the nation.
Personalities
Producing a variety of different programming, China Central Television has a number of different program hosts, news anchors, correspondents, and contributors who appear throughout daily programing on the network.CCTV-3 (Art and Entertainment) anchors
- Li Yong (game shows and CCTV New Year's Gala)
- Zhu Jun
- Zhou Tao
CCTV-13 (Chinese News Channel) anchors
- Bai YansongBai YansongBai Yansong is a prominent Chinese news anchor and journalist affiliated with China Central Television, China's national television network, and is known for his articulate and confident style. He was born in Inner Mongolia, China and is an ethnic Mongol. Bai was one of CCTV's major news anchors...
CCTV-NEWS (English International Channel) program hosts
- Yin ChenYin Chen (TV presenter)Chen Yin is a Chinese television program host.-Early life:Chen Yin attended Cornell University, where she majored in Economics with concentration in international relations and East Asian studies.-Career:...
– Culture Express - Marc EdwardsMarc Edwards (TV presenter)Marc Edwards is a Welsh and Chinese Television Presenter on China Central Television . He currently presents Travelogue.-Background:...
– Travelogue - Michele LeanMichele LeanMichele Samantha Yi Wen Lean known professionally as Michele Lean is a television presenter, writer, actress, and commercial talent. From 2007 - 2010 she was a Television Presenter on China Central Television , hosting CCTV-9's Travelogue and Center Stage...
– Travelogue, Center Stage - Edwin MaherEdwin MaherEdwin Maher is a New Zealand-born TV journalist who now works for CCTV International in Beijing, China.Maher established his broadcast career in Australia, working many minor roles, particularly as a weatherman, in many cities before beginning a 25-year stint with Australian Broadcasting...
– News Update, Asia Today - Mark "Dashan" Rowswell – Communicate in Chinese
- Charlotte MacInnis (Ai Hua) – Growing up with ChineseGrowing up with ChineseGrowing up with Chinese is a scheduled 100-episode series on CCTV-News, China Central Television's English channel, starting from August 2, 2010 each 15-min in length. It is aired from Monday to Sunday at 17:15 and 0:15 BJT. On Monday and Thursday it airs new lessons and rebroadcast on the other days...
- Tracey GrebinskiTracey grebinskiTracey Grebinsky is a Canadian reporter for China Central Television. She is featured in the CCTV9 program Rediscovering China where she stars in three initial programs regarding the Qinghai-Tibet Railroad shown in 2006 and again another 3 programs in 2007, one year after the opening of the...
– "Rediscovering China" - Vimbayi KajeseVimbayi KajeseVimbayi Kajese is a Zimbabwean news presenter for China Central Television's CCTV-9.-Career:Kajese first visited China in 2004, and decided to move to Beijing in 2006. She is currently CCTV-9's early morning news presenter. She also went to North Park Primary School in Mt Pleasant Harare. She left...
– News Update - Jonas Gilbart – Sports Scene
- Zakka Jacob
CCTV-Français (French Channel) anchors
- Staff
- SONG Jianing – Rencontre
CCTV-Русский (Russian Channel) anchors
- Anchors list
- Алеся Корзун
- Наталия Каргапольцева
CCTV-العربية (Arabic Channel) anchors
Channels
The CCTV channels are listed in sequential order with no discerning descriptions, e.g. CCTV-1, CCTV-2, etc., similar to those channels in Europe and in other places around the world.All CCTV channels are independently broadcast. The following is list of the channels with their names:
All CCTV channels are also broadcast via the following:
Overseas broadcasting
The overseas channels are widely available across many cable and satellite providers. CCTV administration plans to create a PortuguesePortuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
channel by 2010 and a CCTV English News station by 2011.
The CCTV-4 channel split into three separate channels on 1 April 2007—each serves different time zones: China Standard Time, Greenwich Mean Time
Greenwich Mean Time
Greenwich Mean Time is a term originally referring to mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. It is arguably the same as Coordinated Universal Time and when this is viewed as a time zone the name Greenwich Mean Time is especially used by bodies connected with the United...
(GMT), and Eastern Standard Time
Eastern Standard Time
Eastern Standard Time may refer to:*North American Eastern Time Zone, UTC-5*Australian Eastern Standard Time, UTC+10*An album by Hip Hop group Kooley High...
(EST)—in order to improve service for audiences around the world.
On 25 July 2009, CCTV launched its Arabic-language international channel
CCTV International Arabic
CCTV International Arabic is an Arabic-language channel launched by China Central Television in 2009.-Launch:...
, stating that it aims to maintain stronger links with Arabic nations. The Arabic Channel serves the Middle East, North Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region.
On 10 September 2009 CCTV began broadcasting its Russian-language
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
channel.
2009 fire
On 9 February 2009 Television Cultural Center caught fire on the last day of the festivities of Chinese New YearChinese New Year
Chinese New Year – often called Chinese Lunar New Year although it actually is lunisolar – is the most important of the traditional Chinese holidays. It is an all East and South-East-Asia celebration...
, killing one firefighter. The blaze rendered the 42-story structure unusable, as the zinc and titanium alloy of the outer skin was burnt. The Mandarin Oriental Hotel was destroyed before its expected 2009 opening.
The fire had implications for the credibility of CCTV, which was already unpopular because of its dominance in the media. The incident was mocked by netizens who reproduced Photoshopped photos of the fire and criticised CCTV for censoring
Censorship in the People's Republic of China
Censorship in the People's Republic of China is implemented or mandated by the PRC's ruling party, the Communist Party of China . The special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau have their own legal systems and are largely self-governing, so these censorship policies do not apply...
coverage. Pictures of the fire are widely distributed on the internet, as a result of citizen journalism
Citizen journalism
Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal 2003 report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information...
.
See also
- Media in the People's Republic of China
- Television in the People's Republic of China