Xinhua News Agency

The Xinhua [New China] News Agency is the official state and Party news agency in China charged with collecting and supplying news, information and analysis to news organizations throughout the country and overseas. It officially exists as a department of the State Council, but it is also answerable to the Central Propaganda Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its primary function is the promulgation of propaganda for the CCP and the government.

Xinhua, by far the largest news agency in China, was originally launched as the Red China News Service to report the First Congress of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers organized by the CCP in Jiangxi province in 1931. According to CCP theory, Xinhua is conceived as having a dual role—to supply news to the people but also to canvass views of the population about government policy and social developments and feed these views back to the Party leadership.

However, in general the transfer of information has been from the government to the people, and the Agency is still conceived as the principle mouthpiece of the Party.

In the 1990s, considerable investment in the Agency from the central government has seen it grow and develop to offer a professional and commercial, as well as politically motivated, news service. It has 106 overseas bureaus in addition to its thirty-six domestic bureaus and numerous sub-bureaus throughout the country. The balance of its foreign news within its news reporting has steadily increased over the post-Mao reform period and currently stands at approximately 60:40 in favour of domestic news. In the late 1990s the Agency launched its own comprehensive news website in Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Japanese and Arabic.

See also: Internet /content; newspapers; state control of media

KEVIN LATHAM