Newspapers and Journals
The number of newspapers in mainland China has increased from 42—virtually all Communist Party papers—in 1968 to 382 in 1980 and more than 2,200 today. By one official estimate, there are now more than 7,000 magazines and journals in the country. The number of copies of daily and weekly newspapers and magazines in circulation grew fourfold between the mid-1960s and the mid-to-late 1980s, reaching 310 million by 1987. (2)
These figures, moreover, underreport actual circulation, because many publishers use their own distribution networks rather than official dissemination channels and also deliberately understate figures to avoid taxes. (3) In addition, some 25,000 printing houses and hundreds of individual bookstores produce and sell nonofficial material—mostly romance literature and pornography but also political and intellectual journals.
China has many newspapers but the front runners are all State-run: the People's Daily, Beijing Daily, Guangming Daily and the Liberation Daily. The two major news agencies in China are Xinhua News Agency and the China News Service. Xinhua was given power to censor and edit the news of the foreign agencies in 2007. Some saw the power of Xinhua as making the press freedom weak and it allowed Xinhua to control the news market fully.
Much of the information collected by the Chinese mainstream media is published in neicans (internal, limited circulation reports prepared for the high-ranking government officials), not in the public outlets.
Read more about this topic: Media Of China
Famous quotes containing the words newspapers and, newspapers and/or journals:
“I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that’s news. If they aren’t, that’s news too.”
—Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982)
“Reality has become so absorbing that the streets, the television, and the journals have confiscated the public interest and people are no longer thirsty for culture on a higher level.”
—Andre Plesu (b. 1948)