User:Blueberryicecream

 Introduction  China Central Television (CCTV) is a state-owned ministerial level institution of China, used to be called Beijing Television before 1978. China Central Television owns 50 television channels, and the broadcaster provides programming in six different languages. Among the 50 television channels, 16 of them are public while 21 are pay channels, and with 13 channels of foreign languages, which are English, French, Russian, Arabic as well as Spanish. It is one of the largest official mouthpieces of the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and under the supervision of State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television of the People’s Republic of China (SAPPRFT), a department within the State Council. State Council is the main department that supervising and censoring the whole China’s television industry. The following graph (Figure 1) depicts the structure of China’s Television System. SAPPRFT is an executive branch under the State Council. Its main task is the administration and supervision of state-owned enterprise engaged in the television, radio and film industries. It performs the actual daily oversight, including censorship of sensitive content. Government related media organizations like CCTV, Xinhua News Agency and China National Radio must have permissions from SAPPRFT to broadcast the new content to the public.

 Directors  The directors on CCTV also have positions in related government organizations and all of them are the members of Communist Party of China. Nie Chenxi, who is the main director of CCTV since 2015. He’s also the vice director of the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC), main director of SAPPRFT as well as the director of the National Copyright Administration of the People’s Republic of China. Nie was born in 1957 and from Hebei Province. He worked for the local government since 1974. In the duration, he studied a master degree in management and engineering. In February 1993, He joined the Communist Party of China and worked towards to the CCP. During Nie’s time, the government has issued repeated orders telling television channels to focus on “uplifting, patriotic programs and screen out ‘base and vulgar’ content” (Reuters, 2015). Historically, directors of CCTV made cultural revolutions. In December 1991, Yang Weiguang was assigned as president of CCTV. With his peasant family background, it’s no doubt helped him secure a steady position in the government related broadcaster organizations. He left his CCTV post in 1999, and the ten years of his management of CCTV were considered as the best days. In Yang’s decade, CCTV was “unquestionably the network’s high point in terms of party approval, market position, and public sphere” (Zhu, 2012). It was the first decade of CCTV’s transformation from state-funded proselytizer to commercial broadcaster.