China marked National Journalist Day on Saturday (November 8, 2025). The date corresponds to the founding of the All‑China Journalists Association (ACJA). However, while the government frames the day as a celebration of journalists and their role, the Chinese regime actually uses the day to promote its propaganda narrative, even while independent journalism is under heavy threat.
Under Xi Jinping, China has perfected an information regime that leaves little room for dissent. Since 2012, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has dismantled every safeguard that once allowed limited press autonomy. Independent media outlets have been replaced by a state-run propaganda system designed to monitor, manipulate and mobilise public opinion.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, as of December 2024 at least 50 journalists were in prison — the highest number in the world. Behind these figures lies a deliberate system: journalism redefined as a branch of the Party, “surnamed CCP,” in Xi’s own words. Party directives now dictate roughly 90 per cent of published content, ensuring that news serves the state rather than society.
The consequence is total narrative control. Reporters who question official lines on corruption, human rights or public health face harassment, disappearance or lengthy prison terms on charges of “spreading rumours” or “leaking state secrets.” Journalism itself has been criminalised — an act of reporting now seen as a threat to national security.
What price do journalists pay for defying censorship?
The stories of those punished reveal the scale of repression. Citizen journalist Zhang Zhan was jailed for reporting from Wuhan at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, exposing chaotic hospital scenes and official cover-ups. Convicted of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” she endured hunger strikes, force-feeding and repeated hospitalisation before being rearrested in 2024.
Australian TV anchor Cheng Lei, once a face of China’s English-language broadcaster CGTN, spent three years in solitary confinement on the charge of “leaking state secrets.” Her “crime,” she later revealed, was sharing an embargoed government briefing minutes early.
Huang Qi, founder of the human-rights website 64 Tianwang, was sentenced to 12 years in secret proceedings for “providing state secrets to foreign countries.” He remains imprisoned in deteriorating health, denied medical care and family contact.
In Hong Kong, the 2020 National Security Law has criminalised journalism itself. Newsrooms such as Stand News were raided, editors jailed, and veteran publisher Jimmy Lai remains in solitary confinement under charges deemed “arbitrary and unlawful” by a UN working group.
Families of journalists are not spared. Uyghur reporters working abroad for Radio Free Asia have seen relatives in Xinjiang detained or disappeared — a tactic of collective punishment that extends the state’s reach beyond its borders.
Can the international community hold China accountable?
UN experts and rights groups have condemned China’s persecution of journalists, calling detentions arbitrary and often involving torture and forced confessions. Yet the regime’s opacity limits external scrutiny. Investigations stall, resolutions fade and trade interests frequently trump human rights advocacy.
Xi’s tightening grip on the media has transformed censorship into infrastructure — algorithmic, institutional and total. The result is not just silence but simulation: a country where journalism’s vocabulary survives while its meaning is erased.
If global democracies fail to respond, Beijing’s model of “managed truth” risks becoming an exportable template — one that blurs propaganda and information until the difference disappears.