China Media Group

China Media Group is one of the world’s largest state broadcasting organisations, created on 21 March 2018 by merging China Central Television, China National Radio and China Radio International into a single ministerial-level public institution under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Publicity Department. It operates domestic and international television and radio in dozens of languages, and its President has led it since its creation while concurrently serving as a Deputy Head of the Party department that supervises it. CMG has one of the most extensively documented artificial intelligence programmes among the broadcasters mapped by State Media Monitor, with an adopted usage standard, successive development white papers and its own media large model.

Media assets

Television: China Central Television (CCTV)– CCTV-1, CCTV-1 Hong Kong & Macau, CCTV-2, CCTV-3, CCTV-4 Asia, CCTV-4 Europe, CCTV-4 America, CCTV-4 Daifu, CCTV-5, CCTV-5+, CCTV-6, CCTV-7, CCTV-8, CCTV-9, CCTV-10, CCTV-11, CCTV-12, CCTV-13, CCTV-14, CCTV-15, CCTV-16, CCTV-17, CCTV-4K; Foreign operations- CCTV Entertainment, CCTV Daifu, CCTV Overseas Chinese Opera; China Global Television Network (CGTN)

Radio: China National Radio (CNR)– Voice of China (CNR1), Business Radio (CNR2), Music Radio (CNR3), Golden Radio (CNR4), Zhongua News Radio (CNR5), Shenzhou Radio (CNR6), Radio Greater Bay (CNR7), Ethnic Minority Radio (CNR8), Story Radio (CNR9), Senior Citizen Radio (CNR10), Tibetan Radio (CNR11), Reading radio (CNR12), Uygur Radio (CNR13), Hong Kong Edition (CNR14), Highway Radio (CNR15), Countryside Radio (CNR16), Kazakh Radio (CNR17); China Radio International (CRI)

Digital: CCTV.com, CNR.cn, CRI’s international digital platforms, CGTN Digital and the Yangshipin streaming platform. CGTN also operates the free ad-supported streaming channels CGTN Global Biz, China Travel and Discovering China, launched in 2025 on more than ten international platforms

Ownership and governance

CMG is not a state enterprise but a ministerial-level public institution directly under the State Council, placed under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Publicity Department. Its formal institutional status is therefore governmental, while its political leadership runs through the Party’s propaganda apparatus. Its statutory functions include propagating Party theory and policy, organising major publicity campaigns, providing internal information to the Party Central Committee and the State Council, guiding public opinion, and carrying out other tasks assigned by them. Sector regulation is exercised by the National Radio and Television Administration, a State Council regulatory agency listed separately from CMG in the State Council structure.

Shen Haixiong has been President and Editor-in-Chief since the group was established on 21 March 2018, and holds the post concurrently with a deputy headship of the Central Publicity Department. He is a member of the Party’s 20th Central Committee. Born in Zhejiang in April 1967, he spent much of his career at Xinhua News Agency, where he was Shanghai bureau chief and a deputy editor-in-chief, before serving as Guangdong’s provincial propaganda chief. He remained in post through the review period, chairing CMG’s annual work conference on 26 February 2026 as Party Group Secretary, President and Editor-in-Chief, and representing the group in bilateral media diplomacy as recently as May 2026.

The arrangement is the same pattern State Media Monitor records across the region’s most closely governed outlets, and in the most concentrated form: the head of the broadcaster is simultaneously a senior officer of the body that directs it. CMG operates internal collective structures, including an Editorial Affairs Meeting whose members appear in its own reporting, but State Media Monitor identified no independent governing board, statutory charter guaranteeing editorial autonomy, independent appointing mechanism or external oversight body capable of insulating CMG from Party and state direction.

Source of funding and budget

CMG publishes annual departmental budgets through the Ministry of Finance. Its 2026 departmental budget, released on 26 March 2026, totals CNY 2.062 billion. It includes CNY 1.677 billion in current-year general public budget appropriations, CNY 377.49 million in carried-over funds and CNY 6.91 million in other income. The budget covers CMG headquarters and China International Broadcasting Press Co., Ltd.

That departmental filing is not a consolidated account of the whole CMG network. Constituent operations generate significant advertising, sponsorship and other commercial income, CCTV in particular having long been among China’s largest advertising sellers, and consolidated group revenue is not publicly disclosed. State Media Monitor’s classification therefore does not infer the funding ratio from the headquarters filing alone: analysis by the Media and Journalism Research Center of available budget data across CMG’s constituent operations finds public funding consistently above the 50 per cent threshold.

Editorial independence

No legislation and no independent oversight body exists to guarantee the editorial independence of CMG or any of its constituent outlets. The group functions as the principal instrument of Chinese government and Party communication, domestically and internationally. Editorial direction is set at the highest levels of the Party, and Chinese journalists and media analysts consulted for State Media Monitor describe the group as the Party’s authoritative voice with no scope for independent editorial policy.

That position has produced regulatory consequences abroad. In February 2021 the United Kingdom’s communications regulator revoked CGTN’s broadcast licence after finding that its licence holder, Star China Media Limited, did not exercise the editorial responsibility required of a British broadcast licensee.

International expansion has continued and accelerated. CMG has pursued partnerships with foreign broadcasters across several continents, with Africa identified as a priority region, and has developed bilateral projects including co-productions and joint broadcasts with state broadcasters in Central Asia.

CMG also expanded broadcasting directed at audiences served by international broadcasters during their 2025 disruption. Monitoring cited by ABC found that between October 2024 and March 2025, as Radio Free Asia’s shortwave frequencies fell from 60 to six, China Radio International added 82 shortwave broadcasts, including 26 in Tibetan and 16 in Uyghur. In February 2026 RSF reported that China National Radio had separately expanded its Tibetan-language programming from one programme to seventeen in less than a year. Radio Free Asia resumed Tibetan and Uyghur radio broadcasting through privately contracted transmission services in February 2026, so the position is no longer one of complete withdrawal.

AI and digital policy

CMG’s artificial intelligence programme is among the most extensively documented of any outlet State Media Monitor maps, and it is set out in public documentation rather than internal practice alone.

In July 2023 it released the CMG Media Large Model, which it describes as China’s first industry model oriented toward the media vertical, trained on the group’s audiovisual archive and professional knowledge base. A CMG Artificial Intelligence Studio was unveiled on 23 February 2024, launching alongside A Thousand Years of Poetic Odes, described as China’s first text-to-video AI-generated animation series, with a remit to train the media large model on the group’s archive for specific production tasks. On 21 March 2024 CMG adopted an Artificial Intelligence Usage Standard on a trial basis, described as China’s first standardised framework for AI use in media, and on 22 May 2024 it issued the first edition of its Artificial Intelligence Development White Paper, setting out objectives, development paths and requirements across the organisation.

The programme expanded in 2025. A dedicated Artificial Intelligence Building opened on 28 February 2025, at which CMG released the 2025 edition of its white paper and brought the second-generation media large model online. Applications described in that documentation extend beyond content generation to sports analytics, including markerless motion capture for technical and tactical analysis at major tournaments.

CMG has also positioned itself as a public authority on the technology rather than only a user of it. On 9 January 2026 it published Ten Artificial Intelligence Trends for 2026 jointly with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s research institute, the Zhongguancun Science City authority, the University of Science and Technology of China, Huazhong University of Science and Technology and other bodies. In February 2026 the group announced an upgrade to a third-generation media large model, alongside plans for a high-quality multimodal national corpus and an AI toolchain spanning content creation, editing, distribution and impact assessment.

State Media Monitor notes the significance of this for comparative purposes. CMG’s adopted AI usage standard, successive white papers, dedicated AI infrastructure and proprietary media model make its AI governance framework unusually extensive by international broadcasting standards, while the organisation itself has no editorial independence for those standards to protect. Transparency about the use of the technology and independence in its application are separate things, and CMG demonstrates the first without the second.

Classification rationale

CMG remains classified State-Controlled Media (SC).

It is state-owned and Party-governed in the most direct form the dataset records. CMG is not a company, a trust or a licensed independent broadcaster: it is a ministerial-level public institution directly under the State Council, led by the Party’s Central Publicity Department, with statutory duties that include propagating Party theory and policy and guiding public opinion. State Media Monitor identified no independent governing board, statutory charter, independent appointing mechanism or external oversight body.

Its leadership is embedded in the supervising authority. The President and Editor-in-Chief has held office since the group’s creation and concurrently serves as a Deputy Head of the Central Publicity Department, the body responsible for directing it, while sitting on the Party’s Central Committee.

It is predominantly state-funded. CMG files an annual departmental budget with the Ministry of Finance, most recently for 2026, in which public appropriations account for the overwhelming majority of headquarters resources. That filing is not consolidated, and constituent outlets, CCTV above all, earn significant commercial revenue. The finding rests instead on analysis of published budget data across CMG’s constituent operations, which indicates that state funding consistently exceeds half of total spending. This is the condition that distinguishes CMG from the Vietnamese and Thai state outlets reclassified in this cycle, where the ratio could not be established.

Its editorial agenda is directed by the state. CMG is the principal vehicle of Party and government communication at home and abroad, its editorial guidelines are set at the highest levels, and no statute or body exists to provide a counterweight. A foreign regulator has formally found that its international arm’s licence holder did not exercise editorial control over its own output.

August 2026