Qiushi

Qiushi, meaning Seeking Truth, is the official theoretical journal of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the principal platform through which the Party sets out and interprets its ideological positions. Its predecessor, Red Flag, published its final issue on 16 June 1988. On 30 May that year the Central Committee decided to entrust the Central Party School with founding a new theoretical journal, and Qiushi was launched on 1 July. In July 1989 it became directly sponsored by the Party Central Committee, restoring its status as a Central Committee organ. Deng Xiaoping wrote the masthead. Qiushi Magazine is a public institution directly under the CCP Central Committee. The Chinese edition appears twice monthly, on the first and sixteenth of each month, while the separate English edition is published every two months.

Media assets

Journals: Qiushi, published on the first and sixteenth of each month; Red Flag Manuscript, a twice-monthly journal of political theory supervised and sponsored by Qiushi Magazine and described by it as an important component of the Qiushi publicity enterprise; and a separate English-language edition of Qiushi, founded in 2009 and published every two months for an international readership

Digital: Qiushi Online at qstheory.cn, launched on 1 July 2009 as Qiushi Theory Net and renamed Qiushi Online on 15 August 2014, together with its WeChat and Weibo channels and other digital products. In July 2026 Qiushi Online launched Qiushi Hao, an aggregation platform bringing together theoretical articles from Party journals across China, described as part of a distribution matrix spanning journal, web, application, social media and screen

Ownership and governance

Qiushi Magazine is a public institution directly under the CCP Central Committee. The journal describes itself as the organ of the Central Committee and an important ideological and theoretical position from which the Central Committee guides the work of the whole Party and the country, charged with propagating Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory and subsequent doctrine, and with explaining the Party’s line, principles, policies and central decisions.

The organisation is governed through an editorial committee. Institutional documentation identifies the president as the organisation’s first responsible person, with the editor-in-chief and other editorial committee members participating in the leadership structure, and major institutional matters handled collectively through the committee.

Qiushi Magazine was subject to a Central Commission for Discipline Inspection political inspection, with a rectification report published in March 2026 addressing the responsibilities of the editorial committee, the leadership structure, subordinate publications, affiliated units and the management of state-owned assets.

Source of funding and budget

State Media Monitor identified no current departmental budget or consolidated financial statements published by Qiushi Magazine.

Public and Party financing is nevertheless structural to its operations. Qiushi Magazine is a public institution directly under the CCP Central Committee, and the circulation of central Party newspapers and journals is treated as a political task, organised through provincial and municipal Party secretaries and financed in significant part from Party dues and public subscription budgets. Qiushi is also a substantial procuring entity within the central government system: its 2026 specialist paper procurement, worth CNY 86.214 million, was run through the Central Committee’s procurement centre.

Qiushi does have enterprise activity. Qiushi Web Media (Beijing) Co., Ltd. was established in March 2017 with the approval of the Central Publicity Department, wholly invested in and supervised by Qiushi Magazine, and operates Qiushi Online. The journal’s own 2025 social responsibility report describes circulation and distribution as its principal operating activity while emphasising that political and social benefit take precedence and that editorial and business activities are kept separate.

Editorial independence

Qiushi is the Party’s theoretical journal and states that function directly. Its 2025 social responsibility report describes its political positioning as the organ of the Party Central Committee, applies the principle that the Party journal bears the Party’s surname, and makes the propagation and explanation of Xi Jinping Thought and Central Committee policy its fundamental responsibility, identifying the publication of the General Secretary’s texts as a core task.

Articles by the General Secretary appear regularly, often assembled from excerpts of speeches and instructions across a period of years. The first issue of 2026, published on 1 January, carried Xi Jinping’s article on studying and implementing the spirit of the Fourth Plenum of the 20th Central Committee, describing that as a major political task for the whole Party and country. The fifth issue, published on 1 March 2026, carried excerpts of his remarks from December 2012 to December 2025 on cultivating a culture of responsibility.

Editorial process is documented rather than assumed. The March 2026 inspection rectification report records that Qiushi operates a five-review, seven-stage editorial process, with a three-review system operating within editorial departments.

No legislation, charter, independent board or external oversight mechanism exists to assess or guarantee the journal’s editorial independence.

AI and digital policy

State Media Monitor identified no publicly available Qiushi editorial policy governing the use of generative artificial intelligence, human verification of AI-assisted output, or disclosure of AI-generated material to audiences.

Public evidence nevertheless shows active institutional exploration of the technology. In 2026 the operating company for Qiushi Online recruited for an artificial intelligence product manager responsible for planning and designing a theoretical large language model, productising large models, and designing AI agent applications for media, government and enterprise use. That establishes product development activity but does not demonstrate the extent, if any, to which generative AI is used in Qiushi’s published editorial texts.

China’s regulatory framework applies to covered internet information services. The deep synthesis provisions, effective January 2023, require technical identifiers for generated or edited information and conspicuous labels for specified forms of synthesis where these may cause public confusion or misidentification. The Measures for Labelling Artificial Intelligence-Generated and Synthesised Content, effective 1 September 2025, established the explicit and implicit labelling framework more systematically.

Classification rationale

Qiushi remains classified State-Controlled Media (SC).

It is Party-owned and Party-governed in the most direct form the dataset records. Qiushi Magazine is a public institution directly under the CCP Central Committee, and the journal is the Central Committee’s own organ. It is governed through an internal editorial committee with the president as first responsible person, and no independent governing board, charter, appointing mechanism or external oversight exists. Its rectification obligations following a Central Commission for Discipline Inspection inspection were published in March 2026.

Its editorial agenda is the Party’s agenda, not merely aligned with it. Qiushi exists to state the Party’s theoretical positions and to carry authoritative articles by its leadership, and its own institutional documents describe that as its fundamental responsibility. The question of editorial independence does not arise in the form it takes for a news organisation, because the journal makes no claim to report independently on the body that publishes it.

It is predominantly publicly funded. No accounts are published, and the organisation does have enterprise activity through the company that operates its website, with circulation described as its principal operating activity. But the circulation of central Party journals is a political task financed substantially from Party dues and public subscription budgets rather than won in an open market, and the journal procures on a large scale through the central government system. Public and Party resources are structural to its financing rather than supplementary to it.

August 2026