China

China’s media system is organised through Party-state structures ultimately directed by the Chinese Communist Party rather than through arm’s-length public-service governance, and the 2018 institutional reform made that architecture explicit. News publication functions moved into the Central Publicity Department, which now carries the State Council Information Office nameplate; the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office was absorbed into the United Front Work Department, bringing China News Service under that structure; and China Central Television, China National Radio and China Radio International were merged into China Media Group under Central Publicity Department leadership. Since then consolidation has continued through mergers of titles, platforms and organisational functions, alongside the Party’s broader push for systemic reform of mainstream media.

State Media Monitor maps 17 active organisations, none in the independent family. They comprise eight central-level publications, including People’s Daily, Qiushi, Guangming Daily, Economic Daily, China Daily, PLA Daily and Legal Daily; the two central news agencies, Xinhua and China News Service; the broadcaster China Media Group; the external communication and publishing group CICG; two municipal groups in Shanghai; the Hong Kong-listed Phoenix TV; and two diaspora operations in the United States and New Zealand. Global CAMG Media Group in Australia was ordered wound up and a liquidator appointed in December 2025; State Media Monitor records its media operation as closed.

The distribution across categories requires explanation, because it does not track the degree of political control. Nine outlets are classified State-Controlled and seven Captured Public/State-Managed, with one, the Chinese New Zealand Herald, moved to Captured Private after State Media Monitor corrected the ownership record: the documented 2016 joint venture was between NZME and the locally owned Chinese Herald. The apparent distinction between the first two categories in China largely reflects evidentiary availability rather than meaningful differences in political control. Almost every CaPu case sits there because predominant state funding could not be demonstrated from published sources, not because governance or editorial direction is looser. Xinhua is the clearest instance. It holds an officially assigned role as the state’s centralised and unified release channel for authoritative Party and government news, and its own budget documentation states that its staff are Party people before they are Xinhua people. It moved out of State-Controlled this cycle because its unusually detailed departmental final accounts show direct fiscal appropriation at 28.6 per cent of current-year income in 2023, 34.9 per cent in 2024 and 32.3 per cent in 2025. CaPu should never be read as semi-independent, and China demonstrates that more clearly than any country in the dataset.

China ranked 178th of 180 countries in the 2026 RSF World Press Freedom Index with a score of 13.85, down from 14.80 at the same rank in 2025. Only North Korea and Eritrea ranked lower. RSF describes China as the world’s largest prison for journalists, with more than 100 currently detained.

Two instruments are particularly relevant to synthetic media governance: the deep synthesis provisions in force since 10 January 2023, and the Measures for Labelling Artificial Intelligence-Generated and Synthesised Content, effective 1 September 2025. Within the Chinese sample, AI adoption is unusually institutionalised at several major organisations while published editorial governance remains uneven. China Media Group adopted a formal usage standard in 2024 and has issued successive development white papers; Shanghai Media Group reports an internal AI management regulation; People’s Daily supplies a curated training corpus to model developers. Elsewhere adoption has outpaced published governance, and the Philippines formally protested an AI-generated China Daily video published on 10 July 2026, demanding its removal.

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