China Central Television, Foreign Language Program of

Abstract

China Central Television (CCTV) is the national broadcaster of the People's Republic of China (PRC) (→ China Central Television Channel 9 (CCTV‐9); China: Media System). In 2010, CCTV broadcast globally to target markets via satellite and cable in Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, Russian, and Spanish (→ Satellite Television; Cable Television). CCTV's non‐English and non‐Chinese foreign language services are closely related to each other and to the original foreign language service in English. That service was launched in 1986 as English News , a daily bulletin translated from CCTV's national nightly news, Xinwen Lianbo (Liu 2006). For the next eighteen years, the English language service was CCTV's only non‐Chinese broadcast intended for foreigners. However, an ambitious government project launched in 2001 to promote the global image of the People's Republic of China (PRC) resulted in an expansion of CCTV's overseas broadcasts. CCTV launched a joint French and Spanish service on October 1, 2004. The broadcaster split that service into separate French and Spanish channels on October 1, 2007. CCTV added an Arabic channel on July 25, 2009, and launched its Russian service on September 10, 2009. CCTV‐F (French), CCTV‐E (Spanish), CCTV (Arabic) and CCTV (Russian) are based on a common programming template originally derived from CCTV‐9 (English, now broadcast as CCTV‐News). The shared template resulted from the common origins of the services within CCTV's Overseas Service Center (OSC), which also ran a Mandarin language broadcast oriented to Chinese and Chinese speakers abroad. Senior personnel for these channels primarily were drawn from within the ranks of administrators, journalists, and technicians already working at the OSC. As of November 2010, all of CCTV's foreign language overseas channels had a rotation of Chinese and foreign news anchors and program hosts, the latter from the following countries: Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia (Arabic); Australia, Canada, Malaysia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Zimbabwe (English); Belgium, France (French); Belarus, Russia, Ukraine (Russian); and Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Spain (Spanish).