Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-2pzkn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-08T23:48:26.104Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Use of Radio in China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Hugh Howse
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The very size of China has imposed on all who would rule it the twin problems of unification and control. Indeed the very first Chinese Emperor, as opposed to Kings among Kings, Ch'in Shih-huang (d. 210 b.c.) achieved the hegemony and his right to this title by being the first to solve these problems. Their continuing intractability in China, despite the mould of history and the unifying cement of the Chinese script, is reflected in Sun Yat-sen's description of the Chinese people more than 2,000 years later as “loose sand.” Ch'in Shih-huang had the stern admonitions of the Legalists as his aid to unification and Sun Yat-sen revolutionary fervour as his. There is no doubt that both or, for that matter, any other would-be ruler in between these two ends of the time scale in China, would have seized on radio as an additional aid, had its potentialities been available to them. Given this basic Chinese problem of unification and control, the failure of the Kuomintang to exploit radio on any effective scale is therefore surprising. China's latest rulers, faced not only with this old problem but also with a new ideology to spread and a new orthodoxy to engender, have naturally sought to exploit it to the full.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 2 , June 1960 , pp. 59 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1960

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Tse-tung, Mao, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People,” NCNA, 06 18, 1957.Google Scholar

2 The writer was informed by a member of a Western legislature, who visited China in 1956, that it was noticeable that on advanced co-operatives and state farms, for example, a radio receiving system was in evidence even before the administrative buildings were completed.

3 Unfortunately, it is not possible to give any indication of the quality of the equipment. It is also worth noting that China recently ordered a colour television camera from a British firm.

4 It is interesting to note the amount of coverage given to national minority areas. The Central People's Broadcasting Station broadcasts in Mongolian, Chuang, Tibetan, Uighur, and Korean. The provincial stations in Szechuan, Chinghai, Kansu, Yunnan and Kweichow also broadcast minority-language programmes. In addition to programmes from these stations in the main minority languages, programmes in sixteen other minority languages are broadcast daily by the various supplementary systems described above.

5 Chinese sources now refer to individual radio sets as being “popular” in the urban areas, and it seems likely that short-wave sets are not uncommon in such areas, as regulations on the control of wireless apparatus, published in the Peking People's Daily in 07 1955Google Scholar, showed that their possession was subject to control. The jamming of Voice of America programmes in Chinese, and, more recently, of B.B.C. programmes in Chinese, does indicate concern on the part of the authorities at listening to foreign broadcasts in Chinese.

6 Regulations on Regional relays of programmes originated by the Central People's Broadcasting Station, issued in April 1959, specified that all stations should relay the national hook-up programme and that other programmes which could be chosen for local relaying were News, Press Reviews, the “International Life” and “International Affairs” programmes.

7 Translated from the Central People's Broadcasting Station's Radio Programme Weekly of 10 19–25, 1959.Google Scholar

8 The writer's attention was recently drawn to the interesting fact that the Soviet Union began its broadcasts in Chinese as early as 1929, when a new Soviet radio station was opened at Khabarovsk on the Manchurian frontier (noted in The Wireless World of 07 15, 1929).Google Scholar