The Current Digest of the Chinese Press

Like its older sibling, Current Digest of the Russian Press, this weekly serial publication launched early in 2012 (after a pilot issue in August 2011) provides English translations of timely articles selected from domestic Chinese news publications.

An editorial team of China experts select the articles in CDCP, and East View commissions native speakers to translate. Each weekly issue includes around forty articles. Most article translations provide the complete text. East View reports that a few are “condensed” if the text is repetitive, and  the condensed text is noted in the bibliographic citation.

The editorial effort involved with selection and translation creates a gap of over three months in the appearance of materials online. The most recent issue, examined on August 16, 2012, included news articles from April 30, 2012.

Although source titles change from time to time, East View describes them as “two dozen key daily newspapers, and some key weeklies.” The Appendix, CDCP Working Source List includes a working source list from East View. The news sources range across various provinces, and include “publications focused on specific industries and regions.” 

East View stresses that its editorial selection provides a unique overview of Chinese domestic press output without a restrictive editorial filter for foreign consumption: “[I]t is difficult . . . (especially if a person lacks Chinese-language fluency) to get a broad-survey, comprehensive understanding of current events and happenings from the Chinese point of view. Since the media in China are far from free, any China-borne attempt to represent a broad picture of China to the outside world is bound to lack perspective.”  

The challenge of forming conclusions from any digested content is to understand what proportion of emphasis the selection represents. Ideally additional data would display the overall distribution of subject content in the original sources. East View reports that selection criteria draw heavily on topics observed to be receiving increased coverage in the domestic press, as well as: “topics that are getting decent or heavy coverage in the Chinese press but little to no exposure in English-language news resources; and any reports or commentary that bring fresh perspectives to widely reported events.” In this sense, the digested content can be thought of as a indicator, however subjectively obtained, to deeper content in the original sources.