It also provided programs for minority groups in the Korean, Manchurian, Zang (Tibetan), Uygur, and Kazak languages, as well as programs directed toward Taiwan and overseas Chinese listeners. The station produced general news and cultural and educational programs. Programming was administered by the provincial-level units. The Central People's Broadcasting Station controlled China's national radio network. Typical radio listening included soap operas based on popular novels and a variety of Chinese and foreign music. As radio and television stations grew, the content of the programming changed drastically from the political lectures and statistical lists of the previous period. By 1985 radio reached 75 percent of the population through 167 radio stations, 215 million radios, and a vast wired loudspeaker system. Radio expanded rapidly in the 1980s as important means of mass communication and popular entertainment. Shortwave radios, powered by batteries, solar energy, and car batteries, have traditionally been the main sources of international news in places without electricity. In the old days, with electricity being in short supply in many areas, radio was the main electronic medium for dispensing news and information. According to some estimates 80 percent of the world's population had access to radio in the early 2000s. Radio announcements are still widely broadcast on trains and over loudspeakers in villages.īefore cell phones became common place, radio was the most widely utilized form of electronic media in the developing world. Many radios are tuned into only one station, the local Communist party station. Many old people still turn on the radio first thing in the morning as they did in the 1960s when they listened to hear what Mao and the Communist party wanted them to do. In the Mao era most people got their news and other information from the radio. See Separate Articles: SEX IN THE MEDIA IN CHINA TELEVISION AND MEDIA IN CHINA CHINESE MEDIA: HISTORY, ADVERTISING, NEWS AND GOVERNMENT RELATIONS Radio in the Mao Era and Afterwards In other parts of the country Chinese with short wave radios listen to the BBC and the Voice of America, which the government tries to silence by jamming and drowning them out with Chinese broadcasts in the same frequencies. In Fujian residents can easily pick up Taiwanese stations. Many Chinese in the Guangdong Province tune into Hong Kong radio stations. However, due partly to a more open political atmosphere and an emerging market economy, and partly to the Chinese Communist Party's intent to use television as an effective means for political and cultural propaganda, television programs became increasingly interesting and more relevant to Chinese daily life. Ting Ni wrote in the World Press Encyclopedia: As a state-owned and party-controlled instrument of propaganda, television had limited penetration prior to the 1980s and thus figured insignificantly compared with newspapers and radios before the reform period. Radios are used much less today than in decades past as nearly all Chinese, even in remote rural areas, have smart phones or cell phones. However, many more people were reached, especially in rural areas, via loudspeaker broadcasts of radio programs that bring transmissions to large numbers of radioless households. In 2001, there were 417 million radios in use in China, a rate of 342 per 1,000 population, up from 50 per 1,000 people in the 1970s.
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