About Jingdezhen Television

Jingdezhen Television

Overview

Jingdezhen Television (Chinese: 景德镇电视台) is the municipal television station of Jingdezhen, a prefecture-level city in northeastern Jiangxi, run by the Jingdezhen radio and television broadcaster as part of the city's converged media centre. Its flagship channel serves the prefecture with news, livelihood and arts programming in Mandarin, and the wider institution behind it also runs radio services, a television website and a broadcast newspaper. Few prefecture stations in China serve a city with so singular an identity: Jingdezhen is China's porcelain capital, a place that has produced imperial porcelain for over a thousand years, and that single fact shapes almost everything the station covers.

The broadcaster's own published departmental accounts describe a complete prefecture media system in miniature. Jingdezhen Radio and Television Station is responsible for three sets of television programmes and two sets of radio programmes, for the Jing TV website and the radio and television newspaper, and for relaying the national and provincial signals into the prefecture. Ceramics heritage, craft markets and the porcelain export trade give the station an unusually arts-centred local remit, and its schedules sit alongside the work of the kilns, the Ceramics Museum and a large community of independent studio potters.

What the station is charged to do

The station's official duties, set out in its published departmental final accounts, run to a full statement of what a Chinese municipal broadcaster is for. Its first duty is publicity: to publicise the party's line, principles and policies, hold to the correct guidance of public opinion, spread scientific and cultural knowledge, transmit social and economic information, enliven the cultural life of the masses, hold the publicity position, guarantee safe broadcasting, and complete the tasks assigned by the municipal party committee and municipal government.

The remaining duties are developmental and technical. The station formulates and implements development plans for the city's radio and television undertaking and industry, promotes the development of broadcasting, speeds up digitalisation and informatisation, and applies new broadcast technologies and scientific results. It implements the industry's laws and regulations and manages its internal affairs under superior rules. And it underwrites the whole system financially, providing the funds guarantee for the city's radio and television undertaking — a reminder that in the Chinese prefecture system the station is not merely a programme-maker but the institution that keeps local broadcasting solvent and on air.

Three television programmes and two radio services

Television is the centre of the operation: the accounts record three sets of television programmes produced and broadcast by the station, against two sets of radio programmes. The television flagship carries the prefecture's news, livelihood and public-service output in Mandarin, while the wider channel family gives the broadcaster room for the arts and cultural programming that Jingdezhen's porcelain identity demands.

Alongside television, the station operates the Jing TV website and manages the city's radio and television newspaper, and it is charged with developing, expanding and operating broadcast new media. That combination — three television services, two radio services, a website, a listings newspaper and a new-media operation — is the standard converged shape of a Chinese prefecture broadcaster, and in Jingdezhen it is all run from the single station.

Inside the station: fourteen departments

The same accounts give an unusually complete picture of the station's internal structure. Jingdezhen Radio and Television Station is organised into fourteen departments, offices and centres: an office, a chief editor's office, a human resources department, a finance management department, a technology centre, a news centre, a news comprehensive radio service, a traffic music radio service, a social education centre, an advertising operations and management centre, a radio and television transmission centre, an arts centre, a features department and an industry development department.

The structure shows the division of labour inside a prefecture station. News gathering sits in the news centre; the two radio services have their own homes in the structure, one for news and one for traffic and music; the arts centre and features department reflect the cultural weight of the porcelain brief; and separate technology and transmission centres keep the signals moving. The station's approved establishment in its 2020 accounts was 113 posts, funded by differential appropriation — a mid-sized institution by prefecture standards, carrying television, radio, print and digital output for a city of kilns.

Relaying the national and provincial signal

A prefecture station is also a relay station. Jingdezhen's broadcaster is formally responsible for rebroadcasting and transmitting the first programmes of China Central Television, Jiangxi Television, China National Radio and Jiangxi People's Radio, together with any other programmes its superiors require. It guarantees wireless broadcast coverage across the prefecture, coordinates with the provincial radio and television network transmission company, and safeguards local rights and interests within that system.

The duty is written as a single chain of responsibility: to keep the whole flow of gathering, production, broadcasting and transmission complete, unified, safe and efficient. For viewers in Jingdezhen's counties, the national and provincial pictures arrive through infrastructure that the municipal station helps to maintain — one reason the transmission centre, rather than the newsroom, is often the largest technical commitment in a station of this size.

A city written in clay

The coverage patch explains the arts remit. Jingdezhen's own official profile records more than 2,000 years of pottery-making, more than 1,000 years of official kilns and 600 years of imperial kilns, in a city summed up in the phrase "three sides green mountains, one side water; half the city is kilns". Craftsmen came from all directions and finished wares travelled the whole world — the profile's summary of the Ming and Qing heyday, when Jingdezhen stood as one of China's four famous towns alongside Foshan, Hankou and Zhuxianzhen.

The name itself is a broadcast-worthy story. The town was founded in the Eastern Jin dynasty as Xinping, renamed Changnan in the Tang because it stood south of the Chang River, and given its present name in 1004, when the Song emperor Zhenzong lent it his Jingde reign title. Changnan, the city notes, is the transliteration behind the English word "china" — the place gave its name to the ware, and the ware to the country in the world's vocabulary. In 1982 Jingdezhen was named among the first batch of national historical and cultural cities, and in 2004 it celebrated the millennium of its name. Its fame rests on a mineral: kaolin, dug alongside coal, manganese and lime, is the clay that made Jingdezhen porcelain famous in China and the world.

Kilns, museums and the Jingdrifters

The station's arts coverage has rich raw material. The city counts some 160 porcelain heritage sites, including the Gaoling ancient mine and the Hutian kiln sites, and holds a national ceramics culture ecological protection experimental zone. Its Ceramics Museum anchors the public presentation of the craft, while a large community of independent studio potters — the so-called "Jingdrifters" who migrate to the city to work in clay — gives contemporary Jingdezhen a young, artisanal population unlike that of any other Jiangxi prefecture.

Academic research on the city underlines how central media are to that identity: a 2023 study of the international communication of Jingdezhen's ceramic culture examined how the city projects its porcelain story to the world through new media, mobile media and digital television alongside traditional newspapers, magazines and television. For the municipal station, ceramic culture is not a strand of programming but the city's principal story about itself, told at home to residents and outward to the porcelain-buying world.

Jingdezhen Television today

Today Jingdezhen Television works as part of the city's converged media centre, the institutional form that has gathered the prefecture's television, radio, newspaper and digital operations under one roof. Its published duties already anticipate that shape: developing new media, running the television website and keeping the full chain from gathering to transmission safe and unified are written into the station's own charter.

The result is a small broadcaster with an outsized subject. Where most prefecture stations divide their attention among industry, agriculture and county news, Jingdezhen's journalists return again and again to one material — clay — in its heritage, market, museum and workshop forms. A station whose city has fired porcelain for two thousand years does not lack for stories; its task is to keep the kilns, and the people who work them, at the centre of the prefecture's screen.