About Tian Jian

Tian Jian

Tian Jian (田間) is the Chinese-language sister publication of the China Media Project (CMP), described by CMP as its Chinese-language news magazine of and about global Sinophone media and journalism. Published weekly on Tuesdays and free to access, it carries interviews, special reports and newsletters exploring the challenges facing the media industry, and it exists to foster dialogue and collaboration to strengthen media development across the Sinophone world. Its chief editor is Heng Yu Chien, formerly a journalist with Taiwanese outlets including Storm Media and the United Daily News (UDN), and its reporting team includes Taiwan-based journalists such as reporter Su Hsiao Fan. Tian Jian's interviews and investigations — from a long conversation with FT Chinese editor-in-chief Wang Feng on newsroom standards in the AI era, to a June 2025 interview with historian Ian Johnson on the China Unofficial Archives, to a 2026 report on the silencing of China's journalists — have made it a distinctive Mandarin-language forum in which the people who run and study Chinese-language media talk to one another, and to readers, about the condition of their profession.

The China Media Project: Tian Jian's parent

To understand Tian Jian is to understand the institution that created it. The China Media Project is an independent research project specialising in the study of the Chinese media landscape both within the People's Republic of China and globally, as well as the specialised media and political discourse of the Chinese Communist Party. It was first launched in 2004 as a research and fellowship programme at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, responding to the need for specialised research and engagement around developments in the Chinese media landscape. It was started by Qian Gang, a veteran journalist and well-known author of several books on journalism, and Yuen-ying Chan, an award-winning journalist and educator who founded and directed the Journalism and Media Studies Centre. Today CMP is based in the United States, with a research hub in Taipei, Taiwan, and works with a range of journalists and partners to monitor trends and breaking developments in journalism and communications in China, under director David Bandurski, who joined the team in 2004 and is the author of Dragons in Diamond Village. Tian Jian is the project's Chinese-language publishing arm — the means by which a largely English-language research institution speaks directly, in Mandarin, to the Sinophone media world it studies.

What Tian Jian is: a magazine of and about Sinophone media

CMP's own description of Tian Jian is precise about its double subject: it is a news magazine of and about global Sinophone media and journalism. It is written in Chinese, for the worldwide community of people who make, study and follow Chinese-language media — a community that spans the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and a global diaspora, and that works under radically different political and commercial conditions. Its stated forms are interviews, special reports and newsletters, and its stated purpose is exploratory and connective: to explore the challenges facing the media industry, fostering dialogue and collaboration to strengthen media development. The Circle 19 media recommendations catalogue — a curated guide to independent sources of information on China — lists Tian Jian in exactly these terms, noting its weekly Tuesday publication and its free access. In a Sinophone media environment where outlets in different jurisdictions rarely address one another directly, a magazine whose beat is the profession itself, published by a research institution with two decades of standing, occupies a niche with no close parallel.

Heng Yu Chien and the Tian Jian team

Tian Jian's chief editor, Heng Yu Chien, came to the magazine from Taiwanese journalism. He previously worked as a journalist for several local media outlets in Taiwan, including Storm Media and UDN, where his focus was covering world news and foreign affairs — work that included interviews with Kelly Craft, the former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, and Kishore Mahbubani, the former Singapore Ambassador to the UN. He holds a BA in political science and international relations from Hunter College, City University of New York. That background — Taiwan-based, internationally oriented, formed in foreign-affairs reporting — matches the magazine's outward-looking remit. Tian Jian's named reporter, Su Hsiao Fan, has worked for many years as a freelance journalist in Taiwan on topics across society, culture and the media; her work has appeared in The Reporter and Initium Media and in the film magazine Filmholic, and she previously worked as a news editor and magazine feature writer, holding a master's degree in journalism from National Chengchi University. Around them sits CMP's wider team — managing editor Jordyn Haime, investigations coordinator Lu Yihsuan, formerly of Voice of America's China desk and Taiwan's Liberty Times, and the Lingua Sinica project team — giving the small magazine the support of a research institution.

The interview as signature form

Tian Jian's most characteristic work is the long interview with a senior figure of Chinese-language journalism. Its conversation with Wang Feng, editor-in-chief of FT Chinese since 2015, took up newsroom standards in the AI era: how the Financial Times' Chinese service embraces artificial intelligence while safeguarding journalistic professionalism, from its reader-facing chatbot 'ChatFTC' to the integration of AI tools across a team led by a journalist of twenty-six years' experience across wire services, newspapers and magazines, about twenty of them as an editor building digital platforms. The interview ranged into industry strategy, asking Wang about the launch of Barron's Chinese in partnership with TMTPost and the competitive position of international media's Mandarin services. In June 2025, Tian Jian published an in-depth interview with the historian and journalist Ian Johnson about the China Unofficial Archives — how the archive was founded, what its goals are and its new software developments — an exchange substantial enough that Johnson published a machine translation of it for his own readers. These interviews function as professional testimony: practitioners accounting, in Chinese and on the record, for how their institutions work and what is happening to them.

Special reports: the silenced profession

Alongside the interviews, Tian Jian publishes special reports on the conditions of journalism inside China. Its report 'The Silenced Profession', published in February 2026 and written by freelancer Tian Yu, took the detention by local police in Chengdu of investigative journalist Liu Hu as the occasion to explore the pressures confronting reporters at every level — from on-site obstruction and disappeared articles to institutional review mechanisms and informant-style pressures. A June 2026 report, 'The Economic Downturn and China's Silent Press', argued that as China's economy sputters, journalists are falling silent not for lack of facts but because the space for telling these stories continues to narrow, undermining the public's ability to understand how the economy actually functions. CMP's English-language site cross-publishes and draws on this work — its own articles cite Tian Jian's reporting and translate its subjects for Anglophone readers — so that reporting gathered in Chinese by Tian Jian's contributors feeds the wider world's understanding of Chinese journalism's condition, closing a loop between the magazine and its parent project's research mission.

Relationship with CMP's English-language work and Lingua Sinica

Tian Jian sits within a small family of CMP products. The parent site publishes English-language research and commentary in strands such as 'Headlines and Hashtags', following the stories shaping the Chinese media environment, and 'Tracking Control', examining the ideological concepts, policies, laws and practices that guide and constrain media space in China. CMP's newsletter Lingua Sinica — supported by a data and mapping project on Chinese-language media globally, coordinated by researcher Dalia Parete — regularly directs its readers to Tian Jian's work, introducing its Mandarin coverage to an international audience of China-media specialists. The division of labour is deliberate: the English-language project analyses the Sinophone media world for outside observers, while Tian Jian addresses that world in its own language, as a participant. When Lingua Sinica's editor signs off by commending 'the wonderful work our colleagues at Tian Jian are doing in Mandarin', the collegial phrasing reflects a real structural fact — one institution publishing about Chinese media in English and in Chinese at once, with each side citing the other.

Why a Chinese-language magazine, and why free

Two of Tian Jian's defining choices deserve emphasis. The first is language. CMP was founded at a Hong Kong university journalism centre and built its reputation in English, the language of international China studies; creating a Chinese-language magazine was a decision to enter the Sinophone conversation rather than only observe it, accepting the discipline of being read by the journalists it writes about. The second is access: Tian Jian is free to access, published weekly on Tuesdays. For a magazine aimed at fostering dialogue and collaboration across a profession whose members work under censorship, paywalls of a different kind and political pressure, free weekly publication maximises the chance that a report on Chengdu's detained journalists or an interview on AI standards is actually read in the newsrooms it concerns — in Taipei, Hong Kong, the mainland where reachable, and the diaspora. Its inclusion in the Circle 19 catalogue of recommended independent media on China confirms that this is how informed guides to the region's information ecosystem regard it: as infrastructure for the right to information, not merely as content.

Why Tian Jian matters

Tian Jian matters because the crisis of Chinese-language journalism is, in large part, a crisis of professional self-knowledge: journalists working under tightening control in the mainland, under political polarisation in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and under commercial strain everywhere, have few shared forums in which to compare their situations honestly. A weekly, free, Chinese-language magazine of and about their own industry — edited by a Taiwan journalist with foreign-affairs experience, published by a research project founded by two of Hong Kong's most respected journalism figures, and sustained by an institution now spanning the United States and Taipei — supplies such a forum. Its interviews preserve the testimony of editors like Wang Feng on how standards survive technological change; its reports document, in the profession's own language, the obstruction and silencing that are otherwise recorded mainly in English by outside observers. In the ecology of Sinophone media, Tian Jian is both a publication and a piece of connective tissue, and that dual role is its distinction.