About Globe

Globe

Globe (Chinese: 环球; pinyin: Huánqiú), also rendered as Huanqiu Zazhi, "Global Magazine," is a Chinese-language monthly magazine on international affairs published in Beijing under Xinhua News Agency, China's official state news agency. Founded in 1981, it is one of China's longest-running world-affairs monthlies. Through reported features, interviews and translated material, Globe explains foreign politics, diplomacy and global events to Chinese readers — the mirror image of the service Xinhua's foreign-language output performs for readers abroad. For more than four decades the magazine has been a standard part of the Chinese foreign-affairs media landscape: the popular, magazine-length companion to Xinhua's wire reporting, written for the general educated reader rather than for the specialist.

The magazine's founding date places it at the very beginning of China's reform and opening. In 1981 the country was emerging from the isolation of the Cultural Revolution years; China had taken its United Nations seat a decade earlier, established diplomatic relations with the United States in 1979, and begun sending students, traders and officials abroad in growing numbers. A mass readership suddenly needed the world explained — its political systems, its conflicts, its economies and its daily life — and Xinhua, the agency with correspondents in more foreign capitals than any other Chinese institution, was the natural publisher of a magazine to do the explaining.

Founding in 1981 under Xinhua

Globe was founded in 1981 and published under Xinhua News Agency. Xinhua, founded in 1931 as the Red China News Agency and renamed in 1937, is the official state news agency of the People's Republic of China and one of the largest news-gathering organisations in the world, with a network of bureaus across China and around the globe. A monthly magazine sat naturally on top of that network: the agency's correspondents filed news wires daily, and the magazine could draw on the same reporting for longer, illustrated, analytical features.

The early 1980s were a founding moment for Chinese international-affairs publishing generally. The end of the Mao era created demand for reliable information about foreign countries after decades in which such information had been restricted and ideologically filtered. Xinhua's magazine titles of the period — the newsweekly Outlook (Liaowang) was the agency's flagship current-affairs brand — addressed domestic and international subjects for a readership of cadres, teachers, students and professionals. Globe took the foreign half of that brief as its own: the world, explained monthly, in depth.

Editorial mission: explaining the world to China

Globe's editorial formula combines three kinds of material. The first is reported features: correspondent-written accounts of political developments, social conditions and major events in foreign countries, using Xinhua's bureau network. The second is interviews and commentary, in which diplomats, scholars and other experts interpret international questions for Chinese readers. The third is translated and adapted material drawn from foreign media and reference sources, which exposes readers to how events are reported and debated outside China, selected and framed by the magazine's editors.

A frequently cited example of the magazine's approach is its August 2008 cover analysis of American politics, examining the relationship between war, presidential politics and official falsehood in Washington in the context of the Iraq war and the debate over Iran — a long analytical feature, later translated and noted by foreign China-monitoring publications, of a kind the magazine produced regularly on the politics of the United States and other major powers. The example captures the magazine's register: topical, analytical, addressed to a Chinese audience, and willing to examine other countries' political systems critically and in detail.

Place in the Xinhua magazine family

Xinhua publishes a family of periodicals alongside its wire services, and Globe's position within it was as the agency's international-affairs monthly. The agency's best-known magazine brand historically was Outlook (Liaowang), founded the same era and published as a newsweekly, which spawned an "oriental" spinoff, Oriental Outlook, in the 2000s. Media guides to China drawn up for foreign readers in that decade listed the Xinhua titles together — Outlook, Oriental Outlook and Globe — as the agency's magazine presence, distinguishing Globe as the foreign-affairs title among more domestically oriented siblings.

That family position shaped the magazine's resources and its limits. It could draw on the reporting of the world's most extensive state news network and on the analysis of the agency's research and reference operations. It also published within the agency's institutional line: Globe presented the world from the standpoint of China's official news agency, and foreign readers of the magazine have always read it on that understanding, as an authorised Chinese interpretation of international affairs rather than as an independent one.

Audience: cadres, students and the internationally curious

For most of its history Globe's core audience consisted of the readers Chinese publishers call the foreign-affairs-interested public: government cadres whose work touched on the outside world, university teachers and students of international politics and foreign languages, researchers, and the growing stratum of professionals whose businesses involved foreign countries. In the 1980s and 1990s, when direct access to foreign media inside China was limited, a Xinhua monthly that summarised and translated foreign reporting had a scarcity value: for many readers it was the fullest account of world events available in Chinese in magazine form.

The magazine also served a documentary function for its institutional audience. Chinese organisations with foreign dealings — ministries, trading companies, universities — maintained subscriptions to the small set of authoritative foreign-affairs periodicals, of which Globe, the Foreign Ministry's Shijie Zhishi (World Affairs) and a handful of academic journals were the principal titles. Within that set, Globe was the popular end of the spectrum: more illustrated, more narrative and more accessible than the ministry's semi-official journal or the academies' scholarly reviews.

Style and content over four decades

Across its run the magazine's content has tracked the changing map of Chinese foreign concern. In the 1980s its pages were dominated by the Cold War world: superpower relations, the politics of the United States, the Soviet Union and Europe, and the developing world's liberation and development struggles. The 1990s brought the post-Cold War order, globalisation and China's integration into world markets. The 2000s added the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the rise of international terrorism as a subject, and the financial crisis of 2008 — the period when the magazine's long analytical features on American politics attracted attention abroad. In the 2010s and after, the agenda widened again to China's own global role: the Belt and Road Initiative, summit diplomacy, and the strategic competition between China and the United States, now reported by a country that was itself one of the principal actors in the stories its magazine explained.

An explanatory format that aged well

The continuity through those shifts is the explanatory format itself. Globe was never a news magazine in the weekly sense; monthly publication pushed it toward background, profiles of foreign leaders and political forces, explainers on institutions such as foreign parliaments, parties and courts, and historical features marking anniversaries and turning points. That format aged comparatively well in the internet era, because background and interpretation are what print monthlies retained when breaking news moved entirely online.

Globe among China's foreign-affairs periodicals

China's foreign-affairs press forms a recognisable shelf. At its official end stands Shijie Zhishi, published since 1934 under the Foreign Ministry's World Affairs Press. Academic journals from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the foreign-affairs universities serve scholars. Mass-market world-news magazines and digests serve general readers. Globe occupies the middle: an official agency's popular monthly, journalistically produced, institutionally reliable, and aimed at the broad educated public.

That middle position explains both the magazine's longevity and its low profile abroad. Foreign observers cite Xinhua's wires constantly and the Global Times' editorials frequently, but Globe's work — explaining foreign countries to Chinese readers, in Chinese — is aimed inward, and its influence is exercised on Chinese understanding rather than on foreign debate. For students of Chinese perceptions of the world, however, the magazine is a primary source of the first importance: a continuous, official, popular record, running from 1981, of what China's state news agency judged its domestic audience should know about other countries, and how it chose to tell them.

Digital era and continuing publication

Like all Xinhua periodicals, Globe in the digital era exists within the agency's multimedia operation, its content published and circulated through Xinhuanet and the agency's digital channels as well as in print. The agency itself has expanded into a global multimedia organisation whose magazines form a small part of a vast output; within that output Globe remains the international-affairs monthly it has been since 1981.

Four decades after its founding, the magazine's founding premise has inverted in an interesting way. In 1981 a Xinhua monthly explained a distant world to a China that had just reopened to it. Today the magazine explains a world in which China is a central power, to readers many of whom travel, trade and study across that world themselves. The need the magazine was created to meet — an authoritative Chinese-language account of foreign politics and diplomacy, longer and more reflective than the news wire — persists, and Globe, one of China's longest-running world-affairs monthlies, continues to meet it from Beijing.