About CCTV-10

CCTV-10

CCTV-10 is China Central Television's science and education channel. Operated by China Media Group from Beijing and broadcast in Mandarin, its schedule consists mostly of local and imported documentaries and educational studio productions covering science, technology, culture, history and health. Launched on 9 July 2001, it is the channel of the lecture, the experiment and the explainer — the place where Chinese television treats its audience as students.

Its best-known programme, Lecture Room, turned university professors into television stars and demonstrated that a scholar talking about the Three Kingdoms or the Analects could hold a national audience. Around that flagship, CCTV-10 built a complete popular-education service that remains unique in Chinese broadcasting.

Ownership and place within China Media Group

CCTV-10 is part of China Central Television within China Media Group, the state media company formed on 21 March 2018 from CCTV, China National Radio and China Radio International. In the CCTV family it is the knowledge channel: CCTV-9 handles documentary film, CCTV-14 handles children, and CCTV-10 handles taught and explained knowledge — science popularisation, health, reading, history and culture presented as learning.

The channel's founding brief was stated at its launch by CCTV's leadership: opening science-education and opera channels together was presented not as a simple multiplication of programmes but as the implementation of the state policy of relying on science and education for the rejuvenation of the nation. That civic mission — education as national development — still defines the channel's tone.

Launch on 9 July 2001

CCTV-10 launched on 9 July 2001, the same day as CCTV-11, the traditional opera channel. People's Daily reported the pair in advance: the Science and Education Channel would provide programmes of top quality and taste, both self-made and drawn from other television stations, designed around more than twenty columns including 'Contemporary Education', 'Exploration and Discovery' and 'Hope English Magazine' — English teaching being then one of the most popular forms of educational broadcasting in China.

The channel inherited strands already proven elsewhere in the CCTV system — most importantly the popular-science tradition of 'Approaching Science', first broadcast in June 1998 — and gave educational television a permanent address. In its launch coverage, CCTV noted its programmes already covered 98 percent of the countries and regions of the world via satellite; the new channel's classroom, from the start, was national.

Lecture Room: the professors' programme

Lecture Room — in Chinese, Baijia Jiangtan, literally 'The Hundred Schools of Thought Forum' — is the channel's defining programme. First broadcast on 9 July 2001, the channel's launch day, it invites scholars to lecture to camera, and in its early years its topics ranged across biology, physics, economics, history and literature, with lecturers from around the world: the physicist Stephen Hawking appeared in 2002, as did Nobel laureates Tsung-Dao Lee, Chen Ning Yang and Samuel C. C. Ting, and Bill Gates lectured in 2003.

Over time the programme's centre of gravity moved to Chinese history and culture, and it created a new kind of celebrity. Yan Chongnian's Qing dynasty lectures opened the era; Yi Zhongtian's 'Analysis of the Three Kingdoms' made him a national star and sparked a Three Kingdoms fever; Yu Dan's readings of the Analects in October 2006 became a cultural phenomenon and a publishing sensation. Producers described the formula as traditional culture delivered by speakers with strong personalities and unique insights — a public classroom that reacquainted millions with the classics and stirred genuine academic debate.

Approaching Science and popular-science documentary

The channel's second tradition is popular-science documentary. 'Approaching Science' (Zoujin Kexue), first broadcast on 1 June 1998 and long associated with CCTV-10 under host Zhang Tengyue until its final episode on 30 September 2019, treated biology, archaeology, psychology and unexplained phenomena in a storyteller's format that begins with a mystery and disenchants it — debunking the so-called supernatural events and pseudoscience that its reviewers credited it with dispelling for a mass audience.

Critics called it an 'interest revolution' in Chinese science television: where earlier popular science lectured, Approaching Science narrated. Its two-decade run, ending in 2019, marks the lifespan of the classic CCTV-10 model — a documentary strand that trusted curiosity rather than credentials to bring a general audience to science.

Documentaries, health, reading and the wider schedule

Around the flagships, CCTV-10's published programme list assembles the full educational brief: 'Great Masters', profiling scholars and cultural figures; 'Reading', devoted to books; and 'The Doctor Is In' — literally 'The Way to Health' — the channel's health strand, alongside imported and domestic documentaries in the schedule's documentary majority. Science, technology, culture and education are not strands within the channel; they are the channel, organised as a curriculum a viewer can wander.

That breadth is deliberate. A commercial channel fragments knowledge into entertainment; CCTV-10's design assumes the same viewer who watches a lecture on the Han dynasty will watch a health programme and a nature documentary, because all three are forms of self-improvement — the value the channel was founded to serve.

Education as policy: the channel's public role

CCTV-10's existence is a policy instrument. The 2001 launch reporting framed the channel as the television arm of the strategy of rejuvenating the nation through science and education, and the channel has carried that role through science popularisation campaigns, school-adjacent programming and health education for an ageing population. Its consultant-friendly, expert-led style — scholars, doctors and scientists addressing viewers directly — contrasts with every other CCTV channel's presenter-led formats.

The Lecture Room phenomenon showed the policy could also be popular culture: lecture books topped bestseller lists, professors toured like performers, and debates about how the classics should be interpreted played out in national media. Few educational channels anywhere have had that kind of cultural footprint.

Audiences and distribution

CCTV-10 is distributed nationally as a free-to-air CCTV channel by terrestrial transmission, cable and satellite, and online. Its audience is the self-improving general public — students, teachers, parents, older viewers and the professional classes — rather than a demographic niche, and its programmes are scheduled across the day for the audiences learning takes: daytime for retirees and home viewers, evenings for family and prime-time lectures.

As one of the channels Chinese cable systems carry by default, it reaches the whole country, including the rural and small-city audiences for whom a televised lecture from a Beijing or Xiamen professor may be the most accessible university teaching available — the democratising promise inside the channel's founding policy language.

Digital presence and the official website

The channel's official online home is tv.cctv.com/cctv10 on CCTV.com, with the live stream, schedules and an archive in which Lecture Room series and documentaries can be found by lecturer and subject. CCTV's online operation began as China Network Television in 2009 and became CCTV.com in 2017.

For an education channel the archive is the product: lectures are reference material, and the channel page's ability to keep a complete Yi Zhongtian or Yan Chongnian series available converts a broadcast strand into a permanent open university shelf.

Why CCTV-10 matters

CCTV-10 matters because it proved that education could be a channel, not a strand. Launched in 2001 under an explicit national policy of rejuvenation through science and education, it made professors into public intellectuals through Lecture Room, turned popular science into storytelling through Approaching Science, and kept health, reading and documentary in one curriculum for a national audience. Streaming platforms now host endless lectures, but CCTV-10 was there first — the original open classroom of Chinese television.