About CCTV-11

CCTV-11

CCTV-11 is China Central Television's Chinese opera channel. Operated by China Media Group from Beijing and broadcast in Mandarin, it is dedicated to Chinese opera and traditional performing arts — Peking opera above all, together with the regional opera forms of the whole country. Launched on 9 July 2001, the same day as CCTV-10, it is the only national television channel in China whose entire schedule is given to a traditional art form.

The channel exists because opera, for centuries China's dominant popular theatre, was losing its audience to television itself. CCTV-11 is television's answer: a permanent stage on which the repertoire, the masters and the regional traditions are performed, taught and archived for a national audience.

Ownership and place within China Media Group

CCTV-11 is part of China Central Television within China Media Group, formed on 21 March 2018 from CCTV, China National Radio and China Radio International. Within CMG's literature and arts operation it is the traditional-arts channel, sitting alongside CCTV-3 Variety and CCTV-15 Music in a portfolio that the group's arts centre programmes together — new formats are routinely announced across the variety, opera and music channels as a single slate.

Its role in the family is custodial. Other channels chase the present; CCTV-11 is charged with a heritage — spreading national culture and opera knowledge, entertaining the art's existing fans and fostering the youngsters who will perform it next, in the words of the channel's founding brief.

Launch on 9 July 2001

CCTV announced the opera channel together with the science and education channel in the summer of 2001, and both opened in July — CCTV-11's launch date is 9 July 2001. People's Daily's advance report described the Traditional Opera Channel's purpose precisely: to spread national culture, popularise opera knowledge, entertain fans and foster youngsters of the trade, with columns including 'Opera Panorama', live transmission of performances and 'Appreciation of Famous Operatic Pieces'.

The launch formalised what CCTV had long done occasionally — competitions among young opera actors had been screened live on CCTV, and a Beijing Opera Month had been televised — into a permanent service. From 2001, opera in China had a channel of its own, broadcasting from the capital where the national companies are based.

Peking opera at the centre

Peking opera — Beijing opera — is the channel's centrepiece and has a dedicated place in its programme list. The form combines music, vocal performance, mime, dance and acrobatics; it arose in the late eighteenth century, when the Four Great Anhui Troupes came to Beijing in 1790, became fully developed by the mid-nineteenth century, and was the Qing court's favoured theatre. Its repertoire includes over 1,400 works drawn from Chinese history and folklore, its music built on the Xipi and Erhuang melodic systems, and its stage populated by the four role types every fan learns to read.

CCTV references describe Peking opera as one of the cultural treasures of China and note that CCTV-11 is dedicated to broadcasting classic Chinese opera productions including Peking opera. The art's modern history runs through figures such as Mei Lanfang, whose mastery of over a hundred roles and reforms of costume, staging and makeup carried the form to audiences in Japan, the Soviet Union and the United States — the tradition the channel exists to continue on screen.

Regional opera and the full map of Chinese theatre

China's opera is not one form but hundreds: reference works count more than 300 regional styles still extant, among them Cantonese opera, Hebei Clapper Opera and Yue (Shaoxing) opera alongside Peking opera, plus Kunqu, Henan Yu opera, Huangmei opera and many more. CCTV-11's programme list reflects that map — 'Local Opera' is one of its named strands — and a national channel is the one institution that can place a Henan or Cantonese production before a nationwide audience on equal terms with the capital's art.

That regional breadth matters culturally and practically. Regional forms are carried by local troupes with local audiences; television is how a masterpiece of Shaoxing opera reaches Beijing, or a Peking opera classic reaches Guangdong. The channel functions as the repertoire's national exchange — the stage where China's theatrical regions meet.

The programme strands

The channel's documented programme list reads as a complete opera service: 'Theater in the Air', its recorded-performance flagship; 'Film and Television Theater', for opera films and televised productions; 'Local Opera'; 'Pear Garden Appreciation' — the pear garden being the classical Chinese name for the theatre world; 'Famous Section Appreciation', devoted to celebrated excerpts; 'Studies with Me', its teaching strand; and 'Play Park Hundred', alongside the dedicated 'Beijing Opera' programming.

The design balances the channel's three founding duties. Full performances serve the connoisseur; excerpt appreciation serves the general viewer who wants the famous scenes; and the teaching strand serves the student — the youngster of the trade the channel was told to foster, learning an aria from a televised master as apprentices once learned in the troupe.

Live performance, competitions and the living stage

From its announcement, the channel promised live transmission of performances alongside its recorded repertoire, and CCTV's opera culture has long included televised competitions and festivals — the annual Plum Blossom Award performances of the Chinese opera world, young performers' competitions screened live, and themed seasons such as Beijing Opera Month, all carried on national television and now centred on the opera channel.

Live and competition programming keeps CCTV-11 connected to the working stage rather than only the archive. Troupes such as the National Peking Opera Company and the Shanghai Peking Opera Company perform for today's audiences under today's conditions; the channel's cameras are how most of China sees that work, and how a young performer's prize performance becomes a national reputation.

Audiences: connoisseurs, students and the curious

The opera audience is famously loyal and famously ageing, and the channel serves it deliberately: full-length performances in traditional staging, famous excerpts for recognition and pleasure, and scholarship and appreciation for depth. At the same time its teaching and excerpt formats are built to recruit — to give a viewer who knows nothing a famous scene, a story and a tune to carry away.

Reformers of Peking opera have long debated how to renew the audience — improving performance quality, adapting new elements, writing new plays — with mixed success. CCTV-11 is the mass-medium side of that effort: free performances in public are the troupes' outreach, and a national channel that keeps opera in the daily listings is the broadcasters'. Its very ordinariness — opera at breakfast, opera at midnight — asserts that the form is living culture, not a museum piece.

Distribution and digital presence

CCTV-11 is distributed nationally as a free-to-air CCTV channel by terrestrial transmission, cable and satellite, and its official online home is tv.cctv.com/cctv11 on CCTV.com, with live stream, schedules and programme archive. CCTV's digital operation dates from China Network Television in 2009, rebranded CCTV.com in 2017; CMG has also maintained an overseas Chinese opera channel among its international services, extending the art to the diaspora.

Online availability gives the channel a second function as an archive of record: performances by masters who have retired or died remain viewable, and students anywhere can study the same recorded excerpt — a resource no previous generation of opera transmission possessed.

Why CCTV-11 matters

CCTV-11 matters because no other country sustains a national channel for its classical theatre. Launched in 2001 to spread national culture, teach opera knowledge, entertain its fans and raise its next performers, it keeps Peking opera and more than three hundred regional traditions in daily national circulation — full plays, famous scenes, lessons and live competitions. In an entertainment market that rewards novelty, the opera channel is a deliberate act of preservation with a broadcast licence: proof that television, the medium that displaced the theatre, can also be the theatre's largest stage.