About CCTV-17

CCTV-17

CCTV-17 is China Central Television's agriculture and rural channel. Operated by China Media Group from Beijing and broadcast in Mandarin, it covers farming, rural development, food and rural life — agricultural techniques, rural revitalisation, village culture and the people who feed China. It was officially launched on 23 September 2019, taking over the agricultural and rural programming that CCTV-7 had carried since 1995.

The channel's creation separated two great themes of Chinese public life that had shared a channel for twenty-four years. Defence went to a refocused CCTV-7; agriculture and the countryside — home to hundreds of millions of people and the source of the nation's food — received, for the first time, a national channel entirely of their own.

Ownership and place within China Media Group

CCTV-17 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. It is produced by CMG's agricultural and rural programming centre — the unit that plans the channel's seasons and campaigns, including its New Year 'rural gathering' programme blocks — and it works alongside CCTV's news operation on rural stories of national significance.

Within the CCTV family the channel holds the 'three rural' brief — agriculture, rural areas and farmers, in the standard Chinese policy phrase. No other numbered channel has a primarily rural audience, and that distinctiveness shapes everything from its presenters' style to its commercial model of serving farm information as a public good.

Origins: from CCTV-7 to a channel of its own

Agricultural television on CCTV is older than the channel: CCTV-7 had been home to military and agricultural programmes since 1995, a pairing netizens joked made it the 'Farming and War Channel'. Through changes in 2001 and 2003 the farm strand stayed, and agricultural programming remained one of the national broadcaster's core public services — for many rural viewers, the most useful thing on television.

By 2019 the strand had outgrown its shared home. Reporting the change, China Military's English service recorded that from 1 August 2019 the CCTV-7 Military and Agricultural Channel would become the National Defense and Military Channel, while a CCTV insider confirmed the broadcaster was setting up a dedicated agricultural and rural channel. CCTV-17 began trial broadcasts on 1 August 2019 alongside the CCTV-7 relaunch.

Official launch on 23 September 2019

CCTV-17 was officially launched on 23 September 2019 — the date of the Chinese Farmers' Harvest Festival that year, as China Media Group had announced when unveiling the change in July. The choice of day was the channel's mission statement: a farmers' festival, created as a national celebration of the harvest, would be the birthday of the farmers' channel.

The launch completed the largest single-theme reorganisation of the CCTV lineup in years: two channels where one had served, each now able to programme its subject in depth. For agriculture, depth meant room for the full rural agenda — not only farming technique, but rural industry, village governance, food culture, rural tourism and the national project of rural revitalisation.

Farming knowledge and agricultural technique

The channel's practical core is farming knowledge: programmes on agricultural techniques, seasonal work, animal husbandry, aquaculture, agricultural machinery and weather-wise decision-making, made for the people who do the work. Long-form strands with titles such as 'Who Knows What's on Your Plate?' — in the channel's English-language descriptions — connect field and table, inviting audiences to consider where their food comes from through direct storytelling from producers.

Science is presented as a farm input like seed or fertiliser. Modern Chinese agriculture — greenhouse production, smart machinery, improved varieties, e-commerce logistics — needs a teaching medium that reaches every county, and a national channel remains the most universal one. CCTV-17's technique programming is the direct descendant of the agricultural education broadcasts Chinese television has carried since the CCTV-7 era.

Rural revitalisation and the 'three rural' agenda

The channel's second core is policy in human form: rural revitalisation. Its flagship current-affairs coverage — described in English summaries as 'China's Three Rural Reports' — reports how agriculture shapes communities, follows poverty-alleviation and rural-development projects, and records the transformation of the countryside: returning migrant entrepreneurs, village industries, renovated housing, rural schools and clinics.

The channel also documents the new rural economy in action — farmers selling through e-commerce and live-streaming, village leaders turned online sellers, specialty products such as regional fruit and livestock finding national markets. Coverage of events such as the annual harvest festival celebrations, with themes of rural revitalisation running through them, makes the channel the television record of the countryside's reinvention.

Food, culture and rural life

Not everything on CCTV-17 is instruction or policy. The channel celebrates rural food and folk culture — local dishes and ingredients, from Chongqing lamb dishes to the black goats of Dazhu in its programme descriptions — festival customs, village arts and the landscapes of agricultural China. Its New Year programming block 'Rural Gathering in China Year', which ran from 19 January to 15 February 2022, assembled more than thirty programmes and some 700 hours of rural content across the group's channels, launched a digital album of original songs, and brought the channel's eight hosts together for the first time.

That cultural strand matters to the channel's address: it speaks to urban viewers as well as rural ones, most of whom have village roots within a generation or two. CCTV-17 is where urban China watches where its food — and much of its family memory — comes from.

Programme descriptions of the channel emphasise the same double service throughout the year: showcasing innovative farming techniques alongside local culinary specialities, and telling the stories of producers directly to the consumers who eventually meet their work on a plate — food television and farm television made by the same hands, for audiences at both ends of the supply chain.

Audiences and distribution

CCTV-17 is distributed nationally as a free-to-air CCTV channel by terrestrial transmission, cable and satellite, and online through CCTV.com, carried in the standard CCTV set on cable systems across the country — including the townships and villages that are its subject. Its primary audience is China's rural population and agricultural workforce; its secondary audience is everyone who eats.

Reaching that primary audience is the channel's founding practical problem and its justification. Rural viewers are the least served by commercial media economics and the most dependent on shared national services; a channel that assumes their attention — rather than treating the countryside as a backdrop — is a deliberate act of public-service broadcasting.

Digital presence and the official website

The channel's official online home is tv.cctv.com/cctv17 on CCTV.com, with live stream, schedules and programme pages, inside the CCTV digital operation launched as China Network Television in 2009 and rebranded CCTV.com in 2017. Rural programming travels online in distinctive ways: technique clips are saved and shared among farmers, and the group's rural live-streaming and e-commerce activities extend the channel's market-making role beyond broadcast.

The channel page is the authoritative index of a fast-growing archive — the record, season by season, of how Chinese agriculture is changing.

Why CCTV-17 matters

CCTV-17 matters because it completed the recognition of rural China in the national media. For twenty-four years farming shared a channel with the military; since 23 September 2019 it has had a channel worthy of its scale — serving the people who produce the nation's food with technique, policy, market access and cultural respect, and showing the urban majority the countryside as it is. In the CCTV lineup of specialists, it is the youngest of the major channels and the one rooted deepest in the ground.