About CCTV-9 Documentary

CCTV-9 Documentary

CCTV-9 Documentary is China Central Television's Mandarin-language documentary channel. Operated by China Media Group from Beijing, it broadcasts documentaries — Chinese and imported, commissioned and acquired, co-produced with the world's leading factual broadcasters — around the clock. Launched on 1 January 2011, it was China's first dedicated national documentary channel, created to build a domestic documentary industry as much as to fill a schedule.

The number carries history: CCTV-9 had previously been CCTV's English-language service, and when that service became a news channel, the number was reassigned to documentary — with an English-language twin, also called CCTV-9 Documentary at birth, that later became CGTN Documentary. The Mandarin CCTV-9 described here is the domestic channel.

Ownership and place within China Media Group

CCTV-9 is part of China Central Television within China Media Group, formed on 21 March 2018 from CCTV, China National Radio and China Radio International. It sits in the CCTV lineup as the factual specialist alongside CCTV-10's science and education remit, and it shares its number and much of its early history with CGTN Documentary, its English-language sister within the China Global Television Network family.

The channel was given an industry-building mandate from the start. Its first managing director, Liu Wen, told the international trade press that one of the channel's responsibilities was to invest in the documentary market and nourish local production companies — a remit that made CCTV-9 simultaneously a broadcaster, a commissioner and a market-maker for Chinese documentary.

Launch on 1 January 2011

CCTV-9 Documentary Channel was launched on 1 January 2011 by China Central Television. There were from the beginning two versions of the documentary service: one for the domestic market, in Mandarin, and one for international distribution, in English and Chinese, aiming to offer a window on China to the world. The first programme trailed for the new channel was a natural history production on China's natural history co-produced by the BBC and CCTV — a statement of intent about the standard the channel meant to keep.

The channel arrived at a moment when Chinese documentary had prestige — the BBC-CCTV co-production 'Wild China' (broadcast in China as 'Beautiful China') had shown in 2008 what Chinese natural history could achieve — but no dedicated home. CCTV-9 gave the form a channel, a budget and a daily audience, attracting, in the trade press's description, an upmarket domestic audience curious to learn about China itself and about other countries.

Domestic production and the two-thirds schedule

The channel's founding programme policy was explicit: local productions take about two-thirds of the schedule and acquisitions the other third. The domestic service broadcasts some 2,500 hours of Chinese programming annually, drawing on the resources of over 100 television stations and 1,000 production companies around the country — a commissioning web that spread documentary work across the whole Chinese television system rather than concentrating it in Beijing.

Subject matter spans the documentary map: natural history and wildlife, Chinese history and archaeology, science and engineering — including the 'Chinese Mega Projects' tradition of films about the country's great constructions — biography, arts and contemporary social observation. A hundred-part series about the police, made with the public security authorities through reconstructions and scripted cases, illustrates the channel's other tradition: access-based documentary made with the institutions it portrays.

Acquisitions: showing the world complete

The acquired third of the schedule was itself a policy statement. Liu Wen explained at the channel's first MIPTV market in 2011 that CCTV had previously imported documentaries for other channels but cut them and inserted its own presenters; CCTV-9 would import documentaries and show them in their complete form, without changing anything — which, he said, made the channel unique in China. In its first year the domestic channel acquired over 1,000 hours of imported programming.

The channel told the market it was particularly keen to acquire wildlife programming and historical documentaries, including films about the First and Second World Wars — subjects its director attributed to demonstrated audience taste. For Chinese viewers, the effect was a nightly window of uncut international documentary — BBC, National Geographic and other world catalogues — that no Chinese channel had previously offered as a matter of policy.

Co-productions with the world's documentary powers

Co-production is the channel's signature method. At launch it was already working with the BBC and Discovery on 'Generation Earth', a three-part series on humanity's impact on the planet; with the BBC and the Science Channel on the wildlife series 'Wonders of Life'; and with ITV Global Entertainment and National Geographic on a series about China's giant sinkholes. BBC Worldwide and the BBC Natural History Unit then agreed to co-produce 'Hidden Kingdoms', about nature's smallest creatures, and Austria's ORF Universum unit joined for 'Triumph of the Tomato'.

The partner list recorded by 2012 — BBC Worldwide, NHK, ITV, France Télévisions, National Geographic, KBS and many others — placed the young channel inside the top tier of world factual production. The lineage ran back to 'Wild China', the six-part BBC Natural History Unit and CCTV co-production of 2008, the first comprehensive series on China's natural history and the first time CCTV had collaborated with a foreign broadcaster on such a project.

International distribution and audiences

The documentary service expanded worldwide quickly. By MIPTV in April 2012 — fifteen months after launch — the channel reported reaching over 25 million homes in 60 countries in its international versions, and the broadcaster cited a daily peak audience of 94 million in China alone for the documentary service. The international version, available in Chinese and English, carries the channel's mandate to bring China's culture to the world, while the domestic version imports the world to China.

That two-way traffic is the channel's defining design: the same institution that commissions a film about a Chinese sinkhole with National Geographic sells Chinese documentary into sixty countries and buys a thousand hours of foreign film a year. In the soft-power vocabulary of the period, it was built as a window in both directions.

Distribution, scheduling and presentation

CCTV-9 is distributed nationally as a free-to-air CCTV channel by terrestrial transmission, cable and satellite, in standard and high definition, and online through CCTV.com. Domestically it addresses the curious general audience rather than the specialist: prime time is built from flagship natural history, history and mega-project films, with themed strands through the day and repeats of the archive overnight.

The channel's presentation — a single documentary brand across nature, history and society — taught Chinese television a new category. Before 2011, documentaries in China were strands inside general channels; after CCTV-9, documentary was a destination, with its own commissioners, markets and audience expectations.

Digital presence and the official website

The channel's official online home is tv.cctv.com/cctv9 on CCTV.com, with live stream, schedules and programme pages; access to some content is restricted outside China. CCTV's online operation, launched as China Network Television in 2009 and rebranded CCTV.com in 2017, gives the documentary archive a long online life — valuable for films that are built to be re-watched and taught from.

Documentary also travels unusually well online: a natural history sequence or a mega-project film works as a complete short viewing experience, and the channel's co-productions are distributed internationally through its partners' platforms as well as its own.

Why CCTV-9 Documentary matters

CCTV-9 matters because it industrialised Chinese documentary. Before 2011 the form survived on strands and specials; the channel gave it a national home, a two-thirds domestic commissioning policy that nourished a thousand production companies, an acquisitions policy that showed foreign films complete, and co-production partnerships with the BBC, National Geographic, NHK and their peers. Its twin existence — Mandarin at home, English through what became CGTN Documentary abroad — makes it the clearest example of CCTV building a channel to speak simultaneously to China and to the world.