About China Television Artists Association

China Television Artists Association

The China Television Artists Association, also rendered the China TV Artists Association and abbreviated CTAA, is the national association of television artists in China. A subordinate organisation of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles (CFLAC), it was founded in Beijing in April–May 1985 — its first chair took office in April 1985, and reference summaries date the founding to May 1985 — with Jin Zhao as its first chairman. Headquartered in Beijing, the CTAA has more than 6,000 registered members and branch associations across China, organising television directors, actors, screenwriters, hosts and scholars through its specialist committees. It is distinct from the China Artists Association, the CFLAC body for visual artists: the Television Artists Association is the federation's organisation for the television profession.

The association is best known to the public as co-presenter, with CFLAC, of the China TV Golden Eagle Award — founded in 1983 by Popular Television magazine, elevated to a national award in 1996, and since 2000 anchored by the China Golden Eagle TV Art Festival permanently hosted in Changsha, Hunan, alternating biennially with the Feitian Awards since 2005. The CTAA also presents the Actors of China Awards, established in 2014, published the journal Contemporary Television (Dangdai Dianshi), China's first journal of television aesthetics, and convenes the national congresses at which the profession's leadership is elected.

Founding in 1985 and place in the CFLAC system

The CTAA was founded in 1985, as Chinese television was expanding from a narrow state broadcasting service into a mass medium with provincial stations, serial drama and a growing professional workforce. Its creation gave that workforce a national professional home inside the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, the umbrella federation of China's literary and art associations, alongside the older associations for writers, film, drama, music and visual art. Television, the youngest of the major art forms, thereby took its place in the federation's structure with an association of its own.

Jin Zhao, the association's first chairman, held office from April 1985 to November 1996 — an eleven-year founding tenure spanning the medium's first great growth. The association's list of chairmen continues with Yang Weiguang, the former CCTV president, who served two terms from November 1996 to December 2007; Zhao Huayong, who served from December 2007 to September 2017; Hu Zhanfan, from September 2017 to September 2023; and Yan Xiaoming, elected at the seventh national congress in September 2023 and incumbent since. The succession itself traces the profession's institutional history, from the founding generation through the CCTV leadership era to the age of converged broadcasting.

Membership, branches and specialist work

The association counts more than 6,000 registered members, with branch associations across China — provincial and local television artists associations that nominate, organise and represent the profession in their regions. Its membership spans the full range of television work: directors, actors, screenwriters, hosts and presenters, and scholars of television art. Specialist committees organise work within particular fields, and the branch associations play a formal role in the association's best-known activity: candidate programmes and performers for the Golden Eagle Awards are recommended by the television artists' associations of the provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities together with the branch associations of the China Television Artists Association.

National congresses govern the association. Its seventh national congress convened in Beijing on 11 September 2023, electing Yan Xiaoming as chairman and a leadership that included, among thirteen vice-chairmen, CCTV host Kang Hui and actor Lin Yongjian, figures reported across Chinese media at the time. Li Shulei, head of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee, attended the opening and delivered a speech; the congress called on television artists to focus their lens on the people, reflect the changes of the times and produce more quality television works, presenting fine traditional culture and adapting to the development of the internet. Xinhua's report of the congress, carried by the State Council Information Office, is the fullest English-language record of the association's contemporary self-definition.

The Golden Eagle Award: origins in Popular Television

The China TV Golden Eagle Award predates the association that now presents it. Originally named the Popular Television Golden Eagle Award, it was established in 1983 by the editorial department of Zhejiang's Popular Television magazine, founded at the initiative of Lin Chenfu, then director of the Zhejiang Television Station, to symbolise the soaring development of China's television industry like an eagle spreading its wings. The first awards ceremony was held in Kunming in March 1983, with winners selected through reader votes from Popular Television magazine, and the ceremony was held annually thereafter.

The award's defining feature was retained through all its later transformations: it is the only national comprehensive award for television art in China voted mainly by the audience. Candidates are recommended by the provincial television artists' associations and the CTAA's branches, expert judging panels assess the work, and viewers vote — a combination of professional nomination and mass participation that distinguishes the Golden Eagle from the purely expert-juried Feitian Awards and the Shanghai Television Festival's Magnolia Awards, alongside which it forms the three most prestigious national awards recognising excellence in the Chinese television industry.

From national award to the Changsha festival

In 1996 the Golden Eagle was elevated to a national-level award, and starting from the 15th ceremony in 1997 it was jointly organised by the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and the China Television Artists Association, renamed accordingly the China TV Golden Eagle Award and becoming a national comprehensive television art award. In 2000 the event was upgraded again, into the China Golden Eagle TV Art Festival, with Changsha, capital of Hunan Province, designated its permanent host city; since the 18th awarding ceremony in 2000 the festival form has combined the award presentation with appraisal and exchange of television programmes. Since 2005 the festival has been held biennially, with awards presented in even-numbered years, alternating with the Feitian Awards.

The festival, co-sponsored by CFLAC, the People's Government of Hunan Province, the China Television Artists Association and the Hunan broadcasting authorities, and organised with Hunan TV, is the first national festival focusing on the appraisal and exchange of national television art programmes. The Golden Eagle Prize at its centre comprises awards across five categories — television series, television literary and art programmes, television documentary, television cartoon and television advertisement — each with excellent-programme awards and individual awards; Ministry of Culture summaries record 99 awards in the five categories in the festival's classic form. The favourite actor and actress awards, decided by audience affection, are the festival's public highlight, and in recent editions the organising committee has extended recognition to artists from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.

The Actors of China Awards and other honours

The association's second award, the Actors of China Awards, was established in 2014 and is presented by the CTAA to honour acting in Chinese television. Where the Golden Eagle spans programmes, documentary, animation and advertising as well as performance, the Actors of China Awards focus on the performers themselves, giving the association a dedicated instrument for recognising the acting profession within television. Together the two awards express the association's dual constituency — the makers of programmes and the artists who appear in them.

Awards in the CFLAC system carry professional as well as public weight: they are national honours, approved within the state awards framework, and a Golden Eagle remains a career-defining distinction for Chinese television performers, cited in biographies and obituaries decades later. Song Jia's acceptance of a best performing arts actress award from her first mentor Li Zhiyu, herself a Golden Eagle winner in 1985, at a festival gala reported internationally, illustrates how the award links generations of the profession the association represents.

Contemporary Television and television aesthetics

The association's official journal was Contemporary Television (Dangdai Dianshi), rendered in some sources as Current TV. Academic scholarship identifies Contemporary Television, launched in 1987, as China's first journal of television aesthetics — a significant fact about the association's intellectual role. In its pages, contributors in the 1980s theorised the essence of the new medium, proposing, among other arguments, that television's essence lay in a liveness linking it to its audience, and debating how Chinese television storytelling should develop.

Through the journal, the association hosted the profession's theoretical conversation at the moment Chinese television was defining itself artistically — debating serial drama, aesthetics and the medium's social role. That scholarly function persists in the association's academic forums and industry work, and in the profile of its recent leadership: Yang Weiguang, after retiring from CCTV in 1999, served as president of the association while taking academic posts including dean of a school of media and design and doctoral supervisor at the Communication University of China, devoted to making communications education more practical.

Leadership: from Yang Weiguang to Yan Xiaoming

Yang Weiguang's chairmanship (1996–2007) shaped the modern association. As CCTV president he had proposed in 1993 to build CCTV into a world first-class television station befitting China's great-power status; after retirement he served as president of the China Television Artists Association, building the brand of the China Golden Eagle TV Art Festival. The festival's permanent settlement in Changsha in 2000 and its growth into the profession's national celebration belong to his tenure. Zhao Huayong's decade (2007–2017) continued the biennial festival rhythm, and Hu Zhanfan — like Yang a former head of China's national broadcaster — chaired the association from 2017 to 2023.

Yan Xiaoming, elected in September 2023, brought a different background: a graduate in Chinese library studies from Shanxi University who worked at People's Daily from 1983 to 2015 before holding leadership positions from 2015 in China Central Radio and then the China Media Group, the converged national broadcaster. His election, with vice-chairmen including Kang Hui, Lin Yongjian, iQiyi president Gong Yu and producer Hou Hongliang among thirteen vice-chairmen, visibly joined the broadcasting establishment, the acting profession and the new online-video industry in one leadership — a map of where Chinese television now lives.

The association in the internet era

The seventh congress's call for works presenting new ideas and means to suit the development of the internet, noted in Xinhua's report, acknowledges the association's central contemporary question: television art now reaches its audience as much through streaming platforms as through broadcast channels. The presence of a major streaming-platform president among its vice-chairmen shows the association adapting its professional tent to the converged industry, while the Golden Eagle festival — still voted by the audience, still anchored in Changsha — supplies the continuity.

Nearly forty years after its founding in 1985, the China Television Artists Association remains what it was created to be: the CFLAC's national organisation for the television profession, with more than 6,000 registered members and branches across China, publisher of the journal that founded Chinese television aesthetics, and co-presenter of the Golden Eagle Award, the audience-voted honour that has recognised excellence in Chinese television since 1983.