About DW Chinese

DW Chinese

DW Chinese is the Chinese-language service of Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany's state-funded international broadcaster. Known in Chinese as 德国之声中文部 — literally the Chinese department of the "Voice of Germany" — it has provided news to Mandarin-speaking audiences since 1965 and today publishes principally through its website at dw.com/zh, with Chinese counting among the core languages of DW's news site. The service reports on China, Germany, Europe and the world in Chinese, from a newsroom tradition anchored in Bonn and Berlin, for an audience that includes readers in mainland China — where its site has been blocked since 2008 — and Chinese speakers worldwide. This profile covers the Chinese service specifically, as a distinct language edition of DW, rather than Deutsche Welle as a whole.

The parent broadcaster: Deutsche Welle

Deutsche Welle was founded on 3 May 1953, when its first shortwave broadcast carried an address by West German President Theodor Heuss; the ARD public broadcasters agreed the following month to share responsibility for the new station. DW is funded from the German federal budget, but its work is regulated by the Deutsche Welle Act, which provides that its content is intended to be independent of government influence — a statutory firewall that is central to how the Chinese service presents itself. DW is a member of the European Broadcasting Union, is headquartered in Bonn, where its radio programmes are produced, while its television broadcasts are produced almost entirely in Berlin; both locations contribute to its news website. The service as a whole is available in more than thirty languages, with satellite television channels in English, German, Spanish and Arabic among others, and it has employed roughly fifteen hundred staff plus a comparable number of freelancers from dozens of countries. Originally headquartered in Cologne, DW moved its headquarters to Bonn after German reunification, when much of the federal government relocated to the capital in Berlin.

Chinese broadcasting since 1965

DW's engagement with Chinese-speaking audiences is among the longest of any Western broadcaster. Reference works on Chinese-language media in Germany record that Deutsche Welle has been providing news coverage to Mandarin-speaking audiences since 1965, building over the decades from shortwave radio into a wide array of global news, politics and culture coverage. For much of that history, shortwave was the only practical channel into China, and the Chinese department became one of DW's established language desks in Bonn. When DW restructured its radio output in 2011, Chinese was among the languages retained on shortwave even as many others were discontinued: from 1 November 2011 DW ended shortwave broadcasts in German, Russian, Persian and Indonesian and limited English shortwave to Africa, while Chinese programming was reduced from 120 minutes to 60 minutes and online, mobile and on-demand services were expanded for the affected languages. Chinese survived the cuts because Asia, with Africa, remained a priority region for the medium.

The website and the 2008 block

The modern centre of the service is dw.com/zh. Chinese is one of the seven core languages of DW's news website, and the site carries the service's news, analysis and multimedia in Chinese for readers worldwide. Inside mainland China, however, the site has been blocked since 2008 — the year of the Beijing Olympics, when Chinese censors repeatedly blocked DW's web presence and its application for a broadcast licence in China was also rejected. DW responded by working on circumvention: it partnered with GreatFire's Collateral Freedom system, which distributes blocked content through the servers of large internet providers whose blocking would cause wide collateral damage to popular services, in order to make its Chinese-language content accessible inside China. Guido Baumhauer, DW's managing director for distribution, marketing and technology, explained the logic publicly, and Philipp Bilsky, then head of DW's Chinese service, led the effort on the editorial side; DW publicised the access addresses through social media and email newsletters and relied in part on Chinese people living in exile to spread the word. DW had already used similar anti-censorship techniques in Iran with Psiphon software. The episode defines the service's operating condition: it produces for an audience its host state does not wish it to reach.

The Zhang Danhong controversy of 2008

The Chinese service's most public internal crisis came in the same year. Zhang Danhong, deputy chief of DW's Chinese division, was taken off air in August 2008 after publicly defending Beijing's human-rights record — praising the Chinese Communist Party's record on Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and likening Beijing's blocking of Falun Gong and Tibetan websites to German restrictions on child pornography and right-wing extremist sites — shortly after Chancellor Angela Merkel's meeting with the Dalai Lama and days before the Beijing Olympics. DW revoked her deputy-chief title on 24 September 2008. Chinese official media covered the suspension extensively, with Xinhua calling it proof that German freedom of expression was "merely a joke," while exiled Chinese intellectuals in Germany wrote an open letter to the Bundestag arguing the opposite case: that parts of the Chinese department's output had drifted toward Beijing's positions and calling for the department's restructuring. A United States diplomatic cable from Beijing in November 2008 documented the affair in detail. The controversy mattered because it tested, in public, whether a state-funded broadcaster's Chinese desk could hold the editorial line set by the Deutsche Welle Act — and it remains the defining case study of the pressures on the service from both governments.

The CCTV cooperation episode and Su Yutong

A second test followed a few years later. In 2014 DW announced a cooperation agreement with China's state broadcaster CCTV; Reporters Without Borders Germany called the cooperation "incompatible" with DW's mission, noting CCTV's role in China's apparatus against journalists, and after scrutiny in the Bundestag the agreement was suspended in 2015. Around the same period, in 2014, the blogger and contributor Su Yutong, who had worked for DW since 2010, was told her contract would not be renewed; the International Federation of Journalists reported that the dispute centred on an article by Beijing-based media consultant Frank Sieren arguing that some Western media were unfairly critical of China over the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, and the dismissal came a day after a protest outside DW's Bonn headquarters led by former Tiananmen activist Wu'er Kaixi. Together, the CCTV and Su episodes showed the Chinese service operating at the intersection of German parliamentary oversight, Chinese state media diplomacy and diaspora activism — pressures few other DW language desks face in the same combination.

From radio to a digital-first service

The 2011 restructuring marked the service's transition from a primarily radio operation to a digital-first one. Shortwave time was halved, but Chinese was explicitly retained while entire services in other languages closed, and DW said it would increase online and mobile services and video- and audio-on-demand for Chinese alongside the remaining broadcasts. In the years since, the website and its associated digital channels have become the service's main product, supplemented by new production capacity in Asia: by DW's sixty-fifth anniversary in 2018 it had opened a remote studio in Taipei producing multimedia content in Chinese for the East Asian region, a location from which its journalists could keep watch on China without working under mainland restrictions. The anniversary coverage itself noted that the Chinese government had blocked DW as an internet platform for years and that a focal point of the Chinese-language operation was getting past the blockades.

Coverage and editorial character

DW Chinese covers a wide array of global news, politics and culture in Chinese, with the German and European perspective that is DW's statutory purpose: explaining Germany and Europe to the world and reporting world events, including China's, to audiences who may not encounter independent coverage at home. Academic comparisons of international broadcasters' China coverage have examined DW alongside the BBC World Service and CNN, and its China reporting — on subjects from the Sichuan earthquake's aftermath to the case of Liu Xiaobo, the dissident whose appeal a Beijing court rejected — illustrates the service's willingness to cover stories sensitive in Beijing. That willingness, combined with the controversies above, gives the desk a documented record on both sides of its central tension: criticised at times from Germany for softness toward Beijing and from Beijing for hostility, while continuing to publish in Chinese under a statutory independence guarantee.

Position among foreign Chinese-language services

DW Chinese sits in this directory alongside the other Chinese-language services of international broadcasters and newspapers — BBC News Chinese, VOA Chinese, RFI Chinese and the Chinese editions of major newspapers. Among them it is distinguished by the length of its Chinese broadcasting, dating to 1965; by its Bonn base and its television sibling in Berlin; and by the intensity with which its internal affairs became matters of German parliamentary and public debate. It is catalogued under China because its language, audience and much of its subject matter are Chinese, following the convention applied to other foreign-based China services, with its listed city reflecting that convention rather than its German newsroom locations.

Official website

DW Chinese publishes at dw.com/zh, the Chinese-language edition of the Deutsche Welle website, carrying its news, analysis and multimedia in Chinese.