About SBS Chinese

SBS Chinese

Overview

SBS Chinese, published as SBS中文, is the Chinese-language news service of the Special Broadcasting Service, Australia's public multilingual broadcaster. SBS publishes news in more than 60 languages, and its Chinese service is built for Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking Australians: text in simplified and traditional Chinese, audio in Mandarin and Cantonese, and, from 2022, a locally produced Mandarin television bulletin. SBS中文 was launched as a mobile-first digital platform around Lunar New Year in February 2021, building on SBS Radio's long-running Chinese-language services. In June 2024 SBS ended its Mandarin television bulletin and shifted Mandarin news to short-form digital video, reporting more than 8.2 million views across SBS Chinese's YouTube, Facebook, Weibo and WeChat accounts. The service is profiled here as a China-facing diaspora outlet because its subject matter, languages and audience place it at the centre of the Chinese-speaking information world, even though its newsroom and its public mission are Australian.

That Australian mission is what makes SBS Chinese distinctive among the outlets in this batch. It is not a foreign broadcaster beaming news into China, nor a Chinese outlet reporting outward. It is a charter-bound public broadcaster serving citizens and residents of its own country in the languages they speak at home, and its Chinese service tells Chinese-Australians Australian news, in Chinese, alongside news from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the world.

The SBS model

The Special Broadcasting Service was created to serve a multicultural Australia, and its charter obligation to reflect the country's diversity runs across television, radio and digital platforms. By the time SBS Chinese launched, SBS was already providing news and information in more than 60 languages across its radio services, podcasting and digital platforms, the most extensive multilingual news operation of any Australian broadcaster. Australia's media regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, records SBS's language services in its register of eligible news businesses, and its 2021 register lists SBS Mandarin and SBS Cantonese as separate eligible news sources within SBS's registered news business. That regulatory detail captures an important fact about the service's architecture: Mandarin and Cantonese are treated as distinct language services with distinct audiences, even where they share the SBS中文 brand and website.

The audience case rests on demography. The 2021 Australian census counted over 685,000 Mandarin speakers in Australia, a figure cited when SBS made its 2024 changes, and Cantonese has an even longer history in Australia, carried by generations of migrants from Guangdong and Hong Kong. Chinese languages are among the most widely spoken languages other than English in Australian homes, and SBS's one-in-five figure, that one in five Australians speaks a language other than English at home, frames the whole network's purpose. SBS Chinese serves the largest single language community in that multicultural structure.

Launch in February 2021

SBS announced in January 2021 that it would launch SBS中文 as a mobile-first digital platform for Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking Australians, timed to begin as Lunar New Year began the following month. TV Tonight's report of the announcement described a service providing Chinese-Australians with independent, trusted Australian news, information and entertainment, together with news from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and around the world. Content was to be published in traditional and simplified Chinese text, recognising that Australia's Chinese-speaking communities include readers educated in both script systems, with audio available in Mandarin and Cantonese. The format mixed short-form video, articles and audio, covering breaking news and current affairs alongside health, education, food, finance and other practical subjects of community life.

David Hua, SBS's Director of Audio and Language Content, presented the launch as both a community service and a statement of the charter in action. He said SBS was thrilled to be celebrating the beginning of Lunar New Year with the new service, that SBS中文 would cement SBS as a trusted source of news for Chinese speakers in Australia, and that it went to the heart of the SBS Charter, not only informing communities but reflecting Australia's multicultural society, promoting greater understanding across cultures and evolving to meet the needs of diverse audiences. The launch programming across the network marked Lunar New Year with curated content including the Australian television premiere of Be Water, the 2020 film about Bruce Lee, and Secrets of China's Forbidden City, a documentary about Beijing's Imperial Palace.

From radio roots to a digital platform

SBS Chinese did not begin from nothing in 2021. SBS Radio had broadcast Chinese-language services for decades before the digital platform existed, and the new service explicitly built on those long-running Mandarin and Cantonese radio programmes. What changed in 2021 was the centre of gravity: a mobile-first website and social presence, publishing text in both Chinese scripts and audio in both spoken languages under one brand, designed for an audience that increasingly consumed news on phones rather than on scheduled radio. The ACMA register's separate listing of SBS Mandarin and SBS Cantonese reflects the older radio architecture persisting inside the new digital one: two spoken-language communities, one shared written platform, since written Chinese, in simplified or traditional characters, is common to both, while spoken Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible.

This dual structure is the service's defining editorial discipline. A story must be produced as simplified text for mainland-born readers, traditional text for many Hong Kong, Taiwan and older diaspora readers, Mandarin audio for the larger and faster-growing spoken community, and Cantonese audio for a community with deep roots in Australian Chinese history. Few news services anywhere maintain all four versions of the same journalism as a matter of routine, and the discipline explains both the service's cost and its value to audiences whom English-language Australian media cannot fully reach.

The Mandarin television bulletin and SBS WorldWatch

In 2022 SBS extended the service to television. SBS中文 News, a locally produced nightly Mandarin bulletin made by a dedicated team of bilingual journalists, premiered on SBS On Demand in January 2022. On 23 May 2022 it gained a prime-time home on SBS WorldWatch, a new free-to-air channel, SBS's sixth, broadcasting international news bulletins from broadcasters in some 30 countries and more than 35 languages, alongside SBS's own Arabic and Mandarin bulletins. The Arabic and Mandarin programmes were half-hour bulletins broadcast each weeknight, produced and presented by SBS journalists for an Australian audience, providing impartial coverage, context and analysis of major national and international stories in language. Mandi Wicks, SBS's Director of News and Current Affairs, described the channel as a demonstration of SBS delivering on its charter by providing local and international news to these communities, and SBS Managing Director James Taylor presented the expansion as serving the one in five Australians who speak a language other than English at home.

For SBS Chinese, WorldWatch conferred a new status. The Mandarin bulletin was no longer only a community service tucked inside a streaming catalogue; it was one of two flagship, locally produced bulletins anchoring a national free-to-air channel, broadcast in prime time on channel 35 and available on SBS On Demand. Chinese-Australian viewers could watch their own community's Australian-made bulletin alongside bulletins imported from broadcasters around the world, a schedule that placed SBS中文 News in the company of the world's public broadcasters and treated Mandarin as a language of Australian public life, not a foreign extra.

The 2024 shift to digital video

In June 2024 SBS ended the Mandarin television bulletin and shifted Mandarin news production to short-form digital video. TV Blackbox's report of the change recorded the audience evidence behind the decision: SBS Chinese content had accumulated more than 8.2 million views across its YouTube, Facebook, Weibo and WeChat accounts. The presence of Weibo and WeChat in that list is notable. SBS Chinese distributes not only on the global platforms available in Australia but also on the two Chinese platforms its audience uses to follow news from China and to communicate with family there, meeting its community inside the applications where that community's wider media life already happens.

The 2024 change illustrates the service's platform realism. A fixed nightly television bulletin suits a broadcast era; short-form digital video suits an audience of phone users spread across time zones of work and family life, and it travels across the social platforms where younger Chinese-Australians actually encounter news. SBS applied the resources of the bulletin to the formats its own viewing figures vindicated, while the digital platform at sbs.com.au/language/chinese, with its simplified and traditional text and Mandarin and Cantonese audio, continued as the service's home. The WorldWatch channel itself continued broadcasting international bulletins after the local Mandarin bulletin's format changed, and reference listings record the channel's later history separately from the Chinese digital service, which remains the enduring form of SBS Chinese.

Editorial role for Chinese-Australians

The editorial promise made at launch, independent and trusted Australian news in Chinese, addresses a structural gap. Chinese-Australians live between two information systems: Australian English-language media, which many follow with difficulty or at second hand, and Chinese-language media from China, whose coverage of Australia is limited and whose coverage of China follows a state-shaped agenda. SBS Chinese occupies the space between them with Australian public-broadcaster journalism in the community's languages: federal and state politics, immigration policy, health and education systems, housing, employment and community affairs, explained for readers whose lives are governed by those systems, alongside world news that includes China coverage produced under SBS's charter standards of impartiality rather than under any government's direction.

That position has civic significance beyond convenience. During public emergencies, health campaigns and elections, governments need to reach citizens in the languages they understand best, and a trusted public service in Mandarin and Cantonese is part of Australia's democratic infrastructure. SBS Chinese's practical coverage, the health, education, food and finance subjects named at its launch, is the everyday form of that infrastructure, while its news coverage performs the same function at moments of national importance. Its bilingual journalist teams, producing Australian stories in Chinese rather than merely translating wire copy, give the community representation inside the national broadcaster as well as service from it.

Position among diaspora Chinese media

SBS Chinese differs from the commercial Chinese-language media that serve Australia's diaspora, and from the China-directed services elsewhere in this batch, in its funding and accountability. Commercial diaspora outlets answer to advertisers and owners; foreign state services such as VOA Chinese or RFA Mandarin answer to overseas governments and address audiences inside China; SBS Chinese is funded as an Australian public broadcaster, governed by the SBS Charter, registered with ACMA as an eligible news business and addressed to people who live in Australia. Its closest relatives are the other language services of SBS itself and the multilingual public services of broadcasters such as Australia's own ABC and Canada's and Germany's public media, rather than any outlet published from Beijing, Taipei or Hong Kong.

Current status and significance

SBS Chinese continues at sbs.com.au/language/chinese as the Chinese-language service of SBS, publishing in simplified and traditional Chinese with Mandarin and Cantonese audio, and producing short-form digital video following the June 2024 end of its television bulletin. Its recorded milestones, the February 2021 digital launch, the January 2022 On Demand bulletin premiere, the 23 May 2022 WorldWatch prime-time launch and the 8.2 million social views reported by 2024, trace a service that grew from radio roots into television and then consolidated where its audience actually was. For this directory, its significance is that it represents the public-service model of Chinese-language news in the diaspora: charter-bound, bilingual in both script and speech, and made in the country its audience calls home.