Beijing news app to spread Chinese culture

Beijing-based news and information content platform Jinri Toutiao, or Toutiao, will launch the “Chinese-Style Plan” to help promote traditional Chinese culture with high-quality content, and an expert said the move is a response to request from authorities to purify the cyberspace environment.

Toutiao will add a “Chinese-Style channel” to its app, in which traditional culture content, including sinology, calligraphy, paintings and operas, will be included and recommended to users, 21st Century Business Herald reported on Monday.

The report said Toutiao will also provide a database on traditional culture to allow users to produce multimedia content.

“The move not only responds to regulators’ initiative to purify cyberspace and promote Chinese culture but also shows the company’s commitment [to upgrade content],” Wang Sixin, a law professor at the Beijing-based Communication University of China, told Global Times on Tuesday.

On April 11, Toutiao removed in-app channels such as “Duanzi” and “Beauty,” which allegedly contained vulgar and incorrect values content.

However, Wang said that a platform should not be closed immediately after vulgar and improper content is discovered, and should only be penalized after failing to heed a warning. And successive warnings from different departments may cause panic in the industry.

The launch of the Chinese-Style channel is similar to the successful “San Nong channel,” a Chinese term which refers to agriculture, rural areas, and farmers, 21st Century Business Herald quoted an official of Toutiao as saying.

Toutiao is not the only platform promoting traditional Chinese culture.

Toutiao’s sister app Douyin, a short-video app considered a clone of its US counterpart Musical. ly, reportedly entered into a strategic cooperation deal with the Xi’an Committee of Tourism Development.

Douyin will also make efforts to promote Xi’an, capital city of Northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, to make the city a more globally desirable tourist destination, news website cnwest. com reported on Thursday.

More than 610,000 short videos about Xi’an were posted on Douyin by the end of March and were played more than 3.6 billion times, cnwest. com reported.

Cooperation with Xi’an was Douyin’s first step to globally promote Chinese culture, Douyin CEO Zhang Nan was quoted by cnwest.com as saying.