A developing market in news: Xinhua News Agency and Chinese newspapers

The mythology of the news agency, as the earliest news organization to operate globally, has been used to explain its ability to build up connections with its counterparts, and media and non-media organizations, as well as to use these connections to good advantage. This article offers a social-historical analysis of China’s Xinhua News Agency and Chinese newspapers, focusing on their interrelations. It attempts to delineate how a national news agency in a non-capitalist country went through a process of development, and how it has changed during the transition from a command economy to market-oriented economy. Xinhua’s experience of dealing with newspapers provides a distinctive example: it started life as an amalgamation of an agency and several newspapers and then evolved towards the path followed by a great number of news agencies since the 19th century. The movement of Xinhua towards adopting Western experiences illustrates a globalized tendency, which has been experienced by leading international news agencies and is still experienced by a number of national players in the developing world. This tendency leads news agencies, including Xinhua, to undergo a transition from bi-directional dependency to an agency-client relationship.