The niche medium of the “podcast” has given many journalists and commentators in China a platform to “not speak out”. However, podcasts have come under the scrutiny of censors, and Chinese podcast hosts are learning how to keep their content original and honest while still managing the scale of their content.
Compared to the hundreds of millions of video views on Chinese film and social media, podcasts have a much lower audience, but their reach is gradually expanding.
Kou Aizhe, anchor of the popular podcast Story FM, told The Economist that he attracts an audience of around 700,000 listeners per episode.
A survey released this year by PodFestChina, an exchange platform hosted by a group of Chinese podcast enthusiasts, showed that the current Chinese podcast audience is mainly concentrated in big cities and is a middle- to high-income group with a high level of education.
The results of this survey show that 88.5% of Chinese listeners are under the age of 35, and 86.4% have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Curiosity, points of interest and practicality are the top reasons listeners listen to podcasts. Podcasts in the categories of literature, art and personal stories are the most popular; 34.7% of podcast listeners are interested in podcasts on political and historical topics.
Openness, originality and honesty are common characteristics of podcast content. Speaking to The Economist, Fang Fangcheng, an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said that the topics discussed on Chinese podcasts do not seek sensationalism as much as mainstream Chinese social media platforms. Yang Yi, host of the podcast show “Khuzuo Khuzuo” and chief operating officer of the podcast service platform JustPod, estimates that around 90 percent of Chinese podcasts are non-professional or independently run, although those sponsored by large companies and backed by venture capital are growing in number, reports the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.
A U.S. report published in 2018 counted China’s podcast market at about $3 billion in annual revenue.
Yang Yi said the space is getting smaller. He told the South China Morning Post, “If someone is making a podcast because they want to speak freely, they can stop now because such an atmosphere will inevitably start to dissipate in a year to a year and a half.”
Young One says podcast operators generally aren’t catering to a mainstream audience anymore, but are doing topics that they are genuinely interested in. But he worries that as the audience expands and commercialization continues, the podcast space will become increasingly crowded.
Unless an episode of a podcast becomes a hit because of its “offbeat” content, censors generally don’t ask questions, which gives podcasters some room to play.
But the Chinese podcast community also acknowledges that podcasters face multiple levels of censorship: self-censorship, censorship by podcast platforms, sponsors and advertisers, and government censorship.
The new crown epidemic has made many issues sensitive at once, and podcasters, who already have a hard time holding the line on censorship in general, have been under the knife of the censors in this public health crisis.
Surplus Value, a pan-cultural podcast started by three female media professionals, released an episode this February titled “Plague, Language, and Specific People,” featuring an interview with Luo Xin, a history professor at Peking University, discussing psychological, cultural, and government management issues during the epidemic.
One of the hosts, Zhang Zhiqi, announced on Weibo on February 19 that all episodes of Surplus Value had suddenly disappeared from the podcast platform Himalaya, and they immediately took the episode down from another domestic platform, NetEase Cloud, keeping it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and their official website. A few days later, however, the episode had also disappeared from the Surplus Value website, which was hosted on a US server. The show’s Paypal account was also “removed or banned from renewal and not allowed to sign up”.
The South China Morning Post said the original Residual Value team now runs a podcast called “Random Fluctuations,” which discusses controversial topics centered on foreign events.
One of the anchors, Zhang Zhiqi, told The Economist that her main concern is reaching a domestic Chinese audience, “the vast majority of whom don’t have VPNs. if that means I have to sacrifice some freedom of speech, then let it go, that’s the reality we live in.”
In June, the Castro and Pocket Casts podcast clients were taken down from Apple’s China App store. The Australian runner of Pocket Casts said Apple took Pocket Casts down because of a request from China’s Internet Information Office. The company says podcasts should not be censored by authorities as an open form of media.
Castro, on the other hand, said their product was taken down because the app had promoted podcast content about the Hong Kong protests.
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