How Are Chinese Journalists Countering International Fake News? A Qualitative Study of Practice and Transparency in The Paper’s Fact-Checking Division, Mingcha

In the digital media era, the spread of fake news poses a serious challenge to the global public knowledge system and public opinion environment. In recent years, fact-checking has rapidly developed globally as an important tool to combat fake news, as developed globally in recent years. However, current academic research on fact-checking has mostly focused on Western countries, lacking a systematic analysis of fact-checking practices in authoritarian countries, especially in the Chinese context. Additionally, the public’s lack of trust in fact-checking institutions poses a major challenge to the fact-checking news industry. Transparency is considered both a key way to mitigate this trust crisis and one of the core principles of fact-checking news. Therefore, this study takes the fact-checking organization Mingcha (明查), affiliated with the Chinese commercial media outlet The Paper (澎湃新闻), as a core case study. From the perspective of transparency theory, it systematically explores the tension between fact-checking production, transparency presentation, and institutional constraints in China's new ecosystem.

This study first broadens the definition of transparency, explaining and categorizing it into two levels: normative transparency and strategic transparency. To better understand the reasons behind the different levels of transparency in Chinese fact-checking news, this study develops Six Filters Authoritarian Propaganda Model based on Herman and Chomsky’s (1988) Propaganda Model to explain the interactive logic between transparency and media ecology in China’s authoritarian news system, particularly in terms of topic selection, censorship mechanisms, power hierarchy, and ideological consistency. Methodologically, this study follows the philosophical logic of qualitative research, using semi-structured interviews to explore the production process and underlying reasons and combining qualitative content analysis to analyse fact-checking texts.

The analytical section of this study consists of four parts. The first part lays the groundwork for analyzing the underlying causes by examining the verification process and methods of fact-checking news in China. The following two chapters delve deeper into the ways in which fact-checking presents different levels of transparency and the reasons behind them, analyzing them from the perspectives of normalization and strategization. The final part summarizes how proactive normative transparency is used to maintain professionalism and how passive strategic transparency is employed to survive in a strict political environment. The study also reveals the social value of fact-checking news in China and demonstrates that, despite the current trend of de-professionalization in Chinese media, fact-checkers at Mingcha are still striving to maintain their professional identity and attempting to balance professionalization and political expectations.