ABSTRACT
China has successfully liberated from poverty, a majority of those who had been in its clutches within a few decades, and the country planned to become the first country in the Global South to eliminate absolute poverty by 2020. This chapter focuses on the constructive roles the Chinese media have played in support of the eight-year national campaign Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) between 2013 and 2020. It describes both state-owned traditional media and privately owned social media using the constructive journalism framework. The chapter argues that cooperation and mutual support between the media and government in pursuit of common interests in TPA has brought efficiency and success to their efforts. Specifically, the chapter argues that constructive journalism may contribute to poverty reduction through (1) agenda setting and consensus building; (2) monitoring and accountability; (3) cooperation and development and (4) participation and people-centered content. The chapter argues that, although media systems and journalism practices vary across nations, there is ample scope for constructive journalism as an alternative approach beyond professional journalism and party journalism to address development issues in diverse social and political contexts.
