Background on China Copyright & Media and Its Contributions to DigiChina

China Copyright and Media (CC&M) was a database of translated Chinese legal and regulatory documents in the field of media, intellectual property, ideology, and technology, that Rogier Creemers compiled as part of his Ph.D. and post-doctoral work. Most translations were completed by Rogier himself, with some contributions from other scholars and observers.

Over CC&M, it has become a well-used resource in the China-watching and scholarly communities. It has been cited in over 800 academic papers and numerous press outlets, and continues to be visited by tens of thousands of visitors annually. This success underlines the project’s ethos of public service, which lives on in DigiChina: to make primary sources about China accessible to global audiences, free of charge.

It also reflects an important truth in the study of contemporary China: While the Chinese Communist Party indeed can be opaque in its ways, there is a great deal of source material available if only analysts are able to dedicate the time and resources to access it. The goal of CC&M was to make this process easier, a goal shared by DigiChina today.

CC&M will remain online as an archive. It is still being used and linked to on a daily basis, and much of its content will not be reproduced on DigiChina as it does not related to the Internet. New additions will not be made.

The CC&M work included in DigiChina’s database carries a label indicating its origin, and if it is edited in our ongoing process of standardizing, updating, and correcting earlier work, the changes will be noted.