Great Hall of the People
The Great Hall of the People is a state building located at the western edge of Tiananmen Square in Beijing. It is used for legislative and ceremonial activities by the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the ruling Communist Party of China. The People's Great Hall functions as the meeting place for the full sessions of the National People's Congress (NPC), the Chinese legislature, which occurs every year during March along with the national session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a political advisory body. It is also the meeting place of the National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which, since 1982, has occurred once every five years and the party's Central Committee which meets approximately once a year.
Soft power of China
China Central Television, China Radio International (CRI), Xinhua news agency, and "The China Daily" newspaper and website are the largest four state-owned media corporations. They all under control by SAPPRFT and rely on each other for producing news to the public. Xinhua News Agency is the main news source of CCTV. As they both are the official press agencies of the state, they have been tightly controlled and packaged by the government. In 2008, an earthquake measuring 8 on the Richter scale hit Sichuan Province. China Central Television was reporting on the disaster within minutes of the quake and had reporters airing with the updates within half an hour. “Domestic disaster of any sort were too hot to handle without instruction from the state and could harm the national image” (Zhu, 2012). This earthquake was a milestone of China as the Olympics was opened in a few months later in Beijing. In the chaos of the disaster, the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China requested other Chinese news organizations not to broadcast their reports of the disaster, but instead only used information released by either CCTV or the Xinhua News Agency. This process reveals that the government controls the news.