News Laundering, Paywall, Quality Reporting, and the Copyright Law in the Digital China

“News laundering” (xi gao) is an issue concerned by Chinese professional journalists in recent years. It refers to a series of unauthorized practices in appropriating or plagiarizing the published contents or the ideas presented by professional journalists, which is conducted by social media users including opinion leaders, and portal media, who are not authorized with news reporting licenses. From a legal perspective, it is hard to assert that “news laundering” violates Chinese copyright law, as news is not under the protection of the law and no one could monopolize the “facts”. From journalists’ perspective, this is an act of stealing content from the inside of the digital paywall. This conceptual article, by borrowing the scholarship from media and journalism, and law studies, contemplates the complex mechanism of “news laundering” and its implication for the paywall of legacy media and Chinese media systems, providing new insights into the new research field of news laundering under the Chinese context.