Xinhua News Agency

Xinhua News Agency, whose name means New China, is the official state news agency of the People's Republic of China and a ministry-level body under the State Council. Its predecessor, the Red China News Agency, was set up by the Chinese Communist Party in Ruijin in November 1931 and took the name Xinhua in 1935 at the end of the Long March. It opened its first overseas branches during the Second World War and began broadcasting in English in 1944. After 1949 it became the official state agency and absorbed the assets of the earlier Central News Agency. Xinhua works both as a wire service and as a publisher in several languages, with its headquarters in Beijing near the central government compound at Zhongnanhai. Scholars describe it as a channel for party and government messaging, and it has been criticized for propaganda; in the United States it registered as a foreign agent in 2021.