China TV Series Production Center Ltd. Breaks Ground

With “Ltd.” officially added to its name on December 29, 2009, CCTV’s China TV Series Production Center — the largest national TV series producer in China, with a history of 26 years — transformed from a public institution into an enterprise. This is a milestone in the reform of China’s television media to separate production and broadcasting, as well as in the marketization of operable capital.

China TV Series Production Center Ltd. is a wholly-funded company that is owned, managed and controlled by CCTV. The company will retain the brand of its predecessor, and will officially become a national base for the production of movies and TV series on major revolutionary and historical themes. It will also expand its main business from being TV-drama production only as it is now to full-range production and distribution of TV series, movies, documentaries, TV programs, cartoons, imported films, etc.; and its products, which are now only in the forms for TV media, will also extend to multimedia such as TV, network, mobile terminal, and so on.

Xue Jijun, former director of China TV Series Production Center and now general manager of its successor, indicates that the company, after a period of development, will introduce strategic investment to reorganize itself into a joint-stock company, and will become a major, comprehensive group in the cultural industry by virtue of CCTV’s internal resource integration and restructuring, as well as the largest State-controlled key enterprise in the movie and TV series industry in China.

Founded on October 18, 1983, China TV Series Production Center is a CCTV-owned institution specializing in the creation and production of TV series. As the most time-honored national TV-drama producer, the Center produced great works including A Dream of Red Mansions, Pilgrimage to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, All Men Are Brothers, etc. which are well-known to every household in China, many winning national awards every year. In May 1986, the 25-episode TV series, A Dream of Red Mansions, was aired on CCTV and ATV and turned out to be a big hit. Scoring an audience rating of over 70%, it created a “Red Mansions” fever sweeping Mainland China and Hong Kong.