中国军视网 (China Military TV Network)

» see js7tv.cn as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The domain tells you where it came from. js7tv.cn is 军事7, military seven, after the channel number that carried military programming on Chinese state television for decades. When the People's Liberation Army's television operation decided in 2014 that it needed a website, it did not invent a brand. It took the number off the channel and put .cn after it.

中国军视网 formally went live on 29 December 2014, and the launch was attended in the way these launches are: an official from the Cyberspace Administration of China gave a speech, and the state press wrote it up the following morning. It ran eight sections. News and commentary sat next to documentaries and a competition reality show built around army units, and the raw material came from the military programming desk at state television and from the army's own broadcast department. It was the video wing of a propaganda apparatus given its own front door.

For most of its life it was, functionally, an archive with a homepage. Parades, training footage, anniversary documentaries, recruitment films. If you wanted to see what the PLA wanted people to see, this is where it was stacked up, in Chinese, without a paywall, for nine years.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was for ~

A standalone video website made complete sense in 2014 and made none by 2024, and the reason is not about China specifically. Every institution on earth that built a video portal in the middle of that decade watched the audience walk into short-form apps instead, where a clip is pushed rather than looked up. For a military press operation the calculus is sharper still: the point of the exercise is reach, and reach had moved into feeds that a .cn homepage cannot participate in.

The institution around it was also rebuilt while the site was running. The PLA's separate newspaper, radio and television units were consolidated into a single news and communication center in 2018 and the site's operator became a department inside it, and the television channel it was named after was itself reorganized in 2019 into a dedicated national defense and military channel. By the end the website was carrying a name that referred to a broadcasting arrangement two reorganizations old.

~ how it actually ended ~

There was a notice, dated 29 January 2024, and it said the site would cease operations. Two days later it did. No transition plan was published for the audience, no redirect was set up to a successor property, and the military's general news portal at 81.cn carried on separately as it always had.

Today js7tv.cn does not resolve. Not a parked page, not a redirect to the parent, nothing in DNS at all, which is unusually clean for an organization that does not normally leave loose ends. Somebody let the record expire the way an ordinary company lets a domain expire.

~ the missing archive ~

This is the part that will matter later. Nine years of primary-source video produced by a military about itself is exactly the material historians and analysts use, and it is the kind of material that is hardest to reconstruct once the index is gone. Individual clips survive on the reposting platforms, on the official accounts that mirrored them and in whatever the crawlers happened to catch, but scattered copies without the original catalog are not the same object.

I am reading this one entirely in translation and from outside, and the distance is not only geographic. A state broadcaster's video portal has no consumer story to remember, no sign-up, nothing anyone in Turkey would have stumbled into. What makes it worth a grave is narrower than nostalgia: it is a large, deliberately assembled public record that stopped existing on a Wednesday, announced two days in advance, by an organization with no obligation to explain.

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