"It was forward-looking provincial stations that began experimenting with new programming, cartoons and youth music shows to increase their mass appeal, and that started influencing how China Central Television decided on content," explains Yang Yuqing, a former marketing executive at the state-run Hunan Television.

　　It was the ability of the arts to effect change that inspired Helicon's Tuesday Record Street promo. Zhu says that the power of music and culture to transform an entire region is a metaphor for the changes now being painted across China and its main broadcaster. Yet he adds, "Injecting color into a city or society depends not only on art, music, and film, but also on the people inside."

　　To recast its image within China and beyond, CCTV is drawing not only on dynamic, independent content providers, but also on its own best young designers and writers to help script its future. And in the expanding universe of CCTV's programming and plans for the new century, artist Tan Jing is a rising star.

　　Tan's life and stage designs reflect the quickening pace of CCTV's evolution.

　　When Tan was born during the "Cultural Revolution" of 1966-76, few Chinese citizens owned a radio (much less a television), contact with foreigners was banned, and the closest thing most people had to a computer was an abacus. As she was growing up, "Television wasn't considered a potential art form," says Tan. Artists who worked at China Central Television were only used to paint stage backdrops for red operas or pageants for peasants and proletarians.

　　Fast-forward to the present, and world-savvy designers like Tan Jing are being enlisted to help CCTV's march onto the global stage of ideas and images. Tan, who has visited the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Egypt in recent years, says the world's biggest broadcaster now encourages its staff to connect with diverse countries and cultures. Artists like Tan are now being used to inject new colors and creativity into CCTV's broadcasts.

　　CCTV, along with Beijing Television and a host of other local broadcasters, has also begun to experiment with using foreign reporters for cultural and lifestyle bits as it plans for more foreign language programming in other parts of the world. To mark the new millennium and China's rising role on the new world stage, China Central Television created an English-language channel, CCTV 9, in 2000. The new channel features more diversified reporting, which can be translated back into Chinese for domestic consumption. CCTV's latest move into Western-oriented broadcasting - a channel that alternately provides Spanish and French content - began transmissions in October of 2004.

　　China's transition into a more market-driven society has also had a profound impact on CCTV's programming practices. While CCTV long considered its role to be that of a medium to mold the masses, "audience ratings are beginning to be used to judge the popularity of every show," says a former British editor who monitors the Chinese media. CCTV's leaders now conduct weekly ratings surveys, and the results are becoming increasingly important in determining future programming.

　　One of Tan Jing's favorite designs, which she created for CCTV 9, emphasizes the rapid changes that are propelling CCTV into new horizons of transnational transmissions. The image, patterned after Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco "The Creation of Adam," shows two digital hands reaching out toward each other, with the spark of life illuminating the wired planet Earth.

　　"Satellite television, the Web, and cross-civilization contacts are creating a new world, and I wanted to express that idea in my design," says Tan. "Just as in Michelangelo's day, the world is undergoing a renaissance, and we want to take part in the renewed creation of cultures."