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Twenty words, half a newspaper
王老师's claim is close to literally true and it is the most useful practical fact in this lesson. Chinese news writing runs on a small, fixed set of formulas, and a learner who memorises two or three dozen of them goes from decoding a headline to reading a page. The core set: 据报道, 据悉, 据了解, 有关部门, 相关部门, 知情人士, 目前, 日前, 此前, 今后, 涉嫌, 嫌疑人, 疑似, 通报, 发布, 启动, 出台 for a policy being issued, 整治 for a crackdown, 有望 for being likely to, 引发 for provoking, 高度重视 for taking very seriously, 不得 for must not, 依法 for in accordance with the law. None of them is hard. All of them recur every day. The register itself is worth understanding rather than merely decoding. Chinese journalistic prose is heavily nominalised, uses the light verbs of lesson 83 — 进行, 加以, 予以 — prefers the agentless construction, and compresses headlines to the point of telegraphy. It also carries a stratum of institutional vocabulary that signals position rather than content, and Chinese readers read it with that in mind: 有关部门 tells you the department is not being named, 高度重视 tells you the matter has been escalated, and 无可奉告 tells you there will be no answer. On the press landscape itself, a learner should know the shape without needing a verdict on it. Xinhua is the state news agency and People's Daily the Party newspaper, and both set the terms much of the rest follows. Caixin and the former Southern Weekly built reputations for investigative work. The large commercial platforms — Toutiao, Tencent News, Weibo — are where most people actually read news now, which has changed the economics as thoroughly as it has everywhere else. Chinese media operate under state regulation and editorial direction that has no close equivalent in most Western countries, and the degree and effects of that are argued about by scholars and journalists inside and outside China. This course does not adjudicate it; what a reader needs is to know that the register is doing work and to read several sources. Three practical suggestions. Start with a subject you already know about, because the vocabulary is predictable and you will finish the article. Read the same story in two outlets and notice where the wording differs. And use the weather and sport pages shamelessly at first, for exactly the reason the Spanish course recommended them: the structures repeat, and finishing something is worth more at this stage than struggling with an editorial.