May 3 is World Press Freedom Day. UNESCO said the theme for this year’s World Press Freedom Day is “Information as a Public Good” and “highlights the important distinction between information and other communications such as disinformation, hate speech, entertainment and data messages.”
The Biden administration sees American values, including freedom of the press, as key to governing the country and guiding foreign policy. But one of its greatest challenges is that China, the world’s second-largest economy, is imposing unprecedentedly tight controls in all areas domestically, while taking full advantage of the liberal environment provided by the United States and the West to wreak havoc on the existing international order internationally.
Blinken: Beijing Propagates Disinformation Internationally, Restricts Press Freedom Domestically
On Wednesday (April 28), Secretary of State John Blinken held an online roundtable with foreign media reporters on press freedom and other issues. He noted that the U.S. is truly concerned about China’s distinct “two-handed approach” to domestic and foreign affairs.
According to Blinken, “Beijing’s propaganda and disinformation abroad through state-run media enterprises and platforms is designed to interfere with or undermine democracy to some degree, while at the same time restricting freedom of the press and expression in China.”
“Unfortunately, the Beijing authorities have used its powerful economic influence to gradually infiltrate overseas Chinese language media over the past 20 years, and its influence in the English language media is growing by the day.” Yu Jinshan, who once worked as a reporter for Chinese newspapers in New York for 25 years and now serves as a member of the non-governmental organization Committee on U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB), told Voice of America.
“It’s a very strange thing.” Yu Jinshan said. “The Beijing authorities are severely restricting freedom of the press at home, in Hong Kong, in the areas they control, but if anyone overseas criticizes its government’s statements, it will refute them in the name of freedom of the press,”
Wang Songlian, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch’s China Department, said, “The Chinese government has long controlled expression both online and offline, and has long used propaganda to legitimize the party’s abusive governing model. Since Xi Jinping came to power, these tactics have been intensified, along with the use of surveillance and social control. It is now increasingly difficult for Chinese people, and people outside of China but with ties to China, to criticize the Chinese government because they face a variety of threats, from detention and imprisonment to harassment by nationalist netizens.”
Garrett: Communist China’s War on Public Opinion Foments Social Unrest with Disinformation
Former Pentagon intelligence analyst Dan Garrett said the Chinese government’s offensive public opinion and information warfare against the United States and the West stems from Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping’s paranoia of being trapped in a new Cold War and his ambition to seize “the center stage of the world.
“As a means of their comprehensive national power, the CCP’s state-owned media have used asymmetry to enter the U.S. and global media markets to shape and direct public opinion against the U.S. and the West under the banner of ‘freedom of the press’ and ‘freedom of expression. Western public opinion – particularly in the context of the new coronavirus pandemic, national medical response and vaccine development.”
In addition, he argues, there is an offensive side to this public opinion war. “It also uses state media journalists as front-line information warriors to foment social unrest and division by spreading anti-American and anti-Western disinformation and propaganda narratives, seeking to strategically exploit the social rifts in the U.S. and globally caused by the New Coronavirus disaster, as well as the governance, financial and public health crises generated by pre-existing economic, medical and rising racial inequalities. “
On Wednesday, Secretary Blinken invited Washington-based journalists from media outlets in Venezuela, Hungary, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Hong Kong, China, to an online virtual roundtable to exchange information on press freedom.
Most of the journalists asked questions and spoke with Blinken about their governments’ restrictions on press freedom and the plight of journalists being suppressed. Journalists from Hong Kong, China, focused on restrictions on official Chinese media in the United States.
The reporter asked Secretary Blinken whether measures made during the Trump administration against Chinese media organizations in the United States, such as positioning them as foreign missions and reducing their visa time, would be changed; the reporter also asked whether many of the policies toward China that were in place during the Trump administration would continue.
Since last year, Washington has taken steps to designate more than a dozen Chinese state and local media outlets operating in the United States as foreign missions, including Xinhua News Agency, China Global Television Network, China News Service, Jiefang Daily and Economic Daily. The Chinese government has criticized the United States for applying double standards.
Blinken noted that the fact that these state-owned media outlets are under the complete control of the Chinese government “is a fact that is hard to ignore.” “The Chinese government has effective operational and editorial control over these entities, which are focused solely on advancing Beijing’s global propaganda and sometimes disinformation.”
The measures the U.S. has taken against these media outlets are designed to ensure transparency, Blinken said. “To ensure that the public understands who pays their [Chinese media staff] salaries and that their news commentary represents the views of the Chinese government and the Communist Party.”
But Blinken also noted that the U.S. approach “does not interfere with the reporting of these media outlets and their ability to choose their topics,” he said, adding that “we are not banning these state-controlled media outlets, which continue to operate here, but we want to ensure transparency and make sure that people are fully aware that what they are reading actually content that is produced on the orders of the Beijing government rather than independent media.”
Perry Lin: Chinese Official Media Reporters in the U.S. Are at Least Partly Secret Agents
University of California, Riverside Distinguished Professor and sinologist Perry Link said he agrees with Blinken’s assertion. Link noted that some employees of Chinese state-run media in the United States “many of them are not actually journalists.”
“I’m not saying all of them, of course, but there are conscientious journalists in China, and there always have been. But some of those who are sent to the U.S. and work as journalists on U.S. visas – I don’t know how many – at least some of them, can only be described as secret agents, not journalists.” Perry Lim emphasized.
Professor Perry Lin acknowledges that the current layout of the media in the U.S. and China is very unequal. “China uses the free space in the United States that’s for sure, comes to the United States to put out the information that he wants to put out using the free media, and the free media in the free world certainly allows it, that’s the intent of the free media. And on the contrary, if you want the Washington Post and the New York Times to come to China and distribute their information to China, that is simply impossible, simply impossible. So it’s a situation that is absolutely unbalanced.”
But he doesn’t favor the use of bans. “I’m for freedom of the press, and I don’t have any objection to what people say.”
He believes that deliberate disinformation must be controlled, but “to control the situation is not to prevent it from speaking, it’s to let him speak and then tear him down so that everyone knows it’s a lie. If he continues to lie in the future, the people of the United States and the world will be immune to him, knowing that this is probably nonsense. This method I think is even better than forbidding him to say it.”
At the roundtable, Secretary Blinken identified “two unsustainable” approaches to press freedom, namely, that China’s policies are “unsustainably out of step” with the practices of the Western world; and that China’s media can “operate in a free and open media environment” while “denying benefits to others is also unsustainable in practice.”
How the United States responds to Beijing’s distinctly different “two-handed strategy” internally and externally is indeed a major challenge for the United States. Joshua Kurlantzick, a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Institute of Foreign Relations, wrote in the wake of the Trump administration’s designation of China’s state-run media as a foreign mission that “taking such strong measures against China’s official media may be counterproductive. Washington may be exaggerating the influence of China’s official media and risks seemingly not caring about press freedom and not building an open society.”
At a time when World Press Freedom Day is being marked this year, Yu Jinshan noted that press freedom is a tool for Beijing to use, not a principle that must be followed, but that all Chinese should not be affected by it.
“All Chinese people in the world should continue to work to reach the point that we Chinese should also enjoy the right to freedom of the press, which is our right and should not be taken away by certain regimes, by certain people.” Yu Jinshan said.
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