The Chinese Communist Party spends huge sums of money each year to influence overseas media to glorify the Chinese Communist Party. The photo shows Tibetan students protesting against the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece Xinhua News Agency for renting a large electronic signboard in New York’s Times Square.
The Jamestown Foundation, a U.S. think tank, noted in an article Monday (April 12) that the Chinese Communist Party has long tried to use party media mouthpieces to expand its influence in Western society in order to gain more “discourse power” in the international arena. power. One of its strategies has been to place “advertising” inserts in influential international newspapers. With the digitization of the news media, this type of publicity has followed suit.
Xinhua’s “advertising” inserts in the print media
John Dotson, author of this article, notes that the CCP has long placed paid inserts in major U.S. newspapers such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. For example, Xinhua News Agency often uses the labels “China Watch” and “China Focus” for its advertising campaigns. The articles in these inserts appear at first glance to be news and editorials from the main newspaper, but in reality they are big foreign propaganda for the CCP.
There is a significant cost to purchase these advertising inserts. Information from congressional staffers in 2011 showed that the Washington Post’s “China Watch” inserts cost $300,000, not including additional costs for web-based content; a 2016 report showed that the U.K.-based Telegraph charged £750,000 (more than $1 million) per year to run similar inserts.
Xinhua’s advertising content goes digital
The article says Xinhua’s newspaper inserts have been in the spotlight, but less known when these promotional tactics moved into electronic media. Big outreach through electronic media may reach a broader audience. The Communist Party media has similarly invested heavily here. The Los Angeles Times, the Seattle Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Houston Chronicle and the Boston Globe all have such partnerships with them.
China Daily Distribution Corporation (CDDC), a New York-based subsidiary of Xinhua News Agency, is responsible for advertising for it in North America. The company’s Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) disclosure filing shows that from November 2019 through October 2020, CDDC received a total of $9,191,926.16 from its parent company to pay for materials printing and advertising for Xinhua (including paper) and online.
As for where these advertising fees went, the article cites an undisclosed amount paid by CDDC to Foreign Policy magazine for advertising services from November 2019 to April 2020; from May to October 2020, the magazine received another $100,000 in advertising fees from the other side.
Using inserts to “tell a good story” for the CCP’s mouthpiece
According to the article, the CCP media uses the credibility of prominent English-language journals in order to “tell the Chinese (CCP) story. In fact, these inserts have disclaimers on them, but they are often in small print, so many people do not notice them.
Taking Xinhua’s “China Watch” content in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) as an example, one of the main propaganda themes highlighted in these materials throughout 2020 is praising the CCP’s highly effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, while calling for global solidarity in the fight against the disease, and insisting that the CCP was not responsible for the pandemic.
And they often refer directly, or more often, to international figures such as Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple Inc.
In addition to praising the policies of the Chinese Communist Party, these articles do not forget to criticize countries for policies that run counter to the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. For example, at the beginning of the outbreak, many countries issued travel bans on travelers from China. The inserts then responded that these travel bans were “Chinese-phobic” and should be opposed. Later, in March 2020, the Chinese Communist Party introduced its own travel ban and began promoting the idea that the virus originated outside of China, but these messages blaming other countries for the travel ban continued.
Other important themes of these major outreach efforts include how the U.S. is responsible for starting the U.S.-China “trade war” and how good the CCP’s “Belt and Road” policy is.
During his presidency, Trump said that the Chinese Communist authorities were buying the media in the U.S. to expand their influence, noting that Beijing was “trying to interfere in American politics.
In addition to “telling a good story” in the U.S., the Communist Party’s big foreign propaganda effort is not shying away from Europe. Deutsche Welle reports that in early 2018, the Mercator Center for China Studies (MERICS) and the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin released a joint study warning that the CCP is actively working to improve the global public image of its political and economic system, trying to package it as a viable alternative to liberal democracies.
The report further notes that a number of major Western newspapers regularly include a “China Watch” supplement with strong official Beijing overtones. In addition to a number of high-profile U.S. media outlets, French newspaper Le Figaro, as well as German newspapers Handelsblatt and Süddeutsche Zeitung, have published such supplements.
Among them, Süddeutsche Zeitung announced in May last year that it would stop publishing the “China Watch” supplement.
In addition to advertising, there are other ways to make big outreach
In his article on Tuesday, author Dossen also noted that some English-language news organizations have decided to abandon these sources of advertising revenue after recognizing the potential conflict of interest and ethical problems associated with their relationship with Xinhua. But there are still many other organizations that maintain such relationships.
The authors conclude their article by warning that, in addition to advertising, Xinhua is finding another way to make a big outreach effort. That is, by establishing commercial partnerships with Western media companies and sponsoring their repackaged content for distribution through U.S. online news outlets. These approaches are more subtle than “advertising,” and potentially more effective. The author says he will discuss this in a second article to be published soon.
The author of the article, John Dotson, is a former editor at the Jamestown Foundation. He currently serves as deputy director of the Global Taiwan Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based organization. The Institute is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank dedicated to the study of contemporary Taiwan issues and U.S.-Taiwan relations. The views expressed by the author in this article are his own and do not represent those of any institution.
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