China’s leading television network, CCTV, is launching a new global media platform aimed at rebranding the country. The announcement was made on the state-owned company’s website, but the force behind the initiative was made clear in comments from President Xi Jinping carried by Xinhua news agency.
“The relationship between China and the rest of the world is undergoing historic changes. China needs to know better about the world and the world needs to know better about China,” Xi said in a congratulatory letter to the China Global Television Network, as CCTV’s new arm will be called. Xi urged CGTN to “tell China stories well,” Xinhua reported.
CGTN will have six TV channels, three overseas branches, a video content provider and a digital media division, and will offer content in multiple languages, Xinhua said.
China has been seeking to build global influence through “soft power” initiatives, such as the Confucius Institutes that promote Chinese culture and language, the state-backed acquisition of film industry assets and investments into global sports teams.
The media is another key focus. In 2009, the government budgeted US$7 billion to increase the presence of CCTV, Xinhua and other state media globally — that compares with the US$289 million the UK government is giving to the BBC World Service to expand its operations over the next five years.
China’s media push comes as the journalism industry in many Western countries is undergoing massive cutbacks in resources as it struggles to cope with digital disruption and changing consumer demands for news. Meanwhile, the gap is being filled by a resurgent Russian government-backed media, and well-funded outfits like Qatar-backed Al -Jazeera.
None are quite so well-funded as China’s though, with the government willing to commit hefty sums to ensure swanky offices, top-of-the-range equipment and editorial budgets most newsrooms would die for. On top of that, China’s media is riding in the slipstream of the country’s overseas investments — with a very clear mandate to “raise the creative strength, charisma and credibility of our external discourse, telling Chinese stories well, transmitting China’s voice well, interpreting Chinese characteristics well,” as Xi put it earlier.
Indeed, China’s media ambitions don’t stop at promoting its own industry. Beijing is also pushing journalism with Chinese characteristics onto the world, and in particular trading partners in developing nations — some of whose leaders welcome a style of journalism that is tailored to meet the needs of the state and not the people. Through the China-Africa Media Cooperation Forum, for example, China offers to help train African journalists in its style of reporting.
Xi’s view of what that style should be was made clear in February after a visit to CCTV’s offices in Beijing. All news media run by the Party must work to speak for the Party’s will and its propositions and protect the Party’s authority and unity, Xi said, according to Xinhua.
Xi has presided over a dramatic winding back of freedom of the press —both in terms of coverage by foreign journalists as well as what the domestic media can cover. A survey by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China in 2015 found 80% of respondents believed their conditions had worsened or remained the same. China ranks 176 out of 180 in Reporters Without Borders’ 2016 Press Freedom Index — dropping one place from a year earlier.
China’s domestic media suffers from political interference and harassment, low technical and ethical standards, and chronic low pay. The state maintains control through outright ownership; oversight by an estimated 15 state bodies to ensure journalists toe the Party line; imprisonment, harassment, torture and other coercive means; and the use of vaguely worded legal threats, including that of breaching official secrets that are not defined and are arbitrarily applied.
Journalists must study correct ideological beliefs. The two-volume, 738-page training manual for 2013 sought to rectify what it says is the growing problem of “false news’’ with detailed guidance on ethics, accuracy, objectivity — and the ideological framework of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Chapter 2, for example, is a 61-page discussion of journalism and Marxism.
Responsible reporting in the eyes of the Party means upholding social values — critical reports on ethnic minorities, suggestions that women are not equal to men and disparaging comments about the elderly or disabled are all forbidden. But so too are reports that threaten the territorial integrity of the state or that deny the leading role of Marxism-Leninism, “Mao Zedong Thought” and Deng Xiaoping’s political theories. Calling for Western style democracy is barred.
The concept of the media as part of the check and balances that hold the powerful to account and inform public debate is toxic to the Party. That was made clear when Chinese journalist Gao Yu landed a scoop when she got her hands on an internal CPC memo know as Document 9 — and landed a 7-year jail sentence for leaking state secrets.
The memo is worth quoting at length:
Anti-China forces are “defining the media as `society’s public instrument’ and as the `Fourth Estate’; attacking the Marxist view of news and promoting the `free flow of information on the Internet’; … The ultimate goal of advocating the West’s view of the media is to hawk the principle of abstract and absolute freedom of press, oppose the Party’s leadership in the media, and gouge an opening through which to infiltrate our ideology…
“We must not permit the dissemination of opinions that oppose the Party’s theory or political line, the publication of views contrary to decisions that represent the central leadership’s views, or the spread of political rumours that defame the image of the Party or the nation…
“We need to strengthen education on the Marxist perspective of media to ensure that the media leadership is always firmly controlled by someone who maintains an identical ideology with the Party’s Central Committee, under General Secretary Xi Jinping’s leadership…
“We must reinforce our management of all types and levels of propaganda on the cultural front … and allow absolutely no opportunity or outlets for incorrect thinking or viewpoints to spread.”
Put the question in another way: Why 50% of them return to Communist Paradise of China?
The MSM in Austalia is a mockery of a ‘free’ press; the aim is always to increase profits – regardless. With very little in-depth discussion of national needs and ambitions, still less the overarching needs of the planet. Plus critical reports on non-western countires and few reports on their achievements. As one observer put it, ‘If you don’t read the MSM, you are un-informed; if you do read it, you are misinformed!’
If the writer truly believe in free speech and expression, why not just let the readers decide after reading or viewing what Chinese or whose ever media have to say instead of bad mounting the motive.
There are many reasons why people dont return. Most of them are economic & opportunities, same as the million of Indians and Pakistanis who migrate to other countries or illeglally try to gain citizenship in Malaysia for example. In the same way the number of Malaysian Chinese migrating to Australia & NZ directly or stay behind after studying.
@Colin Evan Cook: You hit the nail on the head. I got a little exhausted from US MSM and RT’s vitriol before settled down with a well funded and mellow CCTV rebranded into CGTN.
India has too many internal, social, and religious communal problems to have a press that’s remotely free.
India is a joke, a punchline, a button of a laughtrack. India’s newspapers are free, free to be thrown away, they are wallpaper in the houses of those millions and millions of poor people. India is just huge sad country full of cheapskates who are racist and liars.
This awesome news!
I worked with 5 chinese students and 2 of them decided to remain in USA. They were middle classs and did very well in China. I think China is awesome. India, not so awesome.
This article is out of step with observed reality: at 80%, China’s media is among the most trusted on earth. US media, by contrast, has won the trust of only 20% of its consumers, according to Gallup’s June, 2016 surveys.
Those who leave cannot cut it in China’s cutthroat business and intellectual environment where they must compete with 330,000 geniuses with IQs above 160 (the US has 10,000).
It’s that simple.