As a January 19 deadline looms to ban or sell TikTok, and as a key decision awaits from the US Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the related July 2024 act on “foreign adversary controlled applications,” many users of the popular video-sharing platform are already rendering judgment with their feet, seeking refuge in the most unlikely of places — the international version of a popular Chinese app that has a long track record of censorship and surveillance.

This week, more than 700,000 self-styled “TikTok refugees” have flocked to China’s RedNote platform, known at home as Xiaohongshu (小红书) — literally “little red book” — an Instagram-like platform that has long been a go-to space for posts on shopping, makeup, fashion and travel. The app currently has 300 million monthly active users, nearly 80 percent women.

The mass migration, announced with the hashtag #TikTokrefugees, has made the Chinese lifestyle-sharing app an odd escape route for American users of TikTok, some of whom have posted videos criticizing the actions of US lawmakers, and declaring provocatively that they are prepared to volunteer their personal data to the Chinese government. As of yesterday the hashtag had received more than 250 million views and was closing in on six million comments.

Some media, including CNN, have noted that the influx of users to China’s hugely popular RedNote, which to date has had few foreign users and little experience moderating content outside the Chinese language, has resulted in an unprecedented interaction of users across cultures and control regimes. TikTok, the American-based cousin of China’s domestic Douyin service, has never been an option for Chinese — resulting in alternative social universes spawned by the same algorithm. In its headline on the story, Semafor emphasized that the RedNote crossing was “an unlikely ‘cyberspace bridge’” between the two countries.

Hong Kong’s HK01, an online news outlet, quoted one Chinese translator from Hangzhou, Jacob Hui, sharing his reaction to his first interactions with American users of the platform. “I visited a livestream hosted by Chinese and American influencers on Xiaohongshu, and chatted with them, asking them things like what video games are popular in America.”

If the TikTok exodus surprised RedNote, it has delighted commentators in China, who have cast the event as an affirmation of China’s openness to cultural exchange, and further evidence of the hypocrisy of American values like freedom of speech — which state media have routinely panned over the decades as “so-called freedom of speech” (所谓的新闻自由).

Asked at a regular press conference yesterday whether China would step up controls on RedNote following the bump in foreign users, Guo Jiakun (郭嘉坤), a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), lost no time in spinning the trend, saying coolly that social media use was “a matter of personal choice” and affirming China’s support for “strengthening cultural exchanges and promoting mutual understanding among peoples of all countries.”

On the question of risk, Hu Xijin (胡锡进), the often outspoken former editor-in-chief of China’s Global Times newspaper, tied to the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship Peoples’ Daily, called the American influx to RedNote “an opportunity rather than a risk.” Writing on the Shanghai-based Observer (观察网) platform, Hu added that this marked “a rebalancing of online power relations between the US and China.”

“If RedNote succeeds, China will have a new lever to promote common human values with the outside world,” said Hu.

China Central Television (CCTV), the country’s state-run broadcaster, declared that TikTok users had found a “new home.”

Short-Lived Positives

While US TikTok refugees from what some, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have criticized as unconstitutional overreach may have found a temporary harbor and scored a Pyrrhic victory, their enthusiasm could prove short-lived as they grapple with the real conditions on the opposite side of the bridge — the world’s most active and comprehensive system for real-time content moderation and political censorship.

There have already been indications from sources inside RedNote, as reported by Reuters, who have said the platform is already working on its internal content review capacity to deal with the influx of English-language influencers. These developments, demanded by cyberspace authorities for all services operating in the country, can be expected to roll out along with the extra services RedNote has feted — such as an English-to-Chinese translation function, now in the works, and an “English Corner” that connects language partners.

On Tuesday, as TikTok refugee flows were arriving on the shores of RedNote, the platform announced that it was implementing new measures to ensure content was “upward and virtuous” (向上向善) — not exactly an ethos associated with the TikTok homeland, which has thrived on threading together the inventive and unpredictable. This idea of the upward was also coded in the RedNote announcement for what the CCP terms “positive energy” (正能量), which refers to the need for uplifting messages as opposed to critical or negative ones — and particularly the need for content that puts the Party and government in a positive light. The platform talked about “increasing guidance and support for positive content” (加大对正向内容的引导与扶持).

Just days into the exodus, there is already clear evidence that censorship mandates are being applied to RedNote’s new foreign users. One substantive result of this international cultural exchange, it seems, is that hundreds of thousands of American users of RedNote will soon have direct and intimate experience of what it means, and how it feels, to live under a system of all-embracing, granular, and unpredictable censorship. “Got a violation for my cooking video,” one American user posted, “so I shortened it and posted again, no violation.”

“Am I not allowed to show knives?”

As Shanghai’s annual political session began this week, a new proposal from one delegate called for more robust controls on social media platforms by using artificial intelligence. While the delegate, Chen Le (陈乐), chairman of a local business management and information systems firm​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​, said the technology could address growing government concerns about misinformation and privacy violations, the moralistic and political overtones were unmistakable. Chen suggested that AI could help monitor “information leaks” (爆料) through public accounts (公号) and ensure a “healthy ecology” online. 

The supervisor (监事) and top shareholder of Wanrui Puying Group (万瑞普盈集团), Chen is a member of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the country’s top political advisory body that brings together representatives from various political parties, organizations, and ethnic groups. 

In his proposal, “Suggestions on Introducing AI Technology to Strengthen Self-Media Content Review,” Chen outlines four main recommendations to regulate China’s self-media platforms (自媒体平台), which over the past decade have become crucial channels for information sharing and the expression of opinion in China.

First, he calls for AI technology implementation for automated identification and review of content posts and reposts. This system, the proposal said, would use natural language processing and image recognition to conduct real-time monitoring of “information exposures” (爆料) and other sensitive content. 

Second, the proposal recommends a classification and tracking system for published videos. This system would employ AI to tag content as “genuine exposure” (真实爆料), meaning that the content was credible, “false information” (虚假信息), or “privacy violation” (隐私泄露). According to Chen, this would enable better management and accountability. The system would embed mechanisms to trace content back to the original publishers and combat rumors and misinformation. 

Chen Le’s third recommendation focuses on leveraging existing automated review capabilities from established news media platforms. This would involve cooperation between state media organizations, industry associations, and universities to share technical resources and expertise — ultimately reducing manual review costs while improving accuracy.

The final recommendation in Chen’s proposal is where the less techy aspects finally come in. Mirroring frequent calls from internet control authorities, he suggests a renewed emphasis on industry self-regulation and strengthening legal frameworks. This would also involve stronger penalties for violations and enhancing public education about responsible social media use.

Along with 32 other delegates in Shanghai this year, Chen also joined a proposal that critiques Shanghai’s Lunar New Year cultural offerings as lacking distinctiveness compared to celebrations in other cities. AI also figures in that proposal, which argues that it could be used to “incorporate intangible cultural heritage.”

Last Friday, in cities and counties across China, it was time to celebrate the crucial role journalists play in society. As the festivities unfolded, there was fun and games. But there were also stern reminders of the imperative of press control. Quite unlike the UN’s World Press Freedom Day, which every May is intended as a day of reflection among journalists and media about press freedom and professional ethics, China’s Journalist’s Day is a time for Party and government officials to reiterate the need for collaboration and compliance. 

The sense and spirit of what the Chinese Communist Party calls “the Marxist View of Journalism,” the heart of which is obedience to the Party itself, was conveyed with some emotion in a special video tribute aired on November 8 by China Central Television (CCTV), the state-run broadcaster. Called “Footprints are My Badge of Honor” (足迹是我的勋章), the segment was a montage of national glories — including space program breakthroughs and test successes for the AG600 amphibious aircraft — that had been faithfully documented by state media reporters. 

The announced winners of the China Journalism Awards (中国新闻奖), held each year since 1991, were a further sign of how CCP news values have been applied more strictly over the past decade — and particularly since Xi Jinping stressed in 2016 that media must “love the Party, protect the Party and serve the Party.” Tellingly, the top winner in the Special Prize category this year went to a news report from the government’s official Xinhua News Agency with the headline: “Xi Jinping Unanimously Elected Chinese President, CMC chairman” (习近平全票当选中国国家主席、中央军委主席). 

The report, published on March 10, 2023, is a blatant propaganda spot about Xi’s formal appointment at head of state during the National People’s Congress — a decision already made politically at the Party Congress the previous October. Aside from a simple recounting of the “vote” and a brief account of Xi’s political biography, the story includes positive quotes from one local Chinese villager and one foreign professor in China. The latter, Josef Gregory Mahoney, is a regular go-to source for reports in China’s state media. “The elections will ensure that there is a steady hand at the helm, which will serve China well, particularly in this new era of new challenges,” Mahoney was quoted as saying in the report. 

But the values underlying China Journalist’s Day, the push for control as well as the key changes in the media environment in the country, could also be glimpsed in the myriad local celebrations of the holiday that happened last week. 

Control Meets Convergence 

One of the clearest trends in local celebrations, from the county level up through prefectural-level cities, was their concentration within local convergence media centers (融媒体中心), or CMCs, which are controlled by local propaganda departments and draw local official media outlets and party-state communication together under one roof. They are part of a decade-long effort by the CCP leadership under Xi Jinping to remake the country’s media system in ways that reconsolidate Party control while accommodating the realities of modern, mobile-based communication. 

Municipalities like Beijing and Tianjin now have 10-12 convergence media centers, while provinces tend to have 50-100 each, making for a nationwide network of more than 2,000. Most of these apply what is called a “central kitchen” (中央厨房), or hub, approach — producing for multimedia and social media across multiple platforms. 

In Zhejiang province’s Deqing Country (德清县) last week, activities for the day were organized by the “county convergence media center” (县融媒体中心). Participating journalists and press officials played a popular outdoor game called “Down Let the Forest Fall” (不倒森林), in which players arrayed in a circle must transfer colorful meter-long plastic rods using only the palm of one hand. The report on the festivities noted that “on occasion, they failed and [the rods] fell, resulting in laughter all around.” 

The same report from local authorities noted the need for journalists to serve the overall development goals of the county, and to “strictly grasp the correct political orientation and [correct] public opinion guidance” (牢牢把握正确的政治方向和舆论导向). These terms, harkening back to the brutal crackdown on political protests in June 1989, are unmistakable references to the need for strict CCP control of the media to maintain regime stability. 

In Longgang (龙港), a prefectural-level city in Zhejiang province just south of Wenzhou, celebrations were hosted by the Longgang Convergence Media Center (龙港市融媒体中心), with the local CCP secretary, He Zongjing (何宗静), officiating. In a clear echo of Xi Jinping’s national propaganda notion of “telling China’s story well,” He stressed the need for local journalists to “tell Longgang stories well, and transmit the voice of Longgang well” (讲好龙港故事、传播龙港声音). 

Journalists must be guided, said He, by Xi Jinping’s central political concept, “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” Most importantly, once again, they must “strictly grasp the correct political orientation” (牢牢把握正确政治方向). “A happy holiday to you all. You've all worked so hard!" Secretary He exclaimed in a ceremony during which several journalists were honored on stage for their service. 

Meanwhile, up north in Shanxi’s Xia County, the Xia County Convergence Media Center (夏县融媒体中心), the center’s head, Dong Xinhui (董新慧), expressed “her fondest thanks” to “journalists on the front lines,” urging them to “a sense of responsibility and mission” (责任感和使命感) in promoting the county and generating a positive external image. There were even musical and dance performances, including a tune called “The Light of the Journalist” (记者之光).

Merging News and Propaganda 

As Journalist’s Day celebrations were reported across the country in the past week, one of the most tell-tale signs of what journalism means in China today came as local officials made constant references to “news propaganda” (新闻宣传), which refers explicitly to the use of the news form to conduct state propaganda activities and reach the goals of the leadership.

In a speech to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Xinhua News Agency in 1991, Politburo Standing Committee member Li Ruihuan (李瑞環) said that the key purpose of the "news propaganda front" — and the role, in other words, of the press — was to "comprehensively and accurately propagate the Party's basic line."

In Yingkou, a prefectural-level city in China's northeastern Liaoning province, the local report on Journalist’s Day festivities noted that 10 local journalists had been honored with excellence prizes for their “outstanding contributions to news propaganda.” In Dejiang County, Zhejiang, journalists were urged to “continuously create new prospects for news propaganda” (不断开创新闻宣传新局面).

On Wednesday, one of China’s largest tea chains found itself at the center of an online storm after a video emerged of employees for the company apparently wearing cardboard signs and makeshift cardboard handcuffs to enforce workplace discipline — public displays of shame that had disturbing echoes of the country’s political past.  

The offending post, made on September 17 to the official Douyin and Xiaohongshu accounts of the Guangdong operations of Good Me (古茗茶饮) — a tea chain with more than 5,000 locations across the country — showed several employees on site at a Good Me shop standing with their heads cast down, their hands bound in front with what appeared to be cardboard cup holders. Handwritten signs around their necks read: “The crime of forgetting to include a straw”; and “The crime of knocking over the teapot.”

The meme the Good Me account seemed to be riffing on was not a contemporary, social media derived one, but rather an extremely painful episode from China’s past. In the midst of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, millions of Chinese branded as “class enemies” were persecuted in brutal public spectacles known as “struggle sessions” (批斗大会).  In many cases, they had their heads shaved, and were forced to wear dunce caps and signs identifying their supposed crimes as they were subjected to physical and verbal attacks by crazed mobs.

For China’s media and internet authorities, the Cultural Revolution is generally not a subject to be talked about at all. And for many Chinese who remember the period, which was ended by the ouster and arrest in October 1976 of the so-called Gang of Four, it remains a silent source of pain and fear.

In other words — not funny.

The post quickly went viral, but for all the wrong reasons. Most comments on the video on both platforms expressed shock and ridicule at what seemed to be extremely unfair and inhumane treatment of employees on the one hand, and an acute lack of good taste on the other. By Wednesday the video had been removed and Good Me was scrambling to contain the damage.

According to a report from Shanghai’s The Paper, the incident involved the company’s branch in Shenzhen’s Longhua district, where an employee involved in the filming said it was intended as a joke, and that the three employees in the video had volunteered to take part. The employee said the branch did not punish employees for small mistakes like forgetting straws.

On Wednesday afternoon, Good Me issued a public apology through its Weibo account. “We’re sorry,” it said. “We were playing with punchlines, and it went all wrong.”

The term here for “playing with punchlines,” wan’geng (玩梗), has become a popular video content form in the digital media space, essentially referring to humorous posts spawned by existing memes circulating on social media. The form, familiar to any regular user of social media in any language today, has given rise to millions of humorous videos on China’s mobile internet — but also, from time to time, stern warnings from state-run media. In February 2022, the People’s Tribune, a journal published by the CCP’s official People’s Daily newspaper, warned that society must be mindful of “the deviations in value orientation brought about by playing with punchlines.”

The apology from Good Me further explained that the video from the employees had attempted to riff on a recently popular punchline meme about “double-cup handcuffs” (双杯杯托手铐). “We thought it was funny, but it brought misunderstanding and unease to some netizens,” said the company. “After receiving feedback from netizens, we took down the video at the first available moment.”

Internet users responding to the apology, numbering more than 60,000 by noon Thursday, remained mostly unmoved. Some called on the company to make a public apology directly to the employees, while others suggested a video apology would be more appropriate. For most, it was reminder of the pitfalls of jumping on the video humor bandwagon.

“If you play with punchlines, you must be careful,” wrote one user in a comment under the company’s apology. “You’ll definitely learn your lesson now.”

On July 2, the Beijing News kicked up nationwide health concerns in China by reporting that the state-run grain stockpiler Sinograin was using the same tanker trucks to transport both fuel and food oil products, forgoing any cleaning process between. Naturally, Chinese consumers were infuriated at the idea that their soybean oils and syrups might be sloshed together with coal-to-oil (CTL) products, which use coal as a raw material to produce oil and petrochemical products through chemical processing.

In a more active press system, Sinograin’s violations might have been revealed long ago. According to the report, the safety violations of the Sinograin oil truck fleet have long been an “open secret” in the industry — and it lays bare the fecklessness and ambiguity of national standards, which are treated as recommendations only, and routinely ignored by oil manufacturers and transporters.  

The Beijing News report, which was promoted on the front page and ran to over 5,000 words on the inside pages, closely documented the transport process of both chemical and food oils. Reporters, for example, trailed one tanker truck that loaded up with first-grade edible cooking oil in the city of Sanhe, in Hebei province, just three days after it had unloaded a cargo of coal-derived chemical oil at a port to the east — without any washing or sanitizing of the tank in between.

Investigative reports of this kind, many focusing on basic livelihood concerns such as food safety, were a common occurrence in China from the early 2000s through to around 2008, when Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post newspaper revealed that infant formula produced by China’s Sanlu Group was tainted with the chemical melamine, resulting in kidney damage and other serious health issues for infants. In the years that followed, Chinese authorities leaned more heavily on professional media in China, and investigative reporting became rarer and rarer.

Enterprising reports like that last week in the Beijing News, a state-run newspaper under Beijing municipal propaganda office that into the early 2010s was among the country’s more outspoken professional outlets, have become a true rarity in the Xi Jinping era, as the leadership has emphasized “positive propaganda” and the need for media to abide by “correct public opinion guidance.”

It goes without saying that such reports should be celebrated when they do appear. Below, we provide a partial translation.

_______________

An Investigation of Tanker Truck Transport Chaos in Unloading Coal Oil and Loading Edible Oil (罐车运输乱象调查卸完煤制油又装食用油)

Han Futao (韩福涛)

At 10 AM on May 21, an oil tanker truck slowly pulls in to an oil company in Yanjiao, [a town in central] Hebei province. One hour later, this tanker truck leaves the facility loaded with more than 30 tons of soybean oil.

What casual observers may not know is that just three days ago this tanker full of edible soybean oil transported a truckload of coal-to-oil from Ningxia to Qinhuangdao, [on Hebei’s coast]. After unloading, it was directly loaded with edible soybean oil for transportation, with no cleaning of the storage tank.

Like white oil moisturizer and liquid wax, coal-to-oil is a chemical liquid processed from coal. A tanker driver revealed to a reporter for the Beijing News that it is an open secret in the tanker transportation industry that food liquids and chemical liquids are mixed [during transport] without cleaning. 

From May this year, reporters for the Beijing News carried out an extensive follow-up investigation and found that the liquids transported by many general cargo tankers in China are not allotted fixed substances, but carry edible liquids such as syrup and soybean oil as well as chemical liquids such as coal-to-oil. In order to save expenses, many tankers do not clean the tank during the exchange and transportation process, and some cooking oil manufacturers do not strictly check whether the tank is clean according to regulations. As a result, edible oil is contaminated by residual chemical liquids.

In fact, there is no mandatory national standard at present for the transportation of edible oil in China. There is only a recommended Code for Bulk Transport of Edible Vegetable Oil, which mentions that special vehicles should be used for the transportation of edible vegetable oil in bulk. Because it is a recommended national standard, this means that it has limited binding force on manufacturers.

Professor Wang Xingguo (王兴国) of the School of Food Science and Technology told our reporters that although the current transportation norms are recommended national standards, they are also to a certain extent mandatory. “These are national standards,” he pointed out. “When formulating company standards, companies should rely on them. Generally, company standards need to be stricter than these standards, and certainly cannot be lower.” 

Mixed Tanker Transport

Once coal-to-oil is unloaded and before edible oils are loaded, no one checks to make sure the tank is clean.

Many tankers are piled up in the parking lot of the Ningdong Energy and Chemical Engineering Base, all waiting to load up and begin transport.

The base is located in the city of Lingwu, in China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. It has the largest coal-to-oil project in China. In the coal-oil factory area covering an area of thousands of mu, it is possible to “transform black coal into oil" and produce liquid wax, white oil and other downstream products through a series of complex processes involving high temperatures and high pressure. 

Public information shows that this "coal-to-oil" project belonging to Ningxia Coal Industry (宁夏煤业) has an annual production capacity of 4 million tons, ranking it first in the country. Most of the coal-to-oil output here is shipped to economically developed regions on the east coast, where it can be used as raw material for chemical products, or as fuel.

A tanker driver told our reporter that tankers [at the facility] are generally divided into dangerous goods tankers and general cargo tankers. Dangerous goods tankers transport products such as gasoline, diesel and other flammable and explosive liquids; as the term suggests, general cargo tankers transport more ordinary coal-to-oil products such as liquid wax and white oil that are not regarded as dangerous — meaning that they cannot be ignited by an open flame (white oil burns with the use of a special gas cooker). Those products not regarded as dangerous can be transported by ordinary transport tanker trucks.

In mid-May this year, at the Coal Oil Plant operated by Ningxia Coal, the reporter observed that both sides of the road were jammed with transport vehicles of all kinds. Many of these were transport, tankers for coal oil and general cargo. Their outsides displayed information such as their volume and the “medium” (介质) [they transport]. One tanker truck driver explained that “medium” generally refers to the substances that tanker trucks transport, and coal oil is regarded as a “common liquid.“

“Right now is the low season, and there are fewer trucks than usual,” said a driver resting in the parking lot. “During the peak season, the lot can accommodate well over a hundred trucks.“ The driver told reporters that most of these tankers are usually parked close by in the area, and once they receive a transport order, they enter the plant to queue up and load up with oil. After that, the coal oil is transported to its destination according to the buyer’s needs. “Many tankers rely on the coal oil plants year-round to make a living,“ he said.

On May 16, a tanker truck with the license plate number “Hebei E××65Z” departed from the Ningdong Energy and Chemical Industry Base [in Ningxia]. It arrived two days later in Qinhuangdao, Hebei, more than 1,000 kilometers away. The tanker truck drove into a small courtyard on the outskirts of town, and set out again just over an hour later. The tanker did not leave immediately, but stopped on a nearby roadside. The driver opened the door as he rested inside the cab of the vehicle, the journalist from the Beijing News observed.

Pretending to ask about how business was going, the reporter from the Beijing News spoke to the driver, who revealed that he had just transported a load of coal oil from Ningxia to Qinhuangdao and unloaded it in a small yard. “They use the oil her to burn and use as kitchen fuel,” he said. He told the reporter that his tanker is one in a fleet of trucks, and that he is a full-time driver. There are more than 10 such trucks in the fleet. After unloading of coal oil, he said, he had not yet received new transport orders, so he was parking on the side of the road to rest. “Generally, we need to get [new] dispatch orders close to where we unload, and we can’t head back with empty vehicles,” he said.

After this [conversation], the Beijing News reporter remained close to observe the movement of the tanker. On the afternoon of May 20, the tanker restarted, and that evening it drove to the town of Yanjiao, just outside the city of Sanhe, in western Hebei province. There it drove into a parking lot belonging to a grain and oil company. According to guards at the facility, the parking lot belongs to Sanhe Huifu Grain and Oil Group, (汇福粮油集团). The tanker truck parked outside the facility and prepared for the transport of edible cooking oil.

At around 10 AM on May 21, the tanker drove right into the production area of the Sanhe Huifu Grain and Oil Group. The tanker had not been cleaned since unloading its cargo of coal oil [from Ningxia on May 18]. One hour later, the tanker was loaded with product the plant. According to the transport document maintained by the factory gatekeeper, the product loaded into the tanker at the factory was first-grade soybean oil, and the net weight of the load was 31.86 tons.

Over the past two years, China’s central government has pressed provinces and cities to join the national push for more effective external propaganda, which it sees as essential to building the country’s international soft power. This week, it unveiled one of the first mechanisms to measure and track progress on this strategic goal — an annual ranking to measure the relative success of cities in building their image abroad. 

The “China Cities International Influence Report 2023” (中国城市国际传播影响力报告),  announced on Monday, claims to take a global perspective, “synthesizing media reports and internet user responses” to determine how effective various Chinese cities have been in communicating internationally. It was jointly created by a think-tank affiliated by the official China Daily newspaper, under the State Council, and the journalism and communication departments of both Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).

In practice, researchers compiling the report seem to have taken a relatively basic measure of presence across traditional media, internet and social media. How often are cities mentioned in mainstream news reports outside China? How often do social media users mention a given city in comments, and how often are these liked or shared? The result is predictable. Beijing and Shanghai top the rankings, with Hangzhou and Shenzhen following in the third and fourth places. 

If there is any surprise in the report, it might be that Chongqing, China’s most populous city and a leader of inland commerce, just manages to make the Top Ten. The municipality has been one of the most active in pushing its image and that of China externally through its Chongqing International Communication Center (重庆国际传播中心), which operates the external communication platform iChongqing.

Chongqing was one of the earliest out of the gate with an “international communication center,” or ICC, putting out a call for foreign talent in February 2021 — months before Xi Jinping’s address to a collective session of the CCP Politburo that was meant to recalibrate China’s approach to external propaganda. 

China’s provincial and city-level international communication centers, or ICCs, are spearheading efforts promoted by the leadership since 2018 — but accelerating since the May 2021 Politburo session — to “innovate” foreign-directed propaganda under a new province-focused strategy. This allows the leadership to capitalize on the resources of powerful commercial media groups at the provincial level, and also to take advantage of richer story resources — as Xi Jinping has made “telling China’s story well” the heart of the country’s external push for propaganda and soft power. 

To date, provincial-level ICCs have been established in 26 provinces and municipalities across China, and the number of city-level ICCs is steadily rising. 

Your Partner, China Daily

The involvement of the China Daily in the new ranking procedure is another feature of how the ICC push has unfolded. As the Chinese government’s flagship external media outlet, published through the State Council Information Office — the same office as the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department — China Daily is a critical and well-funded layer of the country’s international communication array. It seems to be serving as a media partner for many newly-created ICCs, particularly at the city level, where there may be less media savvy, and fewer resources, to handle external communication. 

As the local Weifang Bohai International Communication Center (潍坊渤海国际传播中心) was launched late last month in Shandong province, China Daily took part in the launch ceremony as a partner, and signed a related framework agreement with the propaganda office of Weifang city. The media group has also signed such framework agreements for international communication with various official think-tanks and cultural institutions, suggesting that it is being tasked with directing broader external propaganda efforts — and is perhaps also capitalizing commercially on this policy from the top. 

In May last year, China Daily signed a similar agreement with the city of Wuhan and its Changjiang International Communication Center (CICC), which involved working closely with the city’s state-run Wuhan Media Group (武汉广播电视台), which administers the ICC under the local propaganda office, on various external promotion activities, including an account called “Wuhan Plus,” which has a special sub-domain on the China Daily website.

The social media brand currently has 2 million followers on Facebook,  more than 2,000 subscribers on YouTube, and more than 43,000 followers on Twitter. None of these accounts are labeled as being state-affiliated. 

As the annual city influence rankings were released this week, Wuhan came in right at the middle of the Top 10, at number five. The website of the city government quickly pounced on the news as a point that needed publicizing: "Number Five! Wuhan Makes the List of Internationally Influential Chinese Cities," read the enthusiastic headline.

More than five years ago, the top bosses at several US media companies, including the Associated Press (AP), were taken to task by lawmakers in Washington for partnerships with Chinese state media. They expressed concern that such cooperation might compromise the integrity of news and information outside of China as the country’s leadership pursued greater influence over global public opinion. 

For all the criticism such partnerships have caused, they show no signs of abating. This was evidenced last month as the president of China’s official Xinhua News Agency, which sits directly under the country’s State Council, made a whirlwind tour from New York to London, meeting with top executives from AP, Reuters, and PA Media Group. 

The deal between Xinhua and AP, which involved cooperation on the distribution of photos, videos and press releases, was finalized with a handshake and the exchange of signed copies. It was covered enthusiastically by Xinhua. For AP, meanwhile, the story was apparently not news — no reporting was available. The same pattern held for Reuters and PA Media Group: enthusiastic coverage from Xinhua, silence from its partners. 

These deals with Xinhua should invite tougher questions about how international media companies with a stated commitment to professional standards should deal with Chinese media giants whose sole commitment — crystal clear in the country’s domestic political discourse— is to strengthen the global impact of Party-state propaganda. 

These partnerships are part of a broader effort by Xinhua to deepen its global media influence, curtailing criticism of the Chinese government and shaping international discourse that portrays the CCP in a positive light. And yet, year in and year out, Western media executives insist, even against the substance of their own statements, that this type of cooperation is just normal business. 

The Politics of the Purely Commercial

In 2019, as AP faced blowback from members of the US Senate for cooperation with Xinhua, the global news wire’s then-CEO, Gary Pruitt reassured the lawmakers that the cooperation was “purely commercial in nature,” and that “AP’s business relationship with Xinhua is completely separate and firewalled from its journalistic coverage of China.” 

 According to the arrangement, Pruitt said, Xinhua and AP had agreed only to an optional arrangement by which the partners could share five text stories and five photos per day. “In practice, AP uses a fraction of those photos and publishes none of the stories,” said Pruitt. As for regular meetings on cooperation, Pruitt said, these are “often a formality.” 

If it is true that AP “publishes none of the stories,” this raises the obvious question of why the arrangement is necessary or commercially viable at all. What is the point of such empty formalities? Read the fine print of Pruitt’s reassurance letter and the truth about the arrangement becomes clear. “Like most major news agencies,” said Pruitt, “AP has an agreement with state-run media in China that allows AP to operate inside the country.” 

And there we have the crux. AP’s relationship with Xinhua, in place since 1972, is not commercial at all — not really. Instead, it is the political foundation on which AP and other major news agencies, including Reuters, are able to operate in China. 

It should be obvious such conditionality has no place in any “purely commercial” arrangement. And as they obscure the true nature of the arrangement, news executives like Veerasingham and Pruitt do a huge injustice to the thousands of journalists who struggle each day to report the facts. 

Again and again, international news executives lean into the act of the ostensibly commercial Xinhua deal. As Pruitt’s successor, Associated Press CEO Daisy Veerasingham, met with Xinhua President Fu Hua (傅华) last month, she spoke encouragingly of deepening cooperation. “We have seen many changes in the world,” she said, “but I think the relationship that the two organizations have forged together for so long is a really important indicator for how we can strengthen our relationship in the years ahead.”  

What does it mean to strengthen a relationship that AP has consistently minimized in the face of scrutiny, and that it does not even care to disclose?  

It bears emphasizing a simple, incontrovertible fact that no one in these instances is making clear — that Fu Hua is not merely a news agency executive but a senior Chinese official with a full ministerial rank, or zhengbuji (正部级), effectively giving him the same ranking as the country’s foreign minister. Fu was elevated three years ago to his current position from his previous role as a deputy minister of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department. Fu is not a champion of shared media values, or a partner in tackling the information challenges of the future. His agenda is that of China’s ruling CCP. Plain and simple. 

Meanwhile, this monstrous charade underwrites Xinhua’s credibility as a news agency as it seeks to work across the world, and even to place itself at the center of global media cooperation through a mechanism called the World Media Summit (WMS) — launched in 2009 under an explicit Central Committee directive and headquartered at Xinhua. 

As Xinhua signed its MOU last month with PA Media Group in London, it even reported that this cooperation was to happen “under the framework of the World Media Summit.” At CMP, we called it clearly on the WMS 15 years ago. It is time for news executives to catch up. 

Fortunately, there are signs of sobriety elsewhere in the international media. On Monday this week, Christoph Jumpelt, the head of the international relations unit at Germany’s public broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, said in a keynote speech here in Taipei that all independent news outlets across the world that uphold democratic values must cooperate to counter the growing threat of propaganda and censorship. “Together, we stand a far better chance of stemming the tide of propaganda,” he said. 

“What [authoritarian] regimes have in common is their fear of a well-informed public,” Jumpelt added. “This goes to show the power behind free media.”

International media like AP, Reuters and PA Media Group that claim to uphold professional values need to decide where they stand. If they insist on the charade of standing with Xinhua, shaking hands and signing on the dotted line, they should at least be forthcoming about what exactly it is they fear.