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.

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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.

In just the second case since late 2022 of a graft probe against a standing official at the provincial level, Zhang Jianchun (张建春), a deputy minister at the CCP’s powerful Central Propaganda Department, was accused on Friday of “severe violations of discipline and law” — a signal that a corruption investigation is underway.

The decision was announced through the website of China’s top anti-corruption body, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, but no details of the alleged crimes were given. The news was reported widely across Chinese-language outlets overseas, including Taiwan’s United Daily News and RFI.

Zhang, 59, had a lengthy career in the CCP’s Organization Department, the body that essentially serves as the human resources heart of the Party, arranging for official appointments and personnel assignments. In November 2018, he was briefly promoted to deputy minister in the department, before being transferred in 2020 to the Central Propaganda Department (CPD). 

According to official sources, a meeting was held in the Central Propaganda Department on Friday evening, during which Minister of Propaganda Li Shulei (李書磊) conveyed the seriousness of the allegations against Zhang. A brief release on the gathering stated only that “comrades at the meeting unanimously expressed their support for the decision of the CCP Central Committee to conduct the disciplinary examination and supervisory investigation into the suspected serious disciplinary violations of Zhang Jianchun.”

As a deputy minister responsible largely for the news and publishing sector, Zhang appeared publicly in a largely ceremonial capacity. In the wake of the 2022 CCP congress he presided over a gathering of publishing houses to stress the importance of releasing published teaching materials about Xi Jinping’s political report. The month before he had officiated at a gathering of Party-run newspaper publishers, where he blandly emphasized the importance of adhering to the leadership of “comrade Xi Jinping as the core.” 

Prior to the news of his downfall, Zhang Jianchun had not made a public appearance in two months. On April 17, he met with the visiting director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Kathi Vidal. His last appearance was on April 23, when he attended a youth reading forum.

Zhang is just the second provincial-ranked, or shengbuji (省部级), official to “fall off his horse” (落马) — list being the colorful phrase in Chinese for being sacked for corruption — since the 20th National Congress of the CCP in October 2022. He is the first senior official from within China’s propaganda system to fall from grace since the arrest in 2017 of Lu Wei (鲁炜), China’s colorful first czar of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). Like Zhang a deputy minister in the CPD, Lu was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2019. 

In a fitting illustration last week of the Chinese leadership’s unrelenting efforts to manipulate collective memory, an online essay with a shocking revelation about the wholesale disappearance of Chinese internet content spanning the 2000s was deleted by content monitors. But the post, quickly archived and shared, reverberated in platforms beyond PRC-managed cyberspace.

Written by He Jiayan (何加盐), an internet influencer active since 2018, the essay concluded, based on a wide range of searches of various entertainment and cultural figures from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s, that nearly 100 percent of content from major internet portals and private websites from the first decade of China’s internet has now been obliterated. “No one has recognized a serious problem,” wrote He. “The Chinese-language internet is rapidly collapsing, and Chinese-language internet content predating the emergence of the mobile internet has almost entirely disappeared.”

Simple searches through the Baidu search engine for public figures such as Alibaba founder Jack Ma and Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun (雷军), who would have yielded perhaps millions of unique posts during the period of the “traditional internet” from the late 1990s through the end of the 2000s, turned up few if any results, He Jiayan revealed. These wholesale absences in Chinese-language content from inside China were repeated when He used non-Chinese search engines, including Google and Bing.

The post cited several reasons for this mass vanishing, including the phasing out of private websites and blog platforms as technologies developed, the shuttering of old and unprofitable platforms by commercial providers who have no commercial incentive to maintain archives, and a lack of social resources in China that might handle archiving as a preservation initiative (like Internet Archive in the United States). But as others commented outside the Great Firewall, the most decisive factor in the loss of content and the failure to archive has been the Chinese Communist Party and its mandate for political and ideological control of history and public opinion.

Posted on Wednesday, May 22, He’s post had been removed from WeChat by the following day, yielding a 404 message that read: “This content violates regulations and cannot be viewed.”

Acknowledging the various reasons for the widespread outage of content from the period of China’s traditional internet, the fact of this mass vanishing raises huge questions about the role of the internet in the formation of collective identity — and what it will mean for entire landscapes of history to be simply gone. “In the internet era to come, as people look back on the first two decades of the 21st century, it will be a 20-year period absent from the historical record,” He wrote. “If you still glimpse old information right now on the Chinese internet, these are just the last rays of the setting sun.”

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[A partial translation of He Jiayan’s post follows]

“The Chinese Internet is Collapsing” (中文互联网正在加速崩塌)

Let me ask you a small question:

If we search for the name “Jack Ma” (马云) on Baidu, and then set our search parameters from 1998 to 2005, how many pieces of information do you suppose we’ll turn up? 100 million? 10 million? One million?

I have asked in several groups, and most feel it should be somewhere in the neighborhood of millions or tens of millions. After all, the internet is such a vast reservoir of information. Jack Ma, as the stormy entrepreneur of that era, must have left a lot of traces on the Internet.

The full search results, in fact, are as follows:

Within the selected date range of “May 22, 1998 to May 22, 2005” on Baidu, there is just one positive result for “Jack Ma” (dated May 22, 2024).

This piece of information is also false. Click on the result and you’ll find it is an article posted in 2021, which does not fall within the specified time frame but is somehow, inexplicably, returned.

This means that if we set out to understand Jack Ma’s experience over this particular time period — including news reports, public discussions, his speeches, company developments, and so on — the sum total of the material we derive from this search is zero.

You may imagine this is a problem unique to Baidu. But if you switch to Bing or Google, can you obtain search results?

I tested, these two sites to search for valid information, and both were not much different from Baidu. They had slightly more, but only in the single digits still. There were also more cases again of invalid information out of order [within the time frame], results that were wrongly pulled out of the search for some unspecified technical reason.

You might wonder if this could happen because Jack Ma is one of the more controversial people out there — that for some indescribable reason, his information is unsearchable.

But Jack Ma is in fact not an isolated case. If we search for [Tencent founder] Pony Ma (马化腾), [Xiaomi CEO] Lei Jun (雷军), [Huawei CEO] Ren Zhengfei (任正非), and so on, or even for figures like [Chinese entrepreneur and internet celebrity] Luo Yonghao (罗永浩) and Sister Fu Rong (芙蓉姐姐) who were hot topics at that time, and even if we search for internet stars like [Taiwanese singer and musician] Jay Chou (周杰伦) or [Super Girl contest winner] Li Yuchun (李宇春), we still get the same results.

When we search for information about Lei Jun for the period, here are the results we get:

After testing various websites and people’s names, over varying time periods, I discovered a shocking phenomenon:

Nearly all of the Chinese websites that were popular back in those days — the likes of NetEase (网易), Sohu (搜狐), Campus BBS (校园BBS, Xici Hutong (西祠胡同), Kaidi Maoyan (凯迪猫眼), Tianya Forum (天涯论坛), SchoolNet (校内网), Sina blogs (新浪博客), Baidu Post (百度贴吧), and a massive number of personal websites — have completely vanished before a certain date, or in most cases have disappeared altogether. The only apparent exception is Sina.com, where you can still find some information from more than ten years ago, but still very little. More than 99.9999 percent of the other content from that time has disappeared.

No one has recognized a serious problem: the Chinese-language internet is rapidly collapsing, and Chinese-language internet content predating the emergence of the mobile Internet has almost entirely disappeared.

We once believed that the internet had a memory. We failed to realize that this memory was like the memory of a goldfish.

[2]

This problem came to my attention because the subject of the He Jiayan public account is the research of leading lights in society. For this reason, I routinely need to research material about such figures. 

Over the past two years, I had a very distinct feeling: the amount of original material I could find online was declining in a sharp, cliff-like manner. Some of the original reports I had seen in the past were later slowly vanishing. The speeches that my target subjects had made in the past, or the articles they had written, were also becoming impossible to find. Video interviews and discussions I had seen before were also slowly disappearing. 

Perhaps there was a monster devouring webpages, and it was following the historical timeline — swallowing pages starting in the past and moving on toward the present, first in nibbles and then in great bites, chomping away the Chinese internet in five and ten-year chunks.