It’s an iron rule and a cautionary note for anyone attending a forum hosted by the Chinese government or its proxy institutions, including state media: You will be ratifying a declaration of principles, whether you have reviewed the text or not.

So, after news executives from five Central Asian states met in the Chinese capital with the editor-in-chief of Xinhua News Agency earlier this week to discuss “strengthening media cooperation” and “working toward the building of a China-Central Asian community of destiny,” the men around the table, with a phalanx of national flags standing sternly behind, sealed the deal — with a declaration.

Initiated and hosted by Xinhua, a news agency directly under the government and the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party, the forum was billed in media reports as an important “result” of the inaugural China-Central Asia Summit held in Xi’an on May 19-20, and attended by Xi Jinping. The Xinhua event was attended by executives from Kazakhstan’s Central Communication Services, Kyrgyzstan’s Kabar national news agency, the Khovar National Information Agency of Tajikistan, the Turkmenistan Oriental News Service (ORIENT), and the Uzbekistan National News Agency. All are official news services under the control of their respective governments.

What exactly does the China-Central Asia News Agency Forum Beijing Consensus say? The full text of the document has not been released. And perhaps no one will ever know exactly what the declaration says. But even so, it has served its purpose — seeking apparent public recognition of the political principles underlying China’s media policies and strategies.

It is general practice in the case of such forums for China to reference the “ratification” (通过) of various statements and declarations (and even supposed mutual charters of quasi-institutions hosted by the Chinese partner) with full fanfare in the state-run media, even though they may never see the light of day.

The broader objective is to give run-of-the-mill exchanges and ad hoc events an elevated diplomatic air, the semblance of multilateral diplomacy, while political language is slipped in to suggest that China’s concepts are making international inroads. The symbolic “ratification” of the CCP’s political principles is ultimately what matters. No surprise, then, that while the Beijing Consensus with Central Asian media leaders was mentioned by scores of official media outlets this week and appeared on more than 100 other websites, all of these were iterations of a single official news bulletin from forum host Xinhua.

Based on what we can glean from the official Xinhua release, there are two basic principles underlying the Beijing Consensus “ratified” on May 23.

Joining Hands for Media Control

First, the document says, according to Xinhua, that “the media of China and the five Central Asian countries have unique advantages and play a bridging role in telling the stories of China and the five Central Asian countries well, enhancing mutual understanding and trust among people, promoting exchanges and mutual appreciation of civilizations, and advancing the construction of the China-Central Asia community of destiny.”

With its reference to “telling stories well,” this passage validates a CCP worldview in which the media’s primary role is to uphold a positive view of the national leadership and maintain social and political stability. It is a view that militates against all criticism, arguing that this undermines “mutual understanding.” The reference to a “community of destiny” in the above passage is language central to Xi Jinping’s foreign policy — rejecting universal values such as human rights in favor of state-centered multilateral exchanges.

In practical terms, China hopes not just that it can achieve stronger relations with Central Asian states at the formal diplomatic level, but that it can have the cooperation of media in the region to ensure that domestic public opinion about China is conducive to its ambitions as a global power and as a regional trade and security partner.

The West is Out to Get Us

Next, the document says, according to the Xinhua release, that the world is now in a turbulent state, and “the times and history are unfolding in an unprecedented manner.” This is a stock Xi Jinping phrase that is now routinely used in the state media to justify governing with a strong hand, including on media policy. It signals that these are times to uphold unity and eliminate dissent. The phrase is used in this context to suggest also that China is a strong and dependable pilot in the storm.

“The media of China and the five Central Asian countries should pool their efforts and make a concerted voice to enhance the discourse of emerging markets and developing countries and promote international equity and justice,” the Xinhua summary of the declaration continues. This passage reflects the official CCP view that the international discourse environment, dominated by what China generalizes as “Western media,” disadvantages the country and its leadership, shaping a predominately negative global view of China.

The Beijing Consensus solicits sympathy for this view among Central Asian media partners, with the subtext that they must together resist the depredations of “Western” news values. This is interwoven with a statement of concern for the welfare of developing countries — long a pillar of Chinese foreign policy.

Continuing Cooperation

Beyond the above language, the Xinhua readout of the Beijing Consensus indicates that the parties present agreed to strengthen their cooperation “under the framework of multilateral mechanisms.” Tellingly, the report includes in this category events such as the World Media Summit (世界媒体峰会), which was first held in 2009 in order to bring major global media outfits into Xinhua’s orbit.

As CMP reported more than a decade ago, the first World Media Summit (WMS) emerged from a central CCP directive that was enacted by Xinhua. As Li Congjun (李从军), a former propaganda official who was then at Xinhua’s helm, wrote in 2009 in the Party’s official Seeking Truth journal:

[We must] actively seek out new horizons, new mechanisms, new channels and new methods in the area of external dialogue and cooperation, particularly, as by the demands of central party leaders, successfully organizing the first meeting of the World Media Summit, building a platform for dialogue among first-rate international media (国际一流媒体), further raising the capacity of Xinhua News Agency to make its voice heard in the international news and information sector.

At the first summit, Li Congjun was styled as “WMS Executive President,” which made him head of a “presidium” comprising top executives from News Corporation, The Associated Press (AP), Reuters, ITAR-TASS News Agency, Kyodo News, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Turner Broadcasting System Inc., Google, Al Jazeera Media Network, and the New York Times Company. WMS headquarters, state media said, was located inside Xinhua.

The summits continued on a regular basis from 2009, foreign media executives naively obliging their Xinhua hosts, as though oblivious to their real intentions. Chinese state media even reported at one point that there were plans for a subsequent WMS event at the New York Times.

Beyond the embarrassing (for foreign media executives) efforts by Xinhua to brand the WMS as a multilateral media organization with real participation and real values, successive summits have introduced declarations. The third WMS, held in Doha in March 2016, concluded with a “Doha Statement” that conveyed, according to Xinhua, “the consensuses reached by the world media leaders.”

In a telling statement of just how little such statements matter substantively, the full text of the statement, which was once carried on the official website of the WMS, hosted on Xinhua servers, is now unavailable.  

In late 2013, after I wrote a rather confrontational bit of context for the Second World Media Summit, calling out executives for international news media taking part, a Hong Kong-based executive for a major Western newswire met me for drinks at the Foreign Correspondence Club. He confided that media executives had seen the event merely as a networking opportunity — a chance to shake hands, and hopefully open doors in an environment mostly closed to international media. Moreover, he said, the event had been hastily planned by China. They had only learned about it perhaps two weeks before, and China had pushed them hard to attend.

Not much time, then, to have a careful look over that declaration.

During a ceremony in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa on March 28, the state-run China Media Group (CMG) inaugurated a new national bureau in what was one of the first formal celebrations between China and Honduras since the Central American country formally broke off relations with Taiwan just two days earlier, on March 26.

Reporting on the event, which took place at the Presidential Palace, under the bright red glare of China’s national flag, CMG’s international broadcasting arm, China Global Television Network (CGTN), said the media conglomerate would now be “positioned to bring more in-depth coverage of Central America to audiences around the world.” The head of the conglomerate’s Latin America division, Zhu Boying (朱博英), told an audience that included Honduran Cultural Minister Anarella Velez that the new bureau would “collaborate with the country’s leading media organizations.”

But the message between the lines of this new bilateral media relationship, coming with astonishing swiftness in the wake of a diplomatic shift that left diplomats in Taiwan reeling, was that official PRC media outlets, far from reporting on the sidelines of international affairs, are active agents in advancing the interests of the Chinese Party-state — well in advance of the story.

The first example of Sino-Honduran media cooperation, the broadcast on Honduran television of a two-part program called “Hand-in-Hand Toward the Future” (携手向未来) looking at the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Honduras, came at lightning speed. It was shown on Canal 8, a state-owned channel operated by the Honduran Ministry of Culture and Telecommunications, at 7 AM Tegucigalpa time on March 26, just 13 hours after Honduras announced that it had cut ties with Taiwan.

“The speed of cooperation was amazing,” one Chinese provincial media outlet, the Qianjiang Evening News, wrote of the broadcast in a report last week, noting also that reporters from Xinhua News Agency, CCTV, and the China Media Group had been “dispatched overnight to Honduras, to bring the Chinese people more local reports.”

But the speed of cooperation was more than just amazing — it was deeply revealing.

The production by the Spanish-language division of CGTN of “Hand-in-Hand Toward the Future,” which includes interviews with ministerial officials from Honduras as well as sources such as a national sales manager for the technology giant Huawei, would have been impossible without early and deep cooperation between the China Media Group, which operates directly under the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party, and the country’s diplomatic and intelligence services.

The program itself includes other tantalizing clues to just how closely intertwined Party-state media outlets are with the mechanisms of Chinese statecraft.

Featured in the program is Sun Yanfeng (孙岩峰), director of Latin American research at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (中国现代国际关系研究院), or CICIR. While the international relations institute presents itself publicly as a leading Chinese think tank for “extensive and multifunctional research,” it is in fact closely affiliated with the Ministry of State Security (MSS), the country’s chief intelligence agency.

Back in February, Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper noted the close relationship between CICIR and the Ministry of State Security as it reported that the former head of the CICIR, Yuan Peng (袁鹏), had been appointed as MSS deputy director.

Also shown on screen in the CGTN television spot on China-Honduras relations is Wang Hua (王华), deputy secretary of the China Foundation for Peace and Development (中国和平发展基金会), or CFPD. The foundation, which identifies itself as a non-profit organization, is operated under the International Liaison Department, or ILD, of the CCP Central Committee (中共中央对外联络部), which is tasked with maintaining ties with foreign political parties, organizations, and individuals, and has a vital role in intelligence collection.

Wang Hua is in fact the former head of the Latin America Office at the International Liaison Department, and at CFPD has actively advanced bilateral relations and exchange between China and partners in Latin America and the Caribbean. In August last year, CFPD signed a friendship and cooperation agreement with the ministry of education in neighboring Nicaragua, which normalized relations with the PRC in 2021, after first recognizing Taiwan in 1990.

Despite its easily ascertainable and completely undeniable link to the Party’s central leadership, CFPD has been treated seriously in even United Nations documents and proceedings as a “non-profit organization” having a purely advisory role.

CFPD is one of China’s many fronts in pushing forward the political goals of the state under the guise of society-level engagement and people-to-people exchange. The media outlets under the China Media Group umbrella similarly perform a sock-puppet role before global audiences in all of the world’s major languages. They appear as a constellation of broadcasters, newspapers, newswires, and digital platforms, while a single hand, that of the CCP Central Committee, is at work behind the scenes.

Late last week, as state media continued to relish the establishment of relations with Honduras, CGTN pushed ahead with its coverage of upcoming elections in neighboring Guatemala, set for June. Just days earlier, the country had reaffirmed ties with Taiwan, but CGTN strung together interviews with “left-wing political party leaders” (左翼政党人士), including the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Party’s Silvia Solorzano, to argue that “voices calling for the government to change its foreign policy and establish diplomatic relations with China are becoming louder and louder.”

A report about the CGTN report from the state-run China Central Television, CGTN’s parent company under the CMG umbrella, relished the fact that CGTN’s Spanish-language anchor Ji Yi (冀艺) had appeared on Guatemala’s Canal+ television network “to emphasize that the Taiwan issue is a core interest of China and that the One China principle is supported by the overwhelming majority of countries in the world.”

Making no attempt to disguise Ji Yi’s role not as a journalist but as a spokesperson for the official position, CCTV gushed about historic firsts. “This is the first time that a CGTN reporter has stated the Chinese government’s position on a Guatemalan TV program,” it said.

As China continues its relentless quest to push Taiwan’s diplomatic allies down into the single digits — the next country on the agenda, with decisive elections later this month, is Paraguay — or to advance other international agendas, its state media are not observing from the sidelines, and they are not waiting in the wings. They are working on the front lines, tools by their own admission of the Party-state from which they are ultimately indistinguishable.

It is a lesson politicians across the world would do well to remember. But as China’s new allies are carried off on the wave of media attention that comes with recognition from China, the puppet show can be a mesmerizing fiction.

One of the more humorous examples of this came last month, on the first full day of the new diplomatic relationship between China and Honduras, as Xiomara Zelaya, President of the International Affairs Commission of the National Congress of Honduras, and daughter of Honduran President Xiomara Castro, toured China beside Eduardo Enrique Reina, the foreign minister. At some point amid the photo ops and selfies, including one with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang (秦刚), Zelaya shared a video in which she turned through the major newspapers in Beijing, showing how each had highlighted the new relationship on the front page.

First came the Global Times. Presumably, Zelaya had no idea the paper was published by the CCP’s official mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, directly under the Central Propaganda Department. Next came Reference News (参考消息). Did she know that this foreign relations news staple was published by Xinhua, the official government news agency ranking as a ministerial-level institution under the State Council? And finally came China Daily, an English-language paper published by the Information Office of the State Council, the very same body as the Central Propaganda Department.

The lesson here was not that Honduras had arrived at the center of a new global narrative, and opened a bright new chapter. It was, quite simply, that China controlled the story.

Addressing an audience in Phnom Penh last month, the chairman of the Cambodia-China Journalists Association (柬中记协), Liu Xiaoguang (刘晓光), urged his colleagues in the media to uphold “a spirit and attitude of professionalism” as they worked to combat fake news. But Liu, who is also editor-in-chief of the local Chinese-language outlet The Commercial News (华商日报), quickly confounded this professional call with a flagrant political agenda.

“As media people, we must at the same time be alert to the fact that Western media still have a strong measure of discourse power in the international arena,” he said. “They still mainly favor their own countries . . . . as they report international news, and they criticize, smear and spread disinformation against countries that do not listen to the West or have different views.”

To support his point about Western bias, Liu accused the American mainstream media of blatant double standards in their downplaying of the serious environmental impact of the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and in their outright suppression of a report by American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh alleging US government involvement in the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea.

There was just one problem — both of these case studies in American media hypocrisy were fake news cooked up on the kooky fringes of the internet and gleefully picked up and amplified by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and state media.

With its fakery about fake news, the Phnom Penh forum was itself a case study of how China is exploiting professional associations and what it calls “people-to-people exchanges” to advance its global media agenda. At the heart of that agenda is undermining the credibility of Western journalism and by extension its critical, and sometimes even adversarial, relationship with power.

During the February forum, Liu Xiaoguang told participants they must consider the fact that 2023 is an election year in Cambodia, and that the country will also host the Southeast Asia Games. “Therefore it is hoped,” he said, “that domestic media personnel across the board will have a professional attitude, truly and objectively reporting on the achievements and development transformation achieved by Cambodia, working together to safeguard the peace and stability of the nation, and further raising Cambodia’s international image.”

Liu’s sentiments were seconded by a top Cambodian information official, who said at the forum that the government would step up its efforts to combat fake news ahead of the July national election, when Hun Sen, the former military commander who since the 1997 coup d’etat has established and steadily consolidated authoritarian rule in the country, will seek yet another five-year term in office.

Implicit in these remarks about the need for the media to safeguard “peace and stability” are definitions of both journalistic professionalism and “fake news” that favor authoritarian regimes in China and Cambodia. Journalists act with a “professional attitude” when they praise the achievements of their national leaders, defending them against hypocritical Western media bent on demonization.

Praise is truth; criticism is fakery.

Telling China’s Story in Cambodia

This upended understanding of journalistic truth, so reminiscent of press policy in China, where Xi Jinping has told media that they must “love, protect and serve the Chinese Communist Party,” was enshrined at the Cambodia-China Journalists Association from the time of its formation on May 6, 2019. During a formal ceremony attended by Cambodian Minister of Information Khieu Kanharith as well as Zuo Wenxing (左文星), the Counsellor for Political Affairs at the Chinese Embassy in Phnom Penh, it was made clear that the association would play a diplomatic role and “promote the overall development of Cambodia-China relations.” 

The founding of the association was a big affair for China’s government, widely reported by official Party-state media, including the People’s Daily. According to CCJA Chairman Liu Xiaoguang, negative reporting and commentary about China was the concern that prompted the creation of the association. Repeatedly in 2019, he characterized this as a question of “fake news.” 

In October 2019, as CCJA signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the local Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia to jointly “tell the China story,” Liu explained to the Jian Hua Daily (柬华日报) that the primary goal of the CCJA was to “make more local people understand the contribution of Chinese enterprises and Chinese people in Cambodia,” and to “curb the occurrence of fake news and events that defame Chinese people and Chinese enterprises, thereby reducing confrontation between the two countries, so that they can tell the ‘China story’ together.” 

Liu Xiaoguang’s political sympathies were garishly on display on July 1, 2021, as he appeared in a video address to congratulate the Chinese Communist Party for its 100th anniversary on behalf of the CCJA. “Without the correct leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, China would not have obtained the major achievements it has,” he said, perfectly mirroring state propaganda. 

At the February forum on “fake news” in Phnom Penh, Liu’s remarks on journalistic professionalism similarly echoed the official narratives of the Chinese government, which in the days prior to the forum had actively sought to frame the Biden administration’s February 4 decision to shoot down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon as an overreaction that exposed the US as a nation in decline.

Attacks on the credibility of the American media were a key part of this strategy. If the US media lacked the integrity to report truthfully on major stories like the Ohio train derailment and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline — if they merely disseminated fake news to cover up the dirty deeds of their own government — how could their reports and criticisms of Chinese surveillance be taken seriously?

The Fake News Pipeline

In recent years, one of China’s most frequent tactics in dealing with international criticism has been to introduce false and misleading memes through the regular press conferences of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Very often sourced from fringe sources on Western social media, or from Russian state media, these are rapidly, even sometimes instantly, picked up and reported by Chinese state media — and are then amplified in the Chinese-language public discourse inside China and beyond. Constructed around base messages about Western hypocrisy, or threats to Chinese national dignity, these memes encourage a reductive and emotional view of international stories as they go viral through mobile platforms.

Before the memes about the suppression of the Ohio and Nord Stream stories surfaced at the Cambodia-China Journalists Association event in Phnom Penh, this is precisely the pattern they followed.

In the case of the Ohio train derailment, one of the earliest references came from Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs Hua Chunyin (华春莹), who posted to Twitter on February 14 to liken the train derailment to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster with the hashtag #OhioChernobyl. This was Hua’s direct appropriation of claims on the internet fringe. As the New York Times has since reported (also in Chinese), the notions of a “Chernobyl 2.0” and a widespread media cover-up were part of the whirlwind of conspiracy theories whipped up, often by right-wing commentators, on platforms like Twitter and Telegram in the wake of the train derailment.

Hua’s rehashed “Chernobyl 2.0” meme was picked up by the Global Times, which reported the day after her tweet that the scale of the disaster in Ohio was being hidden. The story quoted an unidentified internet user as lamenting: “Chernobyl 2.0 has happened in Ohio, but the traditional media are shamefully silent.”

In fact, many days before the Global Times piece ran online, the adequacy and professionalism of media coverage of the Ohio incident was receiving lively and much-deserved discussion in the US — exactly what should happen in a self-critical professional media environment, where there is always room for improvement. Just days after Hua’s tweet and a series of take-down stories in the Chinese state media, the New Republic wrote in an in-depth look at coverage in Ohio: “The truth of the matter is that the story is getting robust coverage, especially where it matters: locally.”

For journalists at the center of the story, the suggestion of a cover-up in Ohio was a source of frustration. Joe Donatelli, the digital director of Cleveland’s News 5, tweeted on February 15, the same day as the Global Times report. “To say it’s not being covered at all is wrong if you know how to Google.”

But conspiracy theories were taken up eagerly by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and state media in China — where the Google search engine is of course not readily accessible — because they suited the broader narrative of US hypocrisy and incompetence, offering convenient material to undermine the credibility of the West and its values, particularly after the sting of the surveillance balloon fiasco.

The Global Times story was widely shared by Chinese-language outlets, from Hong Kong’s CCP-linked Wen Wei Po to Youth.cn, a site operated by the Chinese Communist Youth League. A viral video from the Global Times video service Global Video (环视频), which has more than 4.3 million fans on Weibo alone, emphasized that “mainstream media in the US have played down [the incident].” 

Inflated Accusations

It was again China’s foreign ministry that pushed the narrative during the first half of February that a report by American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh had been actively suppressed by mainstream media in the US, hiding from the public allegations that the US government was behind the September bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline.

At a press conference on February 10, MOFA spokesperson Mao Ning cited the Hersh investigation as she called on the US to “give a responsible explanation to the world” about its possible involvement in the sabotage of the pipeline, and she advanced accusations about a media cover-up. “It proves that some US media outlets do not care what the truth is,” she said. “They are deaf to the truth that really matters, and what is loudly hyped by them is often not the truth, but a false narrative.”

Contrary to the allegation that it had been downplayed in the Western media, Hersh’s story was feverishly consumed and furiously debated through a variety of channels, both mainstream and non-mainstream, in and outside the United States. 

Reuters reported the story, along with a lengthy review of Hersh’s starred career as an investigative journalist, and duly noted (as it should) the controversies that have harried his journalism in recent years. Similarly, Business Insider looked at Hersh’s self-published article with critical eyes, noting that his work in recent decades had been “poorly-sourced, conspiratorial, and over-reliant on anonymous sources.” Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, a well-regarded investigative journalism and fact-checking group based in the Netherlands, called Hersh’s story “thinly sourced garbage.”

But the story, which was based on a single anonymous source, received attention nevertheless, shared, though often critically, by The Times, Politico, and other outlets — while many others chose, understandably given real questions about sourcing, to hold back on the allegations given the further reporting they would certainly have demanded. 

Hersh, meanwhile, appeared on multiple outlets to discuss his Substack post. He spoke about the story in great depth with Amy Goodman, the host of the independent Democracy Now! program, which is broadcast daily across the US, including on PBS and through local radio stations. 

The Chinese government and state media maintained nonetheless that the Hersh story had been silenced, and that this exposed the falsehood of the American mainstream media. China’s clear attempt to sow confusion on the matter prompted a Bloomberg reporter to ask Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) during a press conference on February 15 how he responded to the fact that “Chinese diplomats, state media outlets and social media influencers appear to be making efforts to exaggerate and misrepresent a chemical leak in the US and a report that the US military blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.”

Impervious, Wang responded by doubling down on the suggestion that Hersh’s story, though relying on a single anonymous source, should receive special treatment, and that the failure to simply accept its conclusions was evidence of endemic and longstanding media bias:

Immediately after the explosions of the Nord Stream pipelines, we saw extensive coverage in Western media with one-sided speculations on who was ‘responsible’ for the sabotage. What we see now, however, is that these media, hailed as free, professional and impartial, have fallen silent over Seymour Hersh’s investigative report. Doesn’t this call for concern and reflection?

The foreign ministry statements continued to spawn coverage from state media outlets. “People are fully aware who is trying to deflect public attention: Chinese FM,” read the headline of one story from the official China News Service, quoting Wang. Essentially the same story from the Global Times was headlined: “Why Western media is deaf over [the] Nord Stream incident, Ohio train derailment: Chinese FM.” 

Laundering Lies

The forum on “fake news” hosted in February by the Cambodia-China Journalists Association in Phnom Penh reveals another crucial link in the chain of Chinese government disinformation on international affairs that often begins with the foreign ministry. The circumstances of the association’s founding suggest it was conceived in 2019 not as a true professional organization, but rather as an extension of China’s official diplomatic efforts in Cambodia — as a means of exerting influence among local journalists and media.

Meeting with members of the CCJA in January 2020, the Chinese Ambassador to Cambodia, Wang Wentian (王文天), expressed his gratitude to the organization “for their support and cooperation with the embassy’s work.” Referring to the strategic partnership agreement signed between China and Cambodia in 2010, Wang said: “As the comprehensive strategic partnership between China and Cambodia has been elevated to a new stage, I hope the [journalists] association will promote the dissemination of more good stories of friendly exchanges, and continue to make its contribution to the development of China-Cambodia relations.”

For his part, the association’s chairman, Liu Xiaoguang, offered reassurance that the CCJA was ready to fulfill its mission. He informed the ambassador of the association’s plans for the coming year, and said it would “continue to fulfill the media’s social responsibility, promoting friendship between Cambodia and China, and transmitting even more positive energy.”

The idea of “transmitting positive energy,” or zhengnengliang (正能量), has been an important phrase in the Xi Jinping era to refer to information controls and official messaging, both domestically and internationally. And the forum on “fake news” in Phnom Penh, with its agenda premised on a foundation of disinformation directly from China’s foreign ministry, underscores just how crucial strategic negativity about the United States and the West has become within this strategy of “transmitting positive energy.”

That strategic negativity can be powerful enough when amplified through Chinese state media and across the internet and social media platforms. But such lies can be even more powerful when they are laundered through ostensible professional organizations that can reach media professionals at a personal level across Southeast Asia and around the world.

As China has pursued greater influence over public opinion globally, responding to Xi Jinping’s call to “tell China’s stories well,” foreign media have been crucial channels for the state to reach audiences overseas. In some cases, state media have borrowed exposure through drop-in content, paying for the direct insert of state propaganda. But another important and perhaps more effective tactic has been the covert or non-transparent placement of state-produced messages through content sharing and co-production deals. These deals expose foreign audiences to programming from the Chinese state — often without the knowledge of even overseas media partners.

One of China’s most potent actors in this arena has been the China International Communication Center (五洲传播中心), or CICC, also known in Chinese as the China International Press (五洲传播出版社), and China Intercontinental Press Media (五洲传播出版传媒), or CIPM. CICC is housed directly under the Information Office of China’s State Council, whose main task is to produce foreign propaganda. The Information Office is essentially twinned with the Party’s Central Propaganda Department (CPD), a phenomenon known in Chinese as “one office, two signs on the door.” CICC’s physical offices are at the CPD office in central Beijing.

Dong Qing (董青), the current CEO of CICC, is a veteran official within the Central Propaganda Department, having previously served as chief editor of China Culture Online, a website jointly operated by the Central Propaganda Department and its Central Civilization Office, otherwise known as the Central Steering Committee for Spiritual Civilization Construction. Go back 10 years and Dong served as the deputy chief of the First Bureau of the Central Civilization Office, whose top official is typically a deputy minister of the CPD.

But despite its clear and direct association with the Central Propaganda Department, CICC has presented itself globally as a media group ready to do business, providing foreign outlets with film and documentary content about China, and offering access to China’s vast film and television market.

Silk Road Stories in Southeast Asia

One of the many foreign media to cooperate with CICC is the Malaysian Chinese-language channel 8 TV, whose parent company, Media Prima Berhad, signed a strategic cooperation agreement in 2017 for the broadcasting of a series of documentaries under the label “Silk Road Time” (丝路时间), also known as “USilk.” While the documentaries ostensibly offered Malaysian viewers an opportunity to better understand Chinese culture, the products on offer, produced entirely by CICC, fully accommodated China’s larger foreign policy and trade goals, seeking to build support and sympathy for Xi Jinping’s signature “Belt and Road” initiative.

The partnership began with a pilot broadcast of nine episodes of “USilk” supported by CICC during the first year, but both sides spoke of longer-term cooperation. “The partnership will not be time-limited, and building on the launch of the documentary series on the Silk Road, the two sides can develop further cooperation in the future,” Media Prima Berhad CEO Dato’ Kamakali said at the time.

Founded in 2003, Media Prima Berhad (首要媒体有限公司) is a privately-owned company with a portfolio spanning television, newspaper, radio, outdoor advertising, and online media. It claims to be Malaysia’s largest integrated media company.

Attending the signing ceremony in Malaysia in 2017 was Jing Shuiqing (井水清), named in local media reports as the deputy director of CICC’s Center for Media Promotion. Often identified publicly outside of China as the vice-president or editor-in-chief of CICC, Jing has made regular appearances at bona fide international film and television production events and festivals, like Asian Side of the Doc (where he hosted an event on “USilk” in 2020), or France’s Sunny Side of the Doc marketplace. In 2019, he was in Qatar to sign a cooperation agreement, again under the “USilk” label, with Al Jazeera.

But make no mistake: Though Jing may wear a hat overseas as a film and television executive, his executive position at the propaganda department-affiliated CICC places him among China’s most senior propaganda officials. He is also the legal representative of its private commercial subsidiary, China Intercontinental Co., Ltd (五洲传播有限公司).

During the signing ceremony in 2017, Jing directly referenced the “Belt and Road” initiative, saying that he hoped cooperation with media like 8 TV would mean that “more and more stories of the Silk Road will be brought to the world.”

8 TV is reportedly the first company in Malaysia to cooperate with CICC, though CICC has cooperated with other media groups in the region, including Singapore-based Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific since 2015. Just last year, the group announced it was cooperating with National Television of Cambodia (柬埔寨国家电视台) to co-produce a 30-minute documentary called Sino-Cambodian Feeling Through Thick and Thin (患难与共中柬情), which emphasized China’s aid to Cambodia during the global pandemic. The deal was proudly promoted through the official website of the Chinese Embassy in Cambodia, which noted that the process had been led by the Overseas Promotion Office of the Central Propaganda Department.

Propaganda Goes Private

China’s quasi-privatization of its domestic propaganda and media control structures, along with close links between government and commercial actors (such as Tencent and iQiyi), has enabled it to muddy the waters when it comes to international cooperation and co-production. In many cases, foreign partners have little notion when dealing with partners like CICC that they have effectively contracted with the CCP and government agencies, and that they have opened their channels and audiences to the external messaging of the Chinese state.

The “USilk” series has been rolled out through broadcasters in countries across the world. Most recently, its documentaries have been played on Bulgarian National Television (BNT), the country’s national public service broadcaster, and on Macau’s TDM. In 2021, CICC announced that it had “cooperated in the building of the ‘USilk’ television program [series]” with Kordia, a broadcaster owned by the New Zealand government. Typical of China’s broad understanding of the notion of “cooperation,” this meant only that CICC had managed to license its content to Kordia.

That content included individual programs like Return to the Red Flag Canal (重返红旗渠), a sentimental documentary in which French film producer Jérôme Clément, the founder and former CEO of the European public service channel Arte, is led on an official tour of Henan’s Red Flag Canal. As Clément visits the site, “impressed by the visible changes in China,” he and the documentary’s viewers are treated to a sanitized story of heroism and sacrifice, recounting the construction of the canal between 1960 and 1969, an episode that has become integral to the CCP’s construction of its history as a series of legendary feats.

Long fallen into disrepair, the Red Flag Canal has today become a “red tourism” attraction, held up as “a patriotic model of the Communist spirit” under Mao Zedong Thought. But Clément’s present-day tour, woven in awkwardly with a manufactured narrative strand about the artistic journey of young female pianist Wang Chen (“You have to know yourself very well and listen to your inner voice,” the former Arte CEO at one point advises her), is meant to shoeshine the Red Flag Canal myth — and the message that for China, which strives tirelessly under CCP leadership, nothing is impossible.

In some cases, CICC productions intersect even more blatantly with the international propaganda objectives of the CCP. In December 2020, two full years before the chaotic and long overdue ending of China’s “zero Covid” policy, CICC was behind the production of the documentary Covid-19: Battling the Devil (新冠肺炎: 与魔鬼的战斗), a ringing endorsement of the government’s handling of the epidemic outbreak in Wuhan. The production, a cooperation with the private Chinese video platform Bilibili, was distributed outside China by the Discovery Channel, enabling it to reach a massive global audience. According to CICC, the documentary was aired in more than 200 countries.

In other cases, the messaging is far more subtle, aimed at showcasing Chinese traditional culture and modernity while emphasizing cooperation and friendship. In China: Mission Sojourney (跟我走吧朋友), a reality show produced by CICC and the film and television division of Sina, the Nasdaq-listed Chinese internet company, a group of domestic and international personalities are brought together to explore Chinese culture and create collaboratively. They include Chilean-born American interior designer Juan Pablo Molyneux, Chinese pop idol Xiao Rainco (肖宇梁), and French contemporary dancer Cindy Villemin. “I want to express the Chinese culture through Western eyes,” Molyneux says at one point.

State media have claimed that the series reached an audience of 600 million people in more than 40 countries around the world after premiering on the South Korean nationwide pay television network TVN.

A Media Group with a Foreign Policy Role?

Beyond CICC’s individual agreements with media groups across the world, the group’s multifaceted and ambiguous role can be seen plainly in its initiation of the so-called “Belt and Road” Media Cooperation Union (“一带一路”媒体传播联盟), an ostensibly non-government partnership of media organizations that directly serves China’s foreign policy and communication goals.

It is a common tactic of the Chinese government and association institutions to invite foreign participants to professional and business forums, and then to lend these forums an official and summit-like air, even admitting guests — who might suppose they are simply in town for a conference or networking opportunity — as “members” in a formal alliance of supposed common interests. Another prime example of this is the “Belt and Road” News Network (“一带一路”新闻合作联盟), or BRNN, led by the CCP’s official People’s Daily, with its website hosted on the newspaper’s servers.

Formed in April 2016, the CICC’s “Belt and Road” Media Cooperation Union claims to bring together more than 150 media from 43 countries and regions to promote what CICC calls “diversified media cooperation programs.” From the beginning, the MCU’s support from the State Council Information Office was openly acknowledged, and officials made clear that the group was an extension of Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy initiative. The opening address at the MCU’s formation was delivered by Cui Yuying (崔玉英), a deputy director of the Central Propaganda Department and deputy chief of the State Council Information Office.

17 partner media agencies reportedly “signed” the MCU in 2016, including the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, and the History Channel (all three channels under Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific, whose collaboration with CICC reaches back to 2004). Singapore’s Channel NewsAsia, or CNA, the multi-language news outlet under the national public broadcaster MediaCorp, also signed on.

CICC launched its “USilk” program at the same 2016 meeting under the auspices of the newly-formed MCU, meaning that the media group could effectively leverage a government-backed global forum to push commercial interests overlapping with the external propaganda objectives of the state. By 2018, the MCU claimed 60 members and reported that mainstream media from more than 20 countries were already running “USilk” content in 14 languages. Aside from Malaysia’s 8 TV, partners in Southeast Asia included National Broadcasting Services of Thailand (NBT), the broadcasting arm of Thailand’s government.

Co-Production as Usual

CICC has continued to strike up partnerships with media in every region of the world, effectively distributing factual and entertainment content to global audiences, all the while presenting itself as just another professional partner for co-productions.

Last year, the BBC released a six-part series called China on Stage, produced by CICC, Bilibili and the UK production company Lion TV. One episode of that series artfully played up the Shanghai premiere of the original Chinese musical “On the Road,” which lionizes the hard work and selflessness of China’s delivery riders during the pandemic. The host of the episode at one point calls the musical “a tribute to the long hours, hard work, and dedication of delivery couriers.” But the musical is also an official production by a state-run arts group, expressly intended to “sing the main melody” (唱出主旋律), a reference to media and cultural activity in China that sticks to the main political line of the CCP.

While one could certainly argue that the China on Stage treatment of “On the Road” does not broadly impact views of China in the UK, it makes for an awkward contrast with professional news coverage of the plight facing many gig workers in China, including the BBC’s own coverage of the extreme and unnecessary difficulties facing delivery riders.

It also offers a glimpse of the ingenious ways China now manages to use coverage of arts and culture to convey more subtle political messages. The fostering of such ingenuity is part of the formation story of CICC. Before its transformation into the commercial enterprise CICC in 2011, China Intercontinental largely produced material “with a strong propaganda tone” that was, according to documentary filmmaker Ming Yu, “incapable of communicating China’s image to the world, nor of influencing the world.”

CICC’s commercialization and internationalization enabled it to capitalize not just on foreign distribution channels, but also on foreign production know-how that took better account of overseas audiences. As global interest in China grew dramatically from the late 2000s onward, CICC was also in a unique position to foster international co-productions, as it was “responsible for not only promoting Chinese culture globally but also supervising and issuing filming permission to international broadcasters and media companies.”

More than a decade later, the results of that change can be seen in the polished, glittering mediocrity of many CICC productions.

Take for example the six-episode series Journey of Warriors (勇敢者的征程), produced by CICC along with Tencent Video and Discovery. It follows five celebrities as they attempt arduous treks – à la Naked and Afraid – along routes traversed by the Red Army during the Long March in 1934-1935 and during China’s struggle against the invading Japanese army. CICC and Chinese state media quite nakedly promoted the series as a celebration of the Party’s centennial, but millions of viewers in Discovery markets across the world were none the wiser. The Central Propaganda Department’s direct role in the production was never mentioned by the American company [See CMP’s “Warriors on the Red Road”].

Whatever commercial partners like Discovery, CNA, and the BBC might imagine they are engaged in, the CICC and its “Belt and Road” Media Cooperation Union are fronts for the Chinese Party-state and its communication goals — from the control of access to the “China story,” to the determined export of sanitized stories that suit and serve the “main melody.”

Nevertheless, co-production continues as usual. By maintaining the pretense that CICC is just another commercial production enterprise with its finger on the pulse of the Chinese market, China’s global media partners are complicit in supporting the messages and values of the Party-state — including the robust controls on information that arise from the conviction that the CCP must have a monopoly on the “China story.”

When the American mass media holding company Gannett announced its partnership with CICC in June last year for a series of documentaries called “Sister City,” to be released by USA TODAY Studios, it referred to the Chinese group as simply “an international communication company” dedicated to “high-quality factual programs.” Similarly, as her company inked a co-production deal with CICC and Insight TV for a factual adventure series on the Great Wall, Bomanbridge Media CEO Sonia Fleck praised CICC as “such an innovative leader and dependable partner for top factual content in the premium China market.”

The image may seem to fit when factual programming deals with the wonders of ancient history, the rhythms of nature, or the most adorable and enduring of foreign policy distractions: the giant panda. But it is a huge disservice to global television audiences who deserve the facts about how the cultural products they consume are made, whether about pandas or pandemics.