

“This has translated into ANSA running 50 Xinhua stories a day on its news wire, with Xinhua taking editorial responsibility for the content and ANSA serving as a distribution tool,” explains the IFJ report. Italian state-run news agency ANSA signed a memorandum of understanding with China’s state news agency Xinhua to launch the Xinhua Italian Service together.
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In March 2019, when Italy officially became a part of the Belt and Road Initiative, President Xi Jinping signed a series of media agreements with Italian media entities.
CHINA RADIO INTERNATIONAL NEWS FREE
But Beijing also uses unusual tactics such as providing state media content free of charge, paying for entire supplements in respected foreign newspapers, and launching bilateral cooperation agreements with local media outlets. China regularly conducts exchange programmes for foreign reporters from several countries, organises training for journalists in Chinese cities, and holds regular discussions with foreign journalists and Chinese media unions. According to Bloomberg News, between 20, its investment into media alone amounted to $2.8 billion. It has spent around USD 6.6 billion since 2009 in strengthening its global media presence. The Chinese regime has built a sophisticated strategy to portray the country’s leadership in a good light. Now the regime is also attempting to shape the information narratives internationally, especially in countries directly linked to larger infrastructure projects like the Belt and Road Initiative. Today they have high stakes in the game,” he said.įor decades, China has mostly focused on censoring its own citizens and on expelling foreign correspondents from mainland China.

“Earlier the Chinese had no reason to spend resources to influence the international narrative. Thussu, Professor of International Communication at Hong Kong’s Baptist University. The Chinese are new to a game the West has played for so long, argued Daya K. A total of 54 journalist unions from 50 different countries and territories participated in the survey.

But we were surprised by the number of countries impacted and the economic investment China was making in those countries,” said Jeremy Dear, Deputy General Secretary of IFJ. A global survey conducted at the end of 2020 among the affiliate unions of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) indicates that China has managed to use the pandemic to boost its image in global media coverage.

As China counters the dominance of the West, the news media are becoming a sharper weapon in the war to capture global narratives and the arena within which the war is fought. “It is an ideological and political struggle, with China determined to combat what it sees as decades of unchallenged western media imperialism,” wrote journalists Louisa Lim and Julia Bergin in 2018.Īlthough only a decade old, China’s strategy to expand its presence in global news media has achieved a certain degree of success.
