Beijing to Take on English Press in Canada
State-run China Daily plans Canadian print edition
Created: September 15, 2011
The China Daily, a mouthpiece for the Chinese regime, is hoping to expand into Canada. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)
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As Beijing criticizes Canadian media reports involving a Xinhua News reporter, the communist regime appears set to take matters into its own hands by launching a state-run English newspaper in Canada, the Epoch Times has learned.
China Daily, which bills itself as China’s national English-language newspaper with the Chinese perspective on major financial, political and social issues, is currently shopping for a public relations firm to help it launch a print edition in Canada later this year.
Multiple calls to the paper’s New York headquarters went unanswered, likely due to problems with a new phone system since changing offices, said a manager in the Washington D.C. office.
That manager, who declined to give her name, confirmed the paper is planning an expansion to Canada soon but could not confirm the date. China Daily already prints a five-day-a-week newspaper in the US.
A Canadian public relations firm, which also wished to remain unnamed, confirmed it was among those that received a request for proposal from the paper for a promotional campaign in Canada.
If the launch does happen, China Daily will join Xinhua News Agency as one of the Chinese regime’s directly controlled media operating in Canada, though it would apparently be the only one to publish an English-language print edition.
The Xinhua News Agency has been the subject of much media attention this week after it was revealed that Xinhua Toronto chief Shi Rong had exchanged a series of intimate messages with Canadian MP Bob Dechert , the parliamentary secretary for foreign affairs.
Dechert said the relationship was merely a friendship, but security experts have warned about the potential for a breach as Xinhua has been closely tied to Chinese intelligence operations, a fact widely covered in Canadian media reports.
The Chinese Embassy in Ottawa has taken issue with that coverage, reports the Globe and Mail.
"It must be pointed out that it is irresponsible to use this to defame the Chinese government,” a spokesperson told the Globe, asking to remain unnamed.
Expanding Influence
Search results for events like the Tiananmen Square massacre reveal the China Daily's close adherence to the Party line.
The Chinese regime is reportedly spending upwards of US$7 billion to expand its English-language media overseas and steer the course of international opinion of the communist state.
Xinhua, the regime’s largest news outlet, debuted a new six-storey electronic billboard in Times Square at the beginning of August and rented office space in the square close to media giants Thomson Reuters and The New York Times.
China Daily meanwhile is providing a “paid news supplement” to Washington Post so its content can be carried there. The paper has also created a website which bears The Washington Post logo and is hosted on the washingtonpost.com domain but runs articles produced by China Daily. A footnote on a sub-banner notes the site is a paid supplement to the Post, produced by China Daily.
While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has always exerted jealous control of all communication channels within China, the effort to expand its propaganda influence overseas is more recent.
Xinhua was given a directive by Mao Zedong in 1955 to “have our voice be heard all over the world,” a battle cry still found on the walls of Xinhua's China headquarters, but only now does the regime have the funds to actually make it happen.
Directives from the Top
Party paper Guangming Daily noted in December last year that the regime needed to penetrate the overseas media market to improve its influence over other countries.
Leng Song, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Science, wrote for Guangming that the regime must “build up the CCP Central media’s brand name and reputation overseas. All major Central media have already begun to expand in the Western world.”
It’s a theme that comes up often in the conferences and reports of party think tanks and committees, reveals Chinese media monitor Chinascope.
Chinese leader Hu Jintao told one such conference in February that the Party must establish a mechanism to lead public opinion on the Internet. It is a message he repeated in the past, telling propagandists they must lead other news outlets by breaking stories—but from the regime’s angle.
Journalism with Communist Characteristics
Like most party-controlled media operating overseas, China Daily reports on a variety of topics but toes the party line on sensitive issues.
Searches on the English U.S. site reveal some striking differences from Western journalism. Coverage of Tibet is almost exclusively about the Party’s efforts to improve quality of life there and how Tibetans were under the heavy oppression of the Dalai Lama and the theocracy before it was liberated by the CCP.
Searches for “Tiananmen Square Massacre” return four results, three of which are the same story titled “Tiananmen massacre a myth.” International coverage reveals a much more favourable view of regimes like Sudan and Iran than is common in Western media.
Searches for Falun Gong shut the site down entirely.
“Western media” comes up repeatedly in sometimes scathing articles about Western reporting on China. Articles like “CNN: What’s wrong with you?” and “Chinese experts condemn biased reports on Lhasa riot by Western media,” expose a core grievance the CCP’s propagandists have long held against the free press and likely the reason for the expansion of state-controlled media.
Making a Case for Communist Media
Xinhua News Agency president Li Congjun recently tried to make that grievance sound justified in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
Li argued that the world needs a new global media order, maybe even a “Media UN,” to rebalance the position media from developed countries have over those of developing countries.
“In our interdependent world, the human community needs a set of more civilized rules to govern international mass communication,” he wrote.
Among other points, Li argued modern media organizations should ensure “openness and transparency to promote the building of an open society, but also keep to rational and constructive rules so as to turn mass communication into an active force for promoting social progress.”
The irony of a key propagandist for a regime that stifles free speech calling for a more open news media has made great fodder for bloggers and commentators. The regime’s effort to expand its media successfully will depend on media consumers being far less critical.
Another major obstacle will be overcoming the reputation Chinese state media have for playing the dual role of intelligence gathering.
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