China has not only shown how careless it is in managing the spread of an extremely dangerous virus, but throughout the pandemic, it has tried to shift the onus on other countries and run away from its responsibilities. However, even with all the negatives, the Chinese Communist Party’s control of the global media and thus the global narrative factory, it was able to whitewash the dirt which itself inflicted upon itself. The control of the CCP on the international and western media is a widely known fact, and it is this control that has helped Beijing by becoming its laundry and cleaning every speck of dirt on it.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Chinese President Xi Jinping had prime real estate in the heart of Belgrade, with his profile plastered over a billboard with the words “Thank you brother Xi.” The sign was made in response to China sending Covid-19 medical supplies to Serbia, according to the pro-government tabloid Informer. During the pandemic, it entered a long list of pro-China offers of thanks in the form of blatant propaganda or more subtle media messages from countries all over the world.
A new report being published this week by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), which Julia Bergin co-authored with Louisa Lim of the University of Melbourne and Johan Lidberg of Monash University, has found Beijing’s global image has benefited from the pandemic, despite its origin in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Over half of the 50 nations surveyed at the end of 2020 reported coverage of China had become more positive in their national media since the onset of the pandemic, while less than a quarter reported it had become increasingly negative.
At TFI Global, we have discussed the depth of the influence CCP exercises on the American media, and in its backdrop, it is not difficult to understand how pro-CCP the media houses from other places would be. Ties between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and major American media houses, being brought to the fore, have ceased to surprise anyone of late. It is an open secret that the CCP funnels money into the pockets of American media outlets via its own state media houses to get paid content, pro-China in bias, published as editorial commentary.
It has now come to light that the Chinese state media major, China Daily, which is owned by the CCP’s propaganda department, continued to pay U.S. media companies nearly $2 million for printing and advertising expenses over the past six months, despite being exposed as doing so in June last year itself. This comes even as it was earlier reported that certain publications were dedicating pro-CCP content at the behest of large funds they received from China.
The tragedy of the 21st century is that the media houses of the USA are turning into the enablers of Communist China’s propaganda. The pieces of evidence have been increasing, be it the Hunter Biden emails and his links to the CCP or how the Wuhan Coronavirus was covered. The beacon of a free press which the USA was, has become compromised. The mainstream media giants in the USA have become complicit in Chinese propaganda. These big media companies have forgotten the ethics and morals of being information propagators for the Chinese Yuan. And the more unfortunate fact is that it is not just American media, but the situation is comparable the world over.
Read more: How Chinese is the American Media?
China has long attempted to seed positive narratives of itself in foreign media while blocking unfavourable coverage and redirecting the world’s attention onto Western failures. To do so, Beijing uses customised offers of access and tools to tap into foreign media ecosystems. It uses content-sharing agreements and memorandums of understanding with state-sponsored media outlets like Xinhua and China Daily to export its propaganda to foreign media organisations. For example, ANSA, Italy’s state-run news agency, now publishes 50 Xinhua stories per day on its news wire, with Xinhua handling the editorial material.
Beijing has also given foreign journalists all-expenses-paid tours. The aim is for foreign media to amplify Chinese messages in their languages on their own news outlets’ websites. Chinese misinformation activities have been a new part of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda tactics after the outbreak of the pandemic. State actors dubbed “wolf warrior diplomats” used social media outlets such as Twitter, which are banned in China, to spread a series of conspiracy theories. An army of Chinese diplomats, foreign ministry spokesman, and paid trolls then escalated these claims.
This concerted effort to change the COVID narrative through Western tech channels has also been used to delegitimize democratic institutions, such as the 2020 US presidential elections and the BBC’s reporting on China’s treatment of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang. All of this proves that while China has done everything to get itself drenching in dirt and mud, the global media has coordinated with CCP to make sure it acts as the laundry that cleans Beijing of any and every negative PR.