The Chinese state is ramping up its English-language media campaigns in a bid to defend the country’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, highlight the failings of western governments, and raise China’s standing on the world stage.

Photographs of Chinese aid – dubbed “facemask diplomacy” – arriving at Heathrow on Saturday including boxes labelled “Keep Calm and Cure Coronavirus” have been promoted to UK audiences by the Xinhua news agency. Some younger Chinese diplomats have used English-language Twitter, which is banned within China, to spread false suggestions that the virus may have been started by the west to discredit the Chinese state.

Prof Kerry Brown, an associate fellow on the Asia-Pacific programme at the thinktank Chatham House, suggested the country was trying to turn a national disaster into a global triumph: “They’re trying to push back against some of the politicisation of this in America and to try to get control of the narrative before it spirals out of control.”

China’s authoritarian single-party state, which is at the bottom of the World Press Freedom Index and has faced recent claims of playing down its coronavirus infection numbers, has long complained of unfair coverage by western media and recently expelled many western journalists. In recent years it has invested enormous sums of money in its own English-language news infrastructure to project its image around the world.

At the forefront of this response has been the state-owned English-language 24-hour rolling news channel CGTN, which recently began broadcasting from a new UK base in west London with a mission statement of “reporting the news from a Chinese perspective”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chinese medics posing on 13 March after arriving in Rome from Shanghai to help fight the coronavirus. Photograph: ANSA/AFP via Getty Images

Although CGTN is facing ongoing investigations by the media regulator Ofcom over its impartiality and other issues around press freedom, its criticism of western governments is less overt than that of other state-backed news networks such Russia Today or Iran’s Press TV.

Instead, in the past week the channel has broadcast a combination of inspiring individual stories about Chinese doctors saving lives against the odds during the coronavirus pandemic, videos of Chinese aid arriving in European and African nations, and footage of China’s economy already recovering from the lockdown – along with more unusual footage, such as film of an Ethiopian man who believed he could stop the infection by putting garlic up his nose.

On Thursday afternoon, it aired a series of interviews with Chinese diplomats and medical workers across Europe, with a presenter introducing interviews on how “China’s experience fighting Covid-19 is proving invaluable to other countries trying to contain the crisis”.

They also interviewed the Chinese ambassador to the Netherlands who criticised western media for their coverage of coronavirus aid: “Do they really wish China to stand by? I believe public opinion in the west is appreciative of China and its help.”

Lijian Zhao, a young Chinese diplomat who has been likened to Donald Trump for his outsized and aggressively nationalistic Twitter personality, has also spread links to conspiracy theory websites suggesting the virus may have been created by the US.

Lijian Zhao 赵立坚 (@zlj517) This article is very much important to each and every one of us. Please read and retweet it. COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the US. https://t.co/LPanIo40MR

Zhao is among a group of so-called “wolf warrior” diplomats and state media accounts, named after a patriotic film from 2015, that have become more outspoken, especially in defending China’s role in the outbreak. Over the past year, more Chinese diplomats as well as the foreign ministry have joined Twitter, posting in English and promoting China’s perspective on issues from human rights violations in Xinjiang to the US-China trade war.

The cybersecurity researchers Recorded Future said they had noticed a distinct shift in tone on Chinese-run social media accounts in mid-February, which sought to move the narrative “from China as the source of the pandemic to China as a global leader in its response”.

In line with this approach dozens of branded articles from the Chinese state-controlled People’s Daily have appeared on the Daily Telegraph website under a lucrative sponsorship deal, with headlines such as “Why are some framing China’s heroic efforts to stop coronavirus as inhumane?” Many of these have been removed from the UK newspaper’s website in recent days, in a development first reported by BuzzFeed News.

Chinese companies have also done their best to help. Huawei, the telecoms giant at the centre of a global tussle over 5G mobile phone equipment, has donated thousands of facemasks to the UK under the slogan “Together we support the NHS”. But while the move was applauded by the Apprentice host, Lord Sugar, to his millions of Twitter followers, the company has not promoted its role – potentially out of concerns of how the gift would be perceived.

What is unclear is whether western audiences are being influenced by the Chinese material. CGTN’s viewing figures are not publicly recorded but unlike Russia Today it is not available on the main Freeview broadcast service, while the online audience for Xinhua’s UK Facebook page attracts very few interactions.

Brown said there had been surprise in China at some of the negative reaction to donations of masks: “The Chinese complaint is when you sent aid for earthquakes in the past, we didn’t complain. It’s symptomatic of this cultural clash over news management.”

He also said that current English-language campaigns by Chinese state-backed media outlets were still far too conservative in their approach compared with more effective and “insidious” propaganda efforts by nations such as Russia.

“People bang on about Chinese influence in the media but it’s too obvious – it walks down the street on stilts with a big sign above it saying ‘government messaging’,” he said. “If they get good at it, we won’t know. When they get good at it we have a problem.”

France has also become alarmed at attempts by China to use the coronavirus outbreak to project the superiority of its political system.

In an internal note, CAPS, the in-house thinktank of the country’s foreign ministry, warned that China would take control of globalisation and future global governance in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak unless democratic states offered something better than sticking-plaster solutions once the crisis had ended.

“Even if China cannot claim leadership similar to that which the United States would have assumed a few years ago, China is already occupying the field by making itself essential, even central,” it read.

Additional reporting by Patrick Wintour

