Christophe Deloire and Wu’er Kaixi claim that a recent report released by Reporters Without Borders(RSF) highlights China’s pursuit of a “new world media order.” RSF investigates Beijing's assault on the fourth estate, rejecting press freedom, controlling the flow of information, and reducing journalists to scribes and propagandists. This repression poses “a clear and present danger to the world’s democracies.” What is at stake is journalism as the world knows it.

In the 2019 World Press Freedom Index compiled by RSF, China ranked 177 out of 180. In recent years, the Communist Party has actively sought to establish an order in which journalists, scholars, and analysts are nothing more than state propaganda auxiliaries, a compliant force that serves the regime rather than the public. This poses a threat to journalism and the role of the media as the fourth estate that holds power to account and ensures that the public has access to accurate information.

Meanwhile China is also expanding its clout abroad, by increasing the global presence of its media, paying big money to place ads in renowned international publications, seeking to deter criticism and influence the global public. In some countries, China invests in local media outlets alongside projects on improving infrastructure. State propaganda promotes Beijing’s authoritarian model across the globe. The new world media order may be less well-known than the trillion dollar infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative, but just as ambitious.

Apart from countering fake news, psychological warfare and malicious manipulation of public opinion, the West faces a far more fundamental battle – the global campaign by autocrats, authoritarians, illiberals and thuggish leaders to create a new world media order. Like China they embrace an aggressive crackdown on critical coverage of their politics, the use of technology to spy on journalists, researchers and activists etc.

It comes as no surprise that journalists are demonised, jailed and killed in many parts of the world, since Trump, supposedly the leader of the free world, wages a war against mainstream media, calling them “ the enemy of the people.” The US has been for decades standard bearer of liberal democracy. Now Trump approves of a new world order on which Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Mohammed bin Salman, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte etc. find a degree of common ground.

Ahead of th Global Conference for Media Freedom in London on July 10 and 11, leading defenders of press freedom from around the world will meet. The authors urge them to “take this opportunity not just to reaffirm core principles, but also to rally together to build barriers to China’s media influence, and to end impunity for press-freedom violations.” Over 100 journalists are currently detained in China under “life-threatening” conditions.

It is important to honour those, who have died at the hands of thugs for defending journalism and the freedom of expression, like China’s Nobel Prize laureate, Liu Xiaobo and the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.