Propaganda: How the CCP promotes its favored content and narratives abroad

The CCP employs a variety of methods to reach global audiences with approved content. These include building up the overseas capacity and presence of official state media, insinuating official views into foreign mainstream media, cultivating foreign outlets that can produce their own favorable content, acquiring or establishing new outlets, and conducting disinformation campaigns on global social media platforms.

1.) Expanding the global capacity and presence of official state media

All of China’s most prominent state-owned media outlets now have an international presence across the gamut of formats. The six most notable outlets are China Global Television Network (CGTN), the global service of state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV); the English-language newspaper China Daily; the CCP mouthpiece People’s Daily; China Radio International (CRI); and two news agencies—Xinhua and China News Service. Most have a constellation of bureaus overseas and distribute content in multiple languages. For example, in addition to carrying CCTV programming in Chinese, CGTN broadcasts in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Russian to every region via satellite, cable, and IPTV (internet protocol television). China Daily is distributed in locations such as newsstands in New York City, hotels in Hong Kong, Kenya Airways flights, and congressional offices in Washington, DC. In Africa and the Middle East, Chinese state media have also developed unique publications geared toward local populations.

In 2009, the Chinese government reportedly allocated $6 billion to the global expansion of state media. In 2017, scholar David Shambaugh estimated that China was spending as much as $10 billion per year on enhancing its “soft power,” although state media would only account for a portion of that sum. Complete budgetary information on the spending behind Chinese state media’s global expansion is not available, but the known data points indicate a large and growing investment dedicated to increasing the reach and impact of these outlets. For example, based on China Daily’s annual filings with the US government under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), the paper’s budget and expenditures in the United States have increased tenfold over the past decade, from about $500,000 in the first half of 2009 to more than $5 million in the latter half of 2019. Similarly, in September 2018, Australian media reported that CGTN was engaged in a $500 million advertising campaign—complete with billboards featuring kangaroos and pandas—to try to attract cable viewers. Evidence has also emerged of multimillion-dollar contracts issued by outlets like Xinhua and China News Service to add followers and build influence on Twitter, which, ironically, is blocked in China.

Indeed, all of the major state outlets have accounts on Twitter and Facebook, and some are also active on YouTube and Instagram, which are similarly blocked inside China. In many cases they have multiple accounts divided by language, theme, or geographic location. Each of the main accounts has garnered tens of millions of followers, particularly in the last three years. As of December 2019, CGTN’s English account had 90 million followers—the largest for any media outlet on Facebook—of which 20 million had been added since November 2018. Three of the 10 media accounts on Facebook with the largest number of followers were Chinese state media. In addition, from mid-November to mid-December 2019, four of the five fastest- growing media pages on Facebook were Chinese state-run outlets: Global Times, CGTN, and two photo and culture pages run by Xinhua. CGTN’s French-language account had 20.3 million followers, CGTN Spanish had 15.7 million, CGTN Arabic had 14.4 million, and CGTN Russian had some 1 million. Interestingly, the Chinese-language accounts belonging to the same outlets have a much smaller following. For example, CCTV’s Chinese account on Facebook had just 3.75 million followers as of December 2019.

These numbers raise a variety of questions and concerns. First, observers have speculated on how many of the followers are genuine given the relatively low rate of comments per post, compared with competitors like Cable News Network (CNN) of the United States or the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). But in April 2019, Facebook told the Economist that it had found only a tiny number of fake followers of Chinese state media pages.

Second, although the accounts are clearly managed by these media outlets, a degree of deception is evident in how they identify themselves. A review of several of the main accounts found that none reveal their state ownership or CCP editorial control. Even the People’s Daily, the party’s official mouthpiece, describes itself simply as “the biggest newspaper in China.” CGTN bills itself as “China’s preeminent 24-hour news channel,” and Xinhua refers to itself as “the first port of call for the latest and exclusive China and world news.” Facebook users who are unfamiliar with these outlets’ true nature could easily mistake them for independent, privately owned entities. This may change in the future, as Facebook announced in October 2019 that it planned to begin labeling state-owned media as such.

Third, the accounts regularly run ads on Facebook to recruit followers. Many of the advertisements include images of pandas, the Great Wall, or modern subjects like a high-speed train, coupled with text that encourages users to follow the account and learn about China. The accounts’ current number of followers appears at the bottom of the ads, suggesting a degree of legitimacy and existing public trust. The ads run in multiple languages and target users in countries around the world. In some cases they run exclusively in developing regions like South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East rather than in developed countries like the United States. Some of these advertisements are flagged by Facebook as political. They may contain content on a recent speech by Xi Jinping, commentary on the US-China trade war, or promotional material on the Belt and Road Initiative.

Fourth, sprinkled among run-of-the-mill posts about pandas, development projects, and Chinese culture, more aggressive and negative content targeting perceived CCP enemies has appeared over the past year. During the summer of 2019, CGTN’s English page published several videos likening Hong Kong protesters to terrorist groups or repeating proven fabrications about them, such as a report claiming that protesters carrying toy weapons were armed with a US-made grenade launcher. A few months later, in December, a series of graphic and disturbing “documentaries” about the supposed terrorist threat posed by Uighurs were posted by CGTN’s English, Spanish, and French Facebook pages in an apparent effort to rebut international criticism of the Chinese government’s mass internment and forced indoctrination of Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Within hours of being posted, one of the English videos had garnered over 25,000 views, a relatively high number for CGTN content. These examples demonstrate how media channels that are built over time using misleading advertising and soft content can be activated in a crisis to deliver harsh CCP propaganda to large global audiences.

2.) Insinuating official views into foreign mainstream media

While Chinese state media are working to break into new markets and expand their global audiences, dissemination strategies that rely on these outlets still have a limited reach. Therefore, the Chinese government has developed a considerable aptitude for incorporating official views into foreign programming and publications that reach a wider, more mainstream audience.

One successful method has been for top diplomats and officials to submit opinion articles or provide interviews to major foreign outlets. From 2014 to 2017, for instance, China’s ambassador to Argentina authored 14 op-eds and granted 10 interviews to local media, in addition to personally visiting local newsrooms eight times. In late 2018, as China faced increased international condemnation due to the government’s persecution of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, Chinese diplomats reached out to local media to defend Beijing’s policies. Examples included an opinion piece published in the Jakarta Post by China’s ambassador to Indonesia, letters from China’s ambassador in the United Kingdom to the Economist and the Financial Times, and interviews of China’s ambassador to the United States by both National Public Radio, which is popular among more liberal audiences, and Fox News, a leading conservative station. In November, an opinion piece under Xi Jinping’s own name was published in Papua New Guinea ahead of his visit for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.

While this type of media outreach is a common tool of public diplomacy, Chinese state media have also used more unusual and arguably more opaque methods to exploit foreign media outlets. Chinese officials and state media documents have referred to this practice as “borrowing the boat to reach the sea” (借船出海). One of the most prominent examples is the periodic inclusion of a paid news-like advertising supplement from China Daily called China Watch in the print editions of papers like the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. Similar advertorial inserts have appeared in major newspapers in other parts of the world, including in Spain, the United Kingdom, Australia, Argentina, Peru, Senegal, and India. In the case of the Washington Post and some other publications , China Watch also appears as an online feature, further blurring the lines between Chinese state media content and the host outlet’s own reporting.

A second tactic, particularly relevant to the news agencies Xinhua and China News Service, involves providing content free of charge to partner media. This approach has become especially prominent among Chinese-language outlets serving the diaspora. A November 2018 investigation by the Financial Times found that “party-affiliated outlets were reprinting or broadcasting their content in at least 200 nominally independent Chinese-language publications around the world,” the result of a sharp uptick in content-sharing agreements in 2016–17 compared with previous years. In most cases, the content appears to have been provided for free and published “under the masthead of the overseas news organizations,” making it appear native to the independent publication, even if a small note identifies the original source.

Such agreements are not limited to Chinese-language publications. Xinhua has signed cooperation pacts with a wide range of media outlets in both free and repressive settings around the world. The precise terms of the deals are not always made public, but in at least some instances, Xinhua provides free text and photos to its partners. Over the past two years, the news agency has signed exchange agreements with local counterparts in countries including Australia, Italy, Bangladesh, India, Nigeria, Egypt, Thailand, Vietnam, Belarus, and Laos.

Content-exchange agreements and other forms of cooperation extend beyond newswires and print publications to television and radio programming as well. The 2018 Financial Times investigation found that CCTV provides “free video footage and television scripts to 1,700 smaller foreign news organizations and media groups.” In recent years, arrangements of this kind have led to the airing of Chinese-produced documentaries and other news or entertainment programming on local stations. In 2011, for example, Zimbabwe’s government agreed to share news programming between its state-run television station and CCTV. In 2014, the Thai News Network entered an agreement with Xinhua to broadcast the latter’s China Report program in Thailand on a daily basis. TV Peru’s Channel 7 broadcast 12 documentaries about China surrounding the APEC forum in Lima in 2016, nearly all of which were produced by CGTN and aired during prime time. In January 2018, a delegation from China International Television Corporation, a CCTV subsidiary, reportedly returned from a conference in the United States with deals to air the Spanish-dubbed version of a Chinese-produced drama on “state TV of Latin American countries such as Colombia, Peru, and Mexico.” State media content has also appeared on radio stations. In November 2015, a Reuters investigation revealed that programming from the state-funded CRI was appearing on stations in 14 countries, including 15 US cities, often via privately owned intermediaries. By 2018, the Guardian reported, such content was airing on 58 stations in 35 countries.

In other cases, cooperation takes the form of coproduction. For example, during 2017, the China Intercontinental Communication Center collaborated with Image Nation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to produce and air China-centered documentaries on Image Nation’s Quest Arabia station, which broadcasts to 45 million households in 22 countries in the Middle East. In June 2018, media reports surrounding Xi Jinping’s visit to the UAE indicated that the partnership might go further and entail creation of a 24-hour Chinese television station targeting the Middle East. In mid-2017, CGTN and the Argentinian network Grupo América coproduced a series of 30-minute documentaries on the theme of China and Argentina’s long-standing diplomatic relationship. Similarly, the Venezuela-based regional broadcaster TeleSUR, owned by a group of Latin American governments, has partnered with CGTN Español since 2016 to coproduce Prisma, a cultural program. And in October 2019 in Germany, the public station Northern German Broadcasting (NDR) came under criticism for airing the current affairs program Dialogue with China, which was coproduced with a controversial CGTN host.

3.) Cultivating foreign media that can produce their own favorable content

Not all pro-CCP propaganda that appears in foreign countries is produced or even coproduced by Chinese state media. Chinese diplomats and other officials have gone to great lengths to develop “friendly” relations with private media owners and reporters, encouraging them to create their own content that promotes key narratives favored by Beijing. Chinese diaspora outlets and media owners whose coverage serves the CCP’s interests are frequently rewarded with advertising, lucrative contracts for other enterprises, joint ventures, and even political appointments.

One of the starkest outcomes of this dynamic has been the participation of privately owned news outlets in publishing or airing coerced confessions by Chinese prisoners of conscience and other victims of state repression. An April 2018 report by the rights group Safeguard Defenders examined 45 such confessions recorded between 2013 and 2018, 60 percent of which featured journalists, bloggers, book publishers, lawyers, or activists. Although CCTV has been the outlet most closely associated with recording and distributing the confessions, privately owned Hong Kong news outlets that have a large global audience—including Phoenix TV, the Chinese-language Oriental Daily, and the English-language South China Morning Post—have been implicated as well.

Beijing has also used subsidized trips or “trainings” in China to cultivate foreign journalists directly. According to some past participants from Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the visiting journalists are made to understand that their hosts expect them to reciprocate for the well-funded events by producing content that promotes the CCP’s preferred narratives.

The Chinese government similarly forges relationships with current and former officials in foreign countries, who often benefit professionally or financially and can act as informal defenders of Beijing’s views in local media. For example, New Zealand lawmaker Todd McClay recently referred to the forced indoctrination camps for Muslim minorities in Xinjiang as “vocational training centers,” echoing the terminology used by the Chinese government and state media to justify the mass detentions. Gerhard Schröder, the former chancellor of Germany, dismissed reports of the camps as mere “gossip” in a 2018 interview with Reuters. McClay had represented his political party in a December 2017 dialogue in Beijing organized by the CCP’s International Liaison Department, and Schroeder is known for having profited after leaving office by aiding German companies in their contacts with Chinese government and party officials.

4.) Purchasing foreign media outlets and establishing new networks

In a number of documented cases, entities with links to the Chinese government have purchased or established their own news outlets to disseminate pro-Beijing views. This practice matches Anne-Marie Brady’s 2015 prediction that the CCP would move from “borrowing the boat” to “buying the boat,” or purchasing stakes in foreign media enterprises. In 2018, investors believed to have close ties to the CCP-friendly Phoenix TV moved to purchase a radio station in Mexico near the border with the United States, raising suspicions that it would be used to broadcast pro-Beijing content to Chinese speakers in southern California. But the pattern extends beyond diaspora media. Over the past decade, the Chinese outlet GBTimes has purchased stakes in or provided content to radio stations in Hungary, Italy, and elsewhere, airing daily cultural and news programs that portray China in a positive light. These stations are among at least eight that GBTimes—founded by Chinese entrepreneur Zhao Yinong and significantly subsidized by CRI until 2017 —operates across Europe, reaching millions of listeners.

Beijing’s international infrastructure investment program, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), has served as a vehicle for media influence activities in partner countries. In June 2018, the state-affiliated All-China Journalists Association (ACJA) convened the Belt and Road Journalists Forum, drawing nearly 100 representatives from media and journalism associations in 47 countries. One of the key goals of the forum and subsequent cooperation has been to “organize joint news collection and increase the sharing of information.” At the forum’s conclusion, the ACJA was tasked with establishing a permanent secretariat for the forum and drafting rules for a Belt and Road journalists’ alliance.

Less than a year later, in April 2019, China launched the Belt and Road News Network (BRNN), headquartered in Beijing and chaired by the People’s Daily. According to its founding charter, its leadership council includes 14 members from China and 26 others from 24 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, and the Middle East. The network reportedly publishes news in six languages, although by late 2019 contributions appeared to be coming exclusively from the People’s Daily, with no articles available in the “other members” portion of the content pool. Not surprisingly, the content on BRNN’s English website is focused on touting the benefits of the BRI while omitting negative information about either the initiative or life in China under CCP rule. The top story in mid-December was a profile of Xinjiang as a tourist destination and cultural hub. It remains unclear how many member outlets are republishing BRNN’s content, but past initiatives of this kind on a more modest scale—like the Asia News Network —have resulted in China Daily articles appearing in outlets across the region.

5.) Conducting disinformation campaigns on global social media platforms

The use of Russian-style disinformation campaigns on international social media platforms, which are blocked within China, has gained prominence over the past year as a relatively new tactic for promoting CCP narratives abroad, although the phenomenon apparently began as early as mid-2017. Previously, most evidence of this type of propaganda was observed on domestic platforms, according to the Oxford Internet Institute. But in 2019, the Chinese government displayed “new-found interest in aggressively using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.”

The first campaign to draw international attention focused on the November 2018 municipal elections in Taiwan, and particularly the mayoral race in the southern city of Kaohsiung, in which an unlikely pro-China Kuomintang (KMT) candidate, Han Kuo-yu, emerged victorious in a traditional Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) stronghold. Fake news stories and doctored images originating in China, or from a network of websites suspected of links to Beijing, spread widely on social media, denigrating the DPP government. Some items were picked up and reported as fact by local news stations. In mid-2019, new evidence indicated that pro-Han Facebook groups had been created and administered by suspicious China-based users. Subsequent research found cases of people in five Chinese provinces artificially boosting fake news stories about Han’s opponent in Google search results, as well as efforts by Chinese government agents to purchase popular pro-Taiwan Facebook pages ahead of the 2020 general elections.

Reports of other international campaigns came later in 2019. In August, Twitter announced that it had taken down over 900 accounts that were used as part of a Chinese state-directed disinformation campaign to undermine the credibility of antigovernment protesters in Hong Kong, and that it had also removed 200,000 new accounts associated with the network. Facebook and YouTube announced similar account takedowns, but on a smaller scale. Importantly, the social media firms published data about the accounts and the content they shared.

Analysis by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the New York Times revealed additional details about the tactics and targets of the Twitter network. They found that the same network had been active since mid-2017 and had previously been mobilized to smear a wide a range of Chinese government critics located inside and outside China. These included US-based democracy activist Yang Jianli, self-exiled billionaire Guo Wengui, detained bookseller and Swedish citizen Gui Minhai, arrested human rights lawyer Yu Wensheng, and Chinese military veterans who were detained for protesting over unpaid benefits. It was only after all of these campaigns that the network turned its focus to the Hong Kong protesters and attracted Twitter’s attention, resulting in its dismantling.

A number of the disinformation network’s features are worth noting. First, much—but not all—of the content was in Chinese, both simplified (used on the mainland) and traditional (used in Hong Kong and Taiwan) depending on the topic, indicating that a key target audience was the Chinese diaspora. Second, the accounts were often bought on the black market rather than cultivated from scratch, as Russian operatives have done. Many of the purchased accounts had been devoted to spam and marketing. Still, some had over 10,000 followers, and they had previously tweeted in 55 different languages. Third, the campaigns were less psychologically sophisticated and more hastily assembled than Moscow’s effort during the 2016 US elections, particularly in terms of meaningful engagement with local users. Finally, many of the more political messages failed to go viral; the most frequently retweeted items from the network were often about sports or pornography.

The Chinese authorities’ overseas use of social media disinformation may have been relatively crude to date, but they are learning fast. In Taiwan, where the Chinese social media operations are already more coordinated and sophisticated than those deployed globally, observers note that the disinformation is becoming harder to detect, particularly as the content shifts from simplified to traditional Chinese. Moreover, despite Twitter’s actions to remove the China-linked network, Chinese state-affiliated trolls are still apparently operating on the platform in large numbers. In the hours and days after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted in support of Hong Kong protesters in October 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported, nearly 170,000 tweets were directed at Morey by users who seemed to be based in China as part of a coordinated intimidation campaign. Meanwhile, there have been multiple suspected efforts by pro-Beijing trolls to manipulate the ranking of content on popular sources of information outside China, including Google’s search engine, Reddit, and YouTube.

Beijing’s overseas propaganda: A potent blend of boldness and deception

The Chinese government and state media are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to spread their messages to audiences around the world. Some of their activities fall within the scope of what might be deemed acceptable public diplomacy or “soft power” strategies used by other countries, including democratic governments. These include ambassadors publishing opinion pieces or granting interviews to foreign media, reaching global audiences with state-funded news broadcasts, or making arrangements for domestic entertainment content to air on foreign television networks.

Nevertheless, there are also clear patterns that suggest dishonesty and corruption. Efforts to disseminate state media content frequently lack transparency, and the deceptive self-identification of Chinese state media pages on Facebook extends to paid advertorial supplements. Many news-like inserts include a disclaimer stating that the content was paid for or even that it comes from a Chinese source, but rarely are the official ties of the relevant Chinese outlet made explicit. In the case of free content embedded within foreign publications or broadcasts, Chinese state media may be credited, but the labeling is rarely prominent, and only news consumers who are already familiar with the outlets would be aware of its state or CCP affiliation. Coproductions and co-opted private media further obscure the political motivations driving certain reporting. And disinformation spread by networks of seemingly ordinary social media users is entirely opaque and deliberately mendacious.

The lack of transparency often extends to the economic arrangements surrounding various propaganda activities, such as the amount China Daily is paying for each advertorial, how many and which journalists are traveling to China on government-paid trips, or what financial benefits content-sharing agreements provide to each party. Such details would be of interest to civil society, policymakers, and the general public in many countries given the potential for corruption and the economic dependence they can create for foreign media outlets. The economic ties give Beijing crucial leverage, which it can use either implicitly or explicitly to suppress critical coverage and commentary, as explored in the next section of the report.