"China’s biggest media conglomerate, Xinhua, has 37 bureaus in Africa. This dwarves any other news agency—African or non-African—and is a dramatic increase from just a handful two decades ago. Another Chinese media giant, StarTimes, is China’s biggest player in African digital TV and the sec
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ond largest in Africa after South Africa’s DSTV. StarTimes is installing satellite dishes in 10,000 rural homes across 20 African countries, linking them to Chinese digital TV, further embedding itself on the continent.
Many of Africa’s young journalists are trained in China and paid by Chinese media entities. In Kenya alone, 500 journalists and local staff are employed by Chinese media agencies, dispatching 1,800 news items monthly. Veteran China-trained Kenyan journalist Joseph Odindo, the former editorial director of Nation Media Group (East and Central Africa’s largest media conglomerate), notes that he had to keep close watch on his workforce while at the Standard Group. “[W]e had to draw up a chart which would enable us to see who was out on a Chinese training at any given time, who was due to come back, and who was next—otherwise you could find half of your newsroom is in Beijing undergoing training.”
The surge in Chinese investments in the African media space is part of a global strategy by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to gain influence in the developing countries by shaping their information environments. The CCP views the media as a battleground for “telling China’s story well,” a phrase coined by CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping in 2013 at the party’s National Propaganda and Ideology Work Conference. China’s ruling party, according to its own policies, regards the media as an arena of combat to advance its narratives and policies and to discredit those of its adversaries without using military force. This invokes the Sun Tzu concept of “winning battles without fighting,” a concept CCP propagandists frequently use to describe their media offensives." (Introduction)
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"Beijing's state-backed media, which once seemed incapable having a significant effect globally, has been overhauled and expanded. At a time when many democracies' media outlets are consolidating due to financial pressures, China's biggest state media outlets, like the newswire Xinhua, are modernizi
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ng, professionalizing, and expanding in attempt to reach an international audience. Overseas, Beijing also attempts to impact local media, civil society, and politics by having Chinese firms or individuals with close links buy up local media outlets, by signing content-sharing deals with local media, by expanding China's social media giants, and by controlling the wireless and wired technology through which information now flows, among other efforts. In Beijing's Global Media Offensive - a major analysis of how China is attempting to build a media and information superpower around the world, and how this media power integrates with other forms of Chinese influence - Joshua Kurlantzick focuses on how all of this is playing out in both China's immediate neighborhood - Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand - and also in the United States and many other parts of the world. He traces the ways in which China is trying to build an information and influence superpower, but also critically examines the new conventional wisdom that Beijing has enjoyed great success with these efforts. While China has worked hard to build a global media and information superpower, it often has failed to reap gains from its efforts, and has undermined itself with overly assertive, alienating diplomacy. Still, Kurlantzick contends, China's media, information and political influence campaigns will continue to expand and adapt, helping Beijing exports its political model and protect the ruling Party, and potentially damaging press freedoms, human rights, and democracy abroad." (Publisher description)
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"This volume explores the implications of digital media technologies for journalists’ professional practice, news users’ consumption and engagement with news, as well as the shifting institutional, organizational and financial structures of news media. Drawing on case studies and quantitative an
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d qualitative approaches, contributors address questions concerning: whether China is witnessing ‘disruptive’ or ‘sustainable’ journalism; if, and in what ways, digital technologies may disrupt journalism; and whether Chinese digital journalism converges with or diverges from Western experiences of digital journalism." (Publisher description)
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"How do journalists working for different state-funded international news organizations legitimize their relationship to the governments which support them? In what circumstances might such journalists resist the diplomatic strategies of their funding states? We address these questions through a com
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parative study of journalists working for international news organizations funded by the Chinese, US, UK and Qatari governments. Using 52 interviews with journalists covering humanitarian issues, we explain how they minimized tensions between their diplomatic role and dominant norms of journalistic autonomy by drawing on three – broadly shared – legitimizing narratives, involving different kinds of boundary-work. In the first ‘exclusionary’ narrative, journalists differentiated their ‘truthful’ news reporting from the ‘false’ state ‘propaganda’ of a common Other, the Russian-funded network, RT. In the second ‘fuzzifying’ narrative, journalists deployed the ambiguous notion of ‘soft power’ as an ambivalent ‘boundary concept’, to defuse conflicts between journalistic and diplomatic agendas. In the final ‘inversion’ narrative, journalists argued that, paradoxically, their dependence on funding states gave them greater ‘operational autonomy’. Even when journalists did resist their funding states, this was hidden or partial, and prompted less by journalists’ concerns about the political effects of their work, than by serious threats to their personal cultural capital." (Abstract)
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"The Xinhua News Agency is China's largest state news agency. It is also the largest news agency among developing countries. This research examines the changes Xinhua has undergone over the past three decades under the backdrop of (a) the end of the Cold War, (b) the trend of globalization and vario
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us challenges it has brought to world news agencies, (c) drastic changes in both international and national news agencies across the world, and (d) China's eager desire to become a world superpower. Three questions are studied: What are the major changes that Xinhua has experienced since China adopted the reform policy in 1978? What factors have contributed to the transformation Xinhua has undergone? and What are the implications of Xinhua's transformation? The primary material/data were obtained from field research at the headquarters of the Xinhua News Agency in Beijing, China." (Abstract)
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