Much ado has been made lately about China News Corporation’s official launch of foreign language news outlets this month. People are wondering, can a state-owned media company with a reputation for censoring the most mundane things really report the news in a way that the world will want to hear?

Photo: Mr Bao 包先生

Owned by the Xinhua News Agency, the China News Corporation (CNC) originally began broadcasting in January of 2010, although according to Xinhuanet.com, the news agency had already been offering “multi-media service” in Chinese from December 2008 and limited English multi-media service from July 2009. Xinhua is the Chinese government’s official press service and also does exclusive news gathering and reports for officials.

At first, the CNC’s twenty-four hour news reports were only showing in Asia and a handful of European countries, but this summer it has expanded its offerings to include programs in English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, French, Portuguese and Japanese.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the main difference between this channel and every other Chinese news channel is that this will be “part of a broader international push by the country’s government media aimed at countering the dominance of Western news outlets and conveying a Chinese perspective on events.” Xinhua’s president Li Congjun adds that the “CNC will offer an alternative source of information for a global audience and aims to promote peace and development by interpreting the world in a global perspective.”

Employees of the twenty-four hour news network – all 7,500 journalists, 105 foreign bureaus, and eight translation services – will still be limited by China’s censorship and propaganda rules. At the same time, however, The New York Times reports that the network is “trying to acquire international media assets, to open more overseas news bureaus and to publish and broadcast more broadly in English and other languages.” So does this mean the CNC wants to become, well, more Western? Not according to Tian Congmin, the former president of Xinhua News Agency. He told RXPG News a few years ago that “for the sake of reaching out to subscribers ahead of competitors, Western wire services 'sacrifice truth' and indulge in 'sensationalism'. In contrast, Xinhua reporters who write falsehood 'will be punished, maybe dismissed, and repeated untruths can even result in jailing...On this we are different from them.'”

So China believes that the Western media doesn’t accurately represent the facts and is attempting to remedy that through their own news organization? You won’t be surprised to learn that this idea had been met with a healthy amount of skepticism from the Western world. This is an obvious attempt on China’s part to increase its soft power in the vein of the US – i.e., spreading their culture, their music, their “likeability” through the media. This will prove difficult, seeing as something similar was already attempted, without much success, back in 2004. The Global Times reports that, in that year, “seventeen of China's overseas channels, including CCTV 9, CCTV 3 and provincial TV stations such as Anhui TV, Xianmen TV, and Beijing TV, were integrated into one service, the Great Wall platform, which is transmitted via Echostar satellite to overseas audiences.” This Great Wall Platform ultimately failed to attract overseas viewers other than overseas Chinese, largely because the channels simply competed against each other, showing similar programs and fighting for ratings. Also, when was the last time you sat and watched a Chinese program in your home country?

The creation of CNC eliminates this competition problem, but the Chinese still have a long way to go before they have enough soft power to impact the Western world’s purchasing and viewing power. It simply can’t work when the government filters the internet and controls the media’s every move – no one outside of China will ever take it seriously. The government needs to acknowledge their use of censorship, and be very careful in how and what they report. They cannot completely ignore topics they don’t like, nor can they be so obvious in enforcing edits. If they manage to strike a balance between truthful reporting and finding “appropriate” topics, it’s quite possible for the CNC to become a leader in non-Western media, a position that could potentially translate into a great soft power increase. At this point, only time will tell how accurately a censored news network can report the news.

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