>> Ben Smith, The New York Times
Published: 10 May 2021 11:43 AM BdST
Updated: 10 May 2021 11:44 AM BdST
A giant screen shows news footage of Chinese President Xi Jinping attending a video summit on climate change with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, at a shopping street in Beijing, China April 16, 2021. REUTERS
In the fall of 2019, just before global borders closed, an international journalists’ association decided to canvass its members about a subject that kept coming up in informal conversations: What is China doing?
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What it found was astonishing in its scope. Journalists from countries as tiny as Guinea-Bissau had been invited to sign agreements with their Chinese counterparts. The Chinese government was distributing versions of its propaganda newspaper China Daily in English — and also Serbian. A Filipino journalist estimated that more than half of the stories on a Philippines newswire came from the Chinese state agency Xinhua. A Kenyan media group raised money from Chinese investors, then fired a columnist who wrote about China’s suppression of its Uyghur minority. Journalists in Peru faced intense social media criticism from combative Chinese government officials.