Xinhua, China’s official news agency, will launch an English-language television news programme this week on screens in supermarkets and outside Chinese embassies in Europe, in a cautious first step towards spreading Beijing’s view of the world to western audiences.
The move, planned for Wednesday, comes six months after the Chinese government launched a plan to improve its global image through English-language television news channels to be built by trusted state-owned media.
It highlights how daunting a challenge it is for media organisations that function mainly as propaganda outlets to compete with experienced commercial western groups in wooing a global audience.
“Our goal is to get China's voice and perpective of things out there and to offer a different choice to a news audience all over the world,” said a department head at Xinhua with detailed knowledge of the TV preparations. “We have been hiring aggressively and building our TV capabilities for months. But still, it will take a long time until we can actually challenge CNN or BBC.”
Xinhua this month started offering Chinese-language TV news on Kaixin001, a social networking site. But editorial staff at the agency said broadcasting overseas would require a lot more preparation.
“We decided to test viewers’ reactions first by putting up some screens at Chinese embassies in Europe so people can watch it while they wait for their visas,” said one person. “Also, we will have Xinhua English-language TV in supermarkets in Brussels and other cities.” Academics with an advisory role in the plan have said the government would hand out Rmb30bn-Rmb45bn ($4.4bn-$6.6bn, €3.1bn-€4.7bn, £2.7bn-£4bn) to media groups.
The government has denied the numbers and refused to comment further, but many state media have focused on the project for months. China Daily, the country’s first nationwide English-language newspaper, started overseas circulation this year. In April, Global Times, an affiliate of People’s Daily, the Communist party’s mouthpiece, launched an English-language edition.
Senior Xinhua journalists, advertising industry sources and media executives said the agency had been picked as the main media organisation for the TV portion of the propaganda push, and state funds for the project had started pouring in.
One of the main challenges for the state media in conquering foreign audiences has been the conflict between their propaganda background and the speed and transparency required in a free and commercially driven media market.
The English-language Global Times has experimented with balancing the two. But even stories and pictures that would have been considered too sensitive in China’s domestic market were seen by many western readers as sophisticated propaganda.
