Inside China's audacious global propaganda campaign

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/07/china-plan-for-global-media-dominance-propaganda-xi-jinping

by Lio • 8 years ago

96 53 8 years ago

This is a kinda controversial stance, but I think foreign propaganda has some utility. I don't trust Chinese or Russian state media to report on internal Chinese/Russian affairs honestly, but they can provide a worthwhile counter narrative to the West on certain international issues. RT has also given platforms to dissident voices within the US (for completely cynical reasons of course).

You just have to approach it all critically.

anon_d2• 8 years ago

Yes, exactly.

It's not like the US media hasn't been successfully spreading it's own global propaganda for ages.

An end to the US's media/academic monopoly on truth-setting is a very welcome change. We need real competition here.

stupidcar• 8 years ago

I agree that competition of some kind could be welcome, but welcoming the state sponsored propaganda of autocratic, corrupt and repressive states just because their own hegemonic desires conflict with those of the US strikes me as being the most politically facile stance imaginable.

PavlovsCat3• 8 years ago

When you already have a bunch of fires burning setting more fires makes them compete for oxygen, but that doesn't help living things.

I would say the proper reaction to bullshit is critical thinking. Take someone like James Randi, and imagine instead of disproving deceptions he had just pretended to receive a message from spirits that this or that person was faking something. That's "competition" alright, but it's not helping, and it just helps normalizes something that has greater potential for abuse than use.

xiphias2• 8 years ago

RT is great Russian international competition, but I haven't seen China to do something similar. Do you know a good one?

soohyung• 8 years ago

SCMP

bane• 8 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/user/CCTVNEWSbeijing

xster2• 8 years ago

Outside of small scale independent journalists who are always at the risk of getting de-platformed, non-NATO/petrodollar-aligned foreign news are the only place I can find Americans talking about American stances like leftism (in the economic sense), anti-war, etc.

makomk• 8 years ago

Yeah. The downside of this is that it gives countries like Russia an outlet to slip in pro-Russian propaganda through outlets that people come to trust based on their other reporting. There are basically two responses the US mainstream media could've taken to this - open up local platforms for those non-aligned views so that Russia can no longer leverage them, or use it to claim that non-approved views are just Russian propaganda - and they've gone with the latter.

forapurpose5• 8 years ago

Outside of small scale independent journalists who are always at the risk of getting de-platformed, non-NATO/petrodollar-aligned foreign news are the only place I can find Americans talking about American stances like leftism (in the economic sense), anti-war, etc.

The good news is that there are many opportunities in the U.S. and West: The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Nation, Mother Jones, Common Dreams, Tom Paine, Democracy Now, and many more. The Guardian generally supports those positions too; Le Monde does, last I knew, as well as Der Spiegel. You could read that kind of thing all day and never run out of content.

onetimemanytime• 8 years ago

True, if you know it's a state sponsored TV you can look at it with objectivity glasses. But not all think about putting two and two together--and honestly some can't...hook, line, and sinker.

walrus662• 8 years ago

... I wouldn't really call RT a foreign propaganda site. Frankly, and perhaps I'm myself biased, they provide less propagandic of an assessment of Western events than nearly every one of our mainstream media outlets that I can think of.

Regarding what the article is referring to, things like the Washington Post allowing China to buy ads or China funding lobbyists who speak to congressman who likely have no idea, I can't see anybody justifying that, unless they hate the US, which okay, that's your prerogative.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that the average person is at least two orders of magnitude less endowed with information than the people you might speak with on HN, whether or not any of our opinions are correct, so even a tiny bit of propaganda reaching enough people can change minds against the interest of the country.

I think this should've been illegal 50 years ago, and I think the people abetting this should be tried for treason, almost by the very definition.

jnurmine2• 8 years ago

It is not good to confuse what RT and Ruptly etc. are meant to be.

Their purpose is to pretend to be serious news outlets to amplify various social media phenomena by selectively reporting about them and repeating this over and over again, with the purpose of legitimizing the phenomenae.

The message that comes out is aligned to the goals of the Russian Federation. The messages that are repeated are chosen for political purposes. The point is to not speak to Russians but to the "disgruntled people" of the West. The main idea seems to be to amplify divisions, whatever those may be.

For instance, just look at what is coming now out related to the "Yellow Vests" in France.

These sites are not a channel for presenting facts or a "counterbalance to Western media". They are simpleton propaganda outlets, news theater that is one part of the media influence mechanism that the Russian leadership wields.

The narrative in the prominent articles is always quite predictable: NATO equals bad, USA equals culture imperialism, Europe equals falling apart, Ukrainians equals fascists, Russia the underdog does nothing wrong, and so on.

Once RT starts running articles detailing the corruption in Russia and why there is an opposition movement in the first place (hint: not due to foreign involvement) it might start gaining plausibility as an outlet for high quality fact-based journalism.

jryle702• 8 years ago

Can you give example of dissident voices in the US? why do they need RT when they already have Intercept, Medium, BuzzFeed; Fox News or CNBC; Drudge Report or Mother Jones; Breitbart or Daily Kos, etc?

echevil• 8 years ago

Anything that may not be considered politically correct?

forkLding• 8 years ago

Julian Assange? Edward Snowden? Manning? Don't think local news really want to touch those subjects or at least not elaborate.

In comparison, RT, etc. Is almost rubbing it in people's faces even now that it feels overdone.

iamnothere3• 8 years ago

Can you give example of dissident voices in the US?

Really? How about: Occupy Wall Street, BLM, Anonymous, sovereign citizen/militia groups, pipeline protesters, anti factory farm agitators, union activists, socialists, alt-righters, Antifa, straight up Nazis, Nation of Islam, the list goes on.

I don't agree with the positions of the vast majority of these groups, but I do think that it's important that we understand what they try to do and why they are trying to do it. Existing media outlets (even so-called "alt media") provide grossly distorted views of events associated with these groups, if they report on them at all.

badcede• 8 years ago

The best propaganda is whatever truth the other side is avoiding.

iscro• 8 years ago

That's an excellent point. Strange enough, you described the original ethos of google news. Google news was created in the mid 2000s to give a broad and counterbalancing view of news. It was intended to show not only what "we" were saying about an event, but also what "they" were saying about it. This naturally didn't sit well with our news industry and it didn't well with their news industry and they pressured google to curate and localize the news. For a brief period of time, when idealists ran google, google news offered a broad view of the world. Sadly, now everything is localized, even search.

gaoshan• 8 years ago

One thing to keep in mind, as biased as it can be the media in the West is based on a journalistic tradition that lets it operate free from government interference. The media in authoritarian countries like China and Russia has no such tradition and has, from inception, existed to advance the government's positions. This does not mean the West is free from bias but no one really is.

So while Western journalistic outlets may be far from perfect, you have the opportunity with them to get less politically biased information. The best of them are actually quite good at providing factual, less biased information. The same is not true of China and Russia. One tradition offers more truthful and factual reporting than the other (which in reality offers nothing less than full on governmental propaganda... especially in the case of the Chinese media. They provide a counter narrative in the same way that the Saudis have provided a counter narrative to the Khashoggi murder).

yorwba• 8 years ago

Yes, if you had to choose between Western and other sources of journalism, you'd probably have a higher chance of getting reliable facts from Western sources. But there's no need to make that choice.

You can read a diverse selection of sources and compare their reporting to not only get a more accurate approximation of the truth, but also to notice what various sides focus on. The latter means that even if one side only publishes complete lies, the things they choose to lie about still tell you something.

Viliam1234• 8 years ago

Also, nothing prevents China and Russia from having their own newspapers in the West... and they are going to have them... so it's not like reading Chinese or Russian propaganda gives anyone info they couldn't access otherwise.

forapurpose5• 8 years ago

foreign propaganda has some utility. I don't trust Chinese or Russian state media to report on internal Chinese/Russian affairs honestly, but they can provide a worthwhile counter narrative to the West on certain international issues

A bit bizarre, to attempt to legitimize lies and manipulation, but I guess I'm not surprised to see that kind of comment these days.

Authoritarian governments' interest in manipulating foreign audiences is as strong as their interest in manipulating domestic audiences. The article describes massive Chinese investment in it, and Russia's investment in it is well known; as we know, both operate even on the micro-level, such as on social media and in Internet forums. In the comment below I linked to a study that describes it as a massive and effective campaign "political warfare":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18638027

Lies are not a counter-narrative; they don't improve your understanding; they are just lies.

pergadad• 8 years ago

But RT openly lies and misleads. So it's not a narrative you can actually consider useful. Chinese propaganda is a bit more honest but omits a lot and is focused on diverting/misleading on key policy issues, see Uighur camps

raincom• 8 years ago

Western propaganda is so subtle that it is sold through various channels: area studies in Universities; fellowships, stipends, travel grants, visiting professorships, etc. Produce so-called research papers, then quote each other and peddle further. Remember those professors at OxBridge working as spies.

jryle702• 8 years ago

Western? You already forgot about discussion of Chinese student groups at US universities?

If anything, Chinese propaganda is both subtle and obvious. Nothing wrong with that really. PR is part of the game for anybody. Just don't pretend they do it at lesser level or not as well than the West.

faragon• 8 years ago

A clone of RT (Russia Today)

AsyncAwait2• 8 years ago

Worth noting that the very same Guardian is running a propaganda campaign against Assange, despite them benefiting handsomely from WikiLeaks.

Just recently they published a story[1] that has yet to be verified by anyone else and seems completely made up at this point.

At the same time, they did not have problems with running ads for when MBS was visiting London.

1 - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-hel...

forapurpose5• 8 years ago

First I want to say, great graphic on the article, with the RSS sails.

Related: A study by a leading U.S. defense think tank on intense, active warfare, on the part of China and Russia, in the political realm:

https://csbaonline.org/research/publications/countering-comp...

The Chinese and Russian governments are currently waging political warfare against the United States and its allies. Although efforts to manipulate public opinion and political debate often receive less attention than armed interventions or military modernization programs, Beijing and Moscow are embarked upon campaigns to suppress dissent, discourage foreign narratives they oppose, generate support for policies they favor, keep their rivals distracted, and mitigate pushback against overt acts of aggression. To date, these efforts appear to be having success.

Inside China's audacious global propaganda campaign

Related Stories