Reporters Without Borders: Beijing is pushing domestic information control logic beyond global media space

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released the Chinese edition of the "Propaganda Information Monitoring" report on September 21According to the report, since Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, Beijing has not only continued to compress domestic independent news space, but also pushed overseas through national media expansion, content cooperation, journalist training, overseas advertising investment, overseas media influence and pressure on overseas journalists and exiled media, a set of information governance models based on political obedience.

The report lists ten main tools, including signing content-sharing agreements with foreign public media or local media, pressuring critical media directly through foreign consulates, funding journalist visits and training programs, expanding the multilingual dissemination of national media such as CGTN, and using local partners and opinion leaders to recreate human rights, politics and diplomatic narratives about China.

A notable link is the institutionalized training of Chinese officials for foreign journalists and media people. Media personnel from several French-speaking African countries have participated in Beijing in training programs organized by the Chinese side, the course includes Chinese media practice, communication platform and social responsibility. The Chinese embassy abroad has also long been directed to local journalists through blowing sessions, symposiums and policy explanation activities, explaining the policies and governance ideas of the Communist Party. These activities are themselves open diplomatic tools, but when training, funding, equipment, content cooperation and reporting on political issues are linked, media independence becomes the core dispute.

RSF also incorporated overseas pressure into the framework of “transnational repression.” The report said that the Chinese government’s harassment, threats and domestic pressure on overseas Uighurs, Hong Kong and other exiled media practitioners has caused some journalists to form self-censorship. The group also noted that China is currently one of the countries with the highest number of journalists imprisoned globally, and sees domestic repression of news as two aspects of the same set of political control logic.

From the organizational structure, the propaganda system of the CPC Central Committee and China Central Television Headquarters, Xinhua News Agency and other state media constitute the skeleton of the foreign communication system.RSF said that the international network of institutions such as CGTN and Xinhua News Agency has covered a large number of countries and regions; at the same time, Beijing is increasingly inclined to use local media, commercial marketing networks, social platform accounts and foreign content creators to allow political narratives to enter the information stream of the target audience in the form of "local voice" or live content.

The impact of this trend on democratic societies is not a single report or a single media collaboration, but a long-term reconstruction of the information infrastructure. When state capital, diplomatic resources, platform dissemination and news content are concentrated to shape political narratives, news competition in the traditional sense can easily evolve into resource highly asymmetric political dissemination competition.

RSF recommends that democracies strengthen news agency transparency and support exile media and independent journalistsThe report also calls on governments to pay attention to China’s transnational pressure on foreign journalists and critics.

The report provides a window to observe Xi Jinping's expansion of China's information power: domestic censorship, state media, diplomatic systems, business cooperation and digital platforms are not isolated from each other, but can be combined into cross-border information influence networks.Overseas dissemination itself is not unique to China, but when the dissemination system is combined with the lack of press freedom and the political structure that continues to suppress disagreement information, the focus of external attention is no longer just "national image propaganda", but whether this model of power will erode the existing news independence and public discussion space in other societies.