How WE pay to train China propagandists

JOURNALISM professor Hugo de Burgh, a strong advocate of closer ties between Britain and China, set up the China Media Centre at the University of Westminster in London in 2005.

It was officially launched by Sun Yusheng, then vice president of China’s state broadcaster CCTV, and Jeremy Paxman, sometimes described as Britain’s most respected journalist.

It has hosted three-week training courses for Chinese propaganda officials to expand and improve their global coverage. The courses are partly funded by British taxpayers through the Foreign Office.

Director de Burgh is an honorary fellow of the 48 Group Club, a board member of the Great BritainChina Centre, and a professor at Tsinghua University.

This last position is under the Chinese Ministry of Education’s 985 Program, which aims to bring international talent to China.

According to the CCP, the University of Westminster programme has been very successful. The head of development for the Central Office of External Propaganda wrote: ‘Chinese officials’ understanding of the functions of the media in Western countries, and their ability to respond to and interact with the media, has been enhanced by the briefings designed and executed by the China Media Centre.’

As part of the 2018 training course, the China Media Centre organised a roundtable on ‘China’s international relations and economic strategies: Perceptions of the UK and

China’, with five senior officials from the Central Propaganda Department.

The centre has brought many Party officials to Britain to mingle with the media and political elite, including five seminars at 11 Downing Street.

Boris Johnson, whose first trip to China was joined by Hugo de Burgh, has participated in the centre’s courses and has declared he can think of no one better than de Burgh to teach us about China’s media.

Those arguing in favour of these courses maintain they will help bring about a more open media in China. In fact, the opposite is the case: they help the CCP fine-tune its propaganda.

The courses teach techniques used by Western journalists to extract answers, and how government officials can handle adversarial questions in press conferences.

WITH Chinese spokespeople regularly under fire for the Party’s concentration camps in Xinjiang, and other human rights violations, teaching them how to ‘handle’ questions seems to be more in the CCP’s interest than the British public’s.

While there are serious Chinese journalists who want to do proper reporting, the space for them has shrunk dramatically over the past six years, and they are not the ones sent on training courses abroad.

The participants instead come from the Party and those TV shows and newspapers notable for their compliance.