Media Megaphone With a Global Reach
“We should increase China’s soft power, give a good Chinese narrative and better communicate China’s messages to the world.” Thus exhorted President Xi Jinping in 2014, underscoring international discourse as an important type of communicative soft power. China’s “media going out” initiative started after the Beijing Olympics, with six state-run media outlets to the fore: the Xinhua news agency, China Central Television (renamed in 2016 as China Global Television Network), China Radio International, People’s Daily, China Daily, and the Chinese News Service.
Chinese media’s unprecedented recent global expansion is a relatively less known and researched part of China’s rise. These essays by 27 scholars and experts fill the gap by casting a collective analytical light on a range of subjects, from its domestic context and its instrumental utility as the face of Beijing’s soft power and public diplomacy to its role and impact on the global media landscape and key Chinese media players abroad. The aim of Chinese media globalization is twofold: countering negative and biased portrayals of China in the Us-dominated international media and promoting its views and vision to the wider world.
Some authors still expect a rocky road ahead. CCTV Africa is certainly less of an alternative than Al Jazeera, but less argumentative than Russia’s RT. They observe that Chinese globalizing media still need to address issues of cross-cultural differences in terms of discourse rivalry and cultural frames of reference, as well as challenges mounted by state-run media’s dual identity as news commodity and voice of an ideology.