China Funds British YouTubers To Further Its Propaganda War

UK media report­ed in Jan­u­ary that the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment is fund­ing British YouTu­bers to fur­ther its pro­pa­gan­da war. Accord­ing to an arti­cle in The Times:

Jan­u­ary 9, 2021 The videos are one of sev­er­al that push pro-Chi­na gov­ern­ment agen­da and has led to the Bar­retts scor­ing a run­away suc­cess since they launched their chan­nel in 2019. Titles include “West­ern media lies about Chi­na” and “Cam­era sur­veil­lance is great in Chi­na” and sev­er­al are in sup­port of the tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny Huawei. […]

The Times has found that some of their videos were fund­ed by Chi­nese Radio Inter­na­tion­al, a media orga­ni­za­tion that has been exposed as the secret own­er of an inter­na­tion­al net­work of pro­pa­gan­da radio stations.

Read the rest here.

An exten­sive 2015 Reuters inves­tiga­tive report on “the long arm of Chi­na” has described the state-run Chi­na Radio Inter­na­tion­al (CRI) as follows:

Novem­ber 2, 2015 A Reuters inves­ti­ga­tion span­ning four con­ti­nents has iden­ti­fied at least 33 radio sta­tions in 14 coun­tries that are part of a glob­al radio web struc­tured in a way that obscures its major­i­ty share­hold­er: state-run Chi­na Radio Inter­na­tion­al, or CRI. […] In some ways, the CRI-backed radio sta­tions ful­fill a sim­i­lar advo­ca­cy role to that of the U.S.-run Voice of Amer­i­ca. But there is a fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence: VOA open­ly pub­lish­es the fact that it receives U.S. gov­ern­ment fund­ing. CRI is using front com­pa­nies that cloak its role.

Past Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions (GIOR) cov­er­age of Chi­nese influ­ence oper­a­tions tar­get­ing the West includes:

• In March, we report­ed a GIOR inves­ti­ga­tion uncov­er­ing a Chi­nese influ­ence oper­a­tion flood­ing YouTube with hun­dreds of pro­pa­gan­da videos white­wash­ing China’s human rights vio­la­tions against the Mus­lim Uyghur pop­u­la­tion in Xinjiang.

• In March, we report­ed that YouTube took down almost 3.000 chan­nels deemed part of a Chi­nese influ­ence operation.

• In Jan­u­ary, we report­ed that Swiss media iden­ti­fied over 230 orga­ni­za­tions that are part of China’s overt and covert influ­ence oper­a­tions in Germany.