How Chinese Media Wages A War Against The West: The Case Of Hu Xijin

Euro­pean media has pub­lished a short doc­u­men­tary about Hu Xijin, the edi­tor-in-chief of the Glob­al Times, the Chi­nese government’s main Eng­lish-lan­guage news­pa­per. The ARTE doc­u­men­tary describes Hu Xijin as follows:

Hu Xijin is a cen­tral fig­ure in Chi­na’s media world. He’s been edi­tor-in-chief of the Glob­al Times for 13 years. He’s the CCP-approved author­i­ty on cur­rent affairs. The dai­ly news­pa­per focus­es on polit­i­cal issues and has a cir­cu­la­tion of 2.4 million.

Describ­ing Xijin as “the voice of Chi­na”, the doc­u­men­tary shows how Chi­nese media is wag­ing a war against the West. Accord­ing to the documentary:

Here is Hu Xijin’s spe­cial­ty: To treat any top­ic in the glob­al news from the same angle. Always the same one: use facts to show that the Chi­nese sys­tem out­does all oth­ers. French democ­ra­cy does not work. There’s inse­cu­ri­ty, a slug­gish econ­o­my, and the fire­men are not effi­cient enough to save nation­al mon­u­ments. Mean­ing: this would not hap­pen in China.

Watch the full doc­u­men­tary here.

A 2019 New York Times arti­cle on Hu Xin­jin, one of China’s longest-serv­ing news­pa­per edi­tors, described him as the leader of 24-hour pro­pa­gan­da machines that some call China’s Fox News:

July 21, 2019 Mr. Hu was one of the first to defend China’s vast deten­tion of Mus­lims against inter­na­tion­al crit­i­cism. His news­pa­per has described Sec­re­tary of State Mike Pom­peo as crazy. Thir­ty years ago, he marched with stu­dents on Tianan­men Square demand­ing democ­ra­cy in Chi­na, but now he is a lead­ing crit­ic of pro­test­ers in Hong Kong who have been resist­ing Chi­nese rule.

Read the rest here.

Recent Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report cov­er­age of Chi­nese media manip­u­la­tion and dis­in­for­ma­tion has included:

• In August, we rec­om­mend­ed a study exam­in­ing China’s dis­in­for­ma­tion efforts on social media that argued Chi­na will incor­po­rate social media fur­ther into its mil­i­tary operations.

• In July, we report­ed that China’s Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping said the coun­try must improve its glob­al pro­pa­gan­da efforts to help for­eign­ers under­stand the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Party.

• In May, we report­ed that China’s for­eign influ­ence oper­a­tion bud­get in the US is main­ly cen­tered on tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ing and oth­er media activities.