News Journal: China’s propaganda push is cause for global concern

Last month, the National People’s Congress, which is what passes for a legislative body in China, made headlines around the world when it voted to remove presidential term limits from China’s constitution.
Within days, Xi Jinping made his first significant move as President for Life. The state-run news agency Xinhua announced that the Communist Party’s Department of Propaganda would now assume direct control of film, the news media and publications, taking that responsibility away from what had been a government agency.
That may not immediately strike you as a big deal, but believe me, it is — and it is an ominous one.
During the 13 years from 1995 to 2008 that I served on the United States Broadcasting Board of Governors (the BBG oversees the Voice of America and other international media operations), I learned the hard way about the media environment in China. I had the unenviable assignment, each year from 1999 to 2004, to spend a couple of days in Beijing trying to persuade the powers that be to allow the United States the same media rights in China that we allow China in our country.
You never met more polite people. And I met them in just about every organization involved in China’s domestic and international media operations. But the bottom line never moved an inch. There was no way China was ever going to reciprocate with the United States on anything that had to do with communicating with its citizens.
I did learn a few things from the experience, mainly how effective nearly complete control of media could be.
You may remember a major news event in 1999, when U.S. missiles mistakenly hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. President Clinton immediately went on television, explained what had happened, and apologized.
If you lived in China, that never happened. During my first trip there, everyone I talked to was incensed by the “fact” that President Clinton had never apologized. What had been seen on television screens around the world had been completely blocked on theirs.
A lot of American business executives, eager to have access to the enormous Chinese market, persuaded themselves back then that the Chinese people had access to western media. After all, they could tune in CNN in their Shanghai or Beijing hotel rooms and it was just like home.
What they didn’t grasp was that CNN in China was much more difficult to get if you were not at a very few western-oriented hotels. If you wanted to watch it anywhere else in China, you probably had to break a few laws.
Even in those hotel rooms, strange things happened. I was getting dressed one morning when my CNN screen went blank for a full ten minutes. I later learned I had missed a segment in which a Chinese dissident in the United States was criticizing the Chinese government.
As bad as censorship was until the recent change, there were times when some news from the west was allowed to be disseminated. That’s going to change.
The Communist Party is strengthening its control of every form of public media within China. And it will be exporting its rigid ideology worldwide through an enormous new broadcaster—the Voice of China, a new entity that will employ more than 14,000 people.
This is what the party’s central committee said in a recently published directive: “In order to strengthen the party’s centralized and unified leadership in public opinion work by the media, strengthen the management of publishing activities and develop a prosperous, socialist publishing industry with Chinese characteristics, the responsibilities of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) will be reassigned to the Central Propaganda Department. After this adjustment, the main responsibility of the Central Propaganda Department will be to implement the party’s propaganda guidelines.”
The consolidation of news operations under the Central Propaganda Department means that China plans to have even greater control over everything reported domestically and internationally. It will no longer be news as we know it. It will all be propaganda.
This will have impact far beyond just China. Totalitarian regimes learn from each other, especially how to control the media to maintain their power. The two major countries exporting propaganda and their news control methods are China and Russia.
Increasingly, we see those methods being used in small and large non-democratic countries in South America, Africa, and Asia.
The Chinese chose the name of their new international media operation very carefully. The Voice of China is going to challenge the Voice of America in every corner of the world. The stakes have been raised in what will unquestionably become a high-stakes international battle between government-controlled propaganda and the free press of the world’s remaining democracies.
It doesn’t help that today our own free press is under attack from forces within our country. We can’t afford to lose either battle — here at home or in the rest of an increasingly interconnected world

Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. Senator from Delaware who served on the Broadcasting Board of Governors.