qocsuing: How Beijing Is Controlling Chinese Media in Canada and Around the World

qocsuing

How Beijing Is Controlling Chinese Media in Canada and Around the World

While becoming more autocratic at home during Xi Jinping’s rule, Beijing has become much more willing, over the past decade, to throw its weight around inside other states. It is increasingly trying, for the first time since Mao’s days, to intervene in the domestic politics, media, information environments, and societies of other countries. Beijing’s campaigns today reflect a departure from the more limited and defensive Chinese foreign policy of the late Cold War and early post–Cold War eras. China in many ways has supplanted Russia as the authoritarian foreign power most dedicated to meddling inside other countries.To get more china news service, you can visit citynewsservice.cn official website.

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Beijing has multiple goals for this new global influence offensive, which began in the Asia-Pacific region but now has spread to rich liberal democracies in North America, Europe and other parts of the world. It wants to use its influence efforts to get publics and opinion leaders, in other states, to have warmer views of China’s global leadership, which would smooth the way to China exerting more power internationally. This is power it could then use to undermine democracies and to shape the world in its image: to promote Beijing’s idea of authoritarian capitalism and a kind of closed, heavily censored internet and media environment. (Xi has explicitly encouraged Chinese policy-makers to hold up China as a model for other states, telling delegates to the 2017 Nineteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, “The China model for a better social governance system offers a new option for other countries and nations.” Beijing further wants to blunt the power of the United States and other liberal democracies, like Canada, to shape international affairs or even their own domestic politics, civil society, universities and media. As part of impacting other countries’ domestic politics, Beijing wants to control the information that both Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers in other countries receive about the Communist Party’s actions at home and abroad. Further, unlike previous Chinese governments, Xi’s regime clearly wants to foster divisions among leading democracies and to tarnish the image of democracy.

One of the biggest tools Beijing wields is its growing control of Chinese-language media around the world. In the United States, home to large numbers of Chinese speakers, pro-Beijing owners have taken over nearly every Chinese language outlet, leaving viewers and readers with almost no independent coverage of China, save a few smaller outlets like New Tang Dynasty Television. A similar situation now exists in Canada (as it does in Australia, New Zealand and most other leading democracies, where pro-Beijing owners have taken over most Chinese language outlets). The few tiny remaining independent Chinese language media in Canada, which has become one of the world’s top destinations per capita for Chinese-speaking immigrants, have come under intense pressure from Beijing, face the loss of advertisers, and confront other threats as well.

The biggest Chinese language outlet in Canada, the Sing Tao Daily, part of the Sing Tao empire (and co-owned by the Torstar Corporation), has shifted from more independent coverage of China to consistent pro-Beijing coverage, as has the main Sing Tao in Hong Kong. Journalists for Sing Tao in Canada who dare critique China are ostracized or eventually wind up being pushed out or retiring, like former Sing Tao Vancouver edition editor Victor Ho. As he and other independent-minded Canadian journalists working in Chinese have told parliamentary committees, Sing Tao is not unique — most of the other Chinese language television, online and print outlets in Canada now hew to a pro-Beijing line.

Yet despite CSIS monitoring foreign interference in Canada, the federal government still lacks the kind of tougher legislative tools available to some other democracies to examine Chinese control of parts of the Canadian media and to scrutinize and stop other Chinese influence efforts in Canada. Legislation that allowed Canada to treat media and information as a sensitive sector in which any new foreign investment should be scrutinized might change this situation.

Relying on its diplomats and the United Front Work Department, a kind of intelligence organization increasingly involved in a broad range of meddling abroad, China has beefed up its general influence on Canadian campuses as well. Beijing has become powerful among many Chinese student groups in Canada, a trend similar to that seen in Australia, the United States, Europe and Southeast Asia. As a report by the Hoover Institution, a U.S. think-tank, noted, in Canada there is now “a strong pro-PRC culture of ‘political correctness’ (on university campuses) that conforms to United Front goals.” Another report, released in 2021 by Alliance Canada Hong Kong, further confirmed that Beijing had set up a wide range of influence operations, guided by the United Front Work Department, on Canadian campuses to stifle dissent about China’s policies, harass critics of Beijing, including ethnic Uyghurs, and form partnerships with and/or fund Canadian universities, likely to shift narratives about China.