Sinosphere

Although the Portuguese established a presence in Macau in the 16th century, Chinese migrants did not begin arriving in continental Portugal until the late 19th century. That early flow was unconnected to Macau, and instead followed the 1876 Chefoo Convention, which opened Wenzhou and other Chinese ports to foreign trade. Many migrants from the Wenzhou area came to Europe as shipyard workers and later worked as traders across Western Europe, some settling in Portuguese coastal cities. Few stayed permanently, and migration slowed after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

Two later waves reshaped the community. After Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution ended its colonial empire, descendants of Chinese contract laborers recruited to Mozambique in the 19th century relocated to Portugal, along with some Chinese residents of Macau. But most of Mozambique’s Chinese community went to Brazil instead, according to historians Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen, after Portugal refused Portuguese nationality to the majority of those arriving from Mozambique. Then, after China launched its reform and opening policy in 1978, migrants from Zhejiang and other provinces arrived in growing numbers, drawn by business opportunities.

Portugal’s Chinese migrant population rose from 244 in 1980 to a peak of 27,879 in 2023, according to data from Portugal’s Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA) cited by researchers at ISCTE–University Institute of Lisbon. However, these numbers do not include Portuguese citizens of Chinese descent, including some who [resettled] from Mozambique after its independence in 1975, and others from Macau. The community’s makeup has also shifted. Early arrivals were largely migrants from Zhejiang working in catering and the import-export trade. After 2012, Portugal’s “Golden Visa” program, introduced to encourage foreign investment in the wake of its economic and debt crisis, drew wealthier investors, lifestyle migrants and professionals. Chinese nationals were the program’s largest group of beneficiaries, and according to the researchers, roughly 90 percent of their investment went into real estate, a route Portugal closed in October 2023 as part of a law aimed at easing a domestic housing crisis. 

Climate and Challenges

Portugal is regarded as one of the world’s freest countries for media, ranking 10th out of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index compiled by the independent media advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF), down from eighth the previous year. Its constitutional and legal system provides strong protections for journalists, but threats from the far right and financial strain have weighed on its standing.

Articles 37–39 of the Portuguese Republic’s 1976 Constitution — written after the Carnation Revolution, which overthrew the Estado Novo dictatorship and led to the country’s democratization, and last revised in 2005 — guarantee freedom of expression and information, the exercise of which “may not be hindered or limited by any type or form of censorship.” They also require the state to ensure the existence of public radio and television services, whose structure must “safeguard their independence from the Government, the Administration and the other public authorities.” Article 39 calls for an independent administrative body to guarantee press freedom, prevent media concentration and protect the independence of the media from political and economic power. That body, the Regulatory Authority for the Media, or ERC, was established by Law 53/2005. Other laws have further defined press freedoms. The Press Law (Law 2/99) establishes the “right to reply” and penalties for infringing press freedom, and Law 78/2015 sets out procedures to ensure transparency of media ownership. Defamation remains a criminal offense in Portugal. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled more than 30 times that Portugal violated citizens’ freedom of expression, according to anti-corruption consultant João Paulo Batalha. Batalha argues that Portugal should decriminalize defamation as it brings its laws in line with a 2024 EU directive against SLAPPs — or “strategic lawsuit against public participation” —  which member states were required to adopt into national law by May 2026.

Threats to press freedom in Portugal have most recently come from the far right, particularly the right-wing populist party Chega. In June 2024, following a dispute over a media story involving an immigrant from Bangladesh, the party’s founder, André Ventura, told journalists they were “enemies of the people.” In November 2024, prosecutors charged two leaders of Chega with aggravated threats against Pedro Coelho, an investigative journalist for the SIC television channel. A Chega donor whom Coelho had identified in his reporting has also filed lawsuits in Portugal and the United States against Coelho and other journalists for reporting critically on the party. 

Many journalists and experts identify the economic vulnerability of the media sector as one of the main threats to press freedom in Portugal. An analysis by the online newspaper ECO found that only three of 13 privately held media companies reported positive results in 2023. In 2024, labor strikes that impacted nearly 50 news organizations preceded the government’s Media Action Plan, a set of 30 new measures backed by a €55 million budget meant to strengthen media resilience, news literacy, and journalist safety. However, the collapse of the government in March 2025 — triggering the third general election in three years — has slowed the rollout of the plan. Another strike by journalists at Lusa News Agency, a state-owned broadcaster, in March 2026, further drew attention to the dire commercial state of media in the country. Striking journalists were opposing the government’s acquisition of private shares in Lusa, which was facing extreme financial difficulties, fearing an erosion of editorial independence. 

Five public and private groups dominate the market, according to RSF: Impresa, Cofina, Media Capital, Global Media and the public broadcaster RTP. Smaller independent, investigative and local media outlets have struggled to stay afloat. According to researchers, more than half of Portugal’s territory, 53.9 percent, is either already a news desert or at risk of becoming one. Nevertheless, Portugal has one of the highest levels of trust in news among the markets surveyed by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, at 54 percent in 2025, though this represents a 12-point decline over the past decade.

Domestic Chinese Media

Chinese-language newspapers began appearing in Portugal only in the late 1990s, but by the mid-2000s the market had become highly competitive, according to a 2012 master’s thesis by Qiao Xu, an employee of one of those newspapers, Jornal Sino (葡華報). Xu recalls that by 2005, seven Chinese-language titles, including at least two published in Spain, were on sale in Lisbon, serving a Chinese community of fewer than 20,000. Before local newspapers were established, some Chinese businesspeople subscribed to Nouvelles d’Europe (歐洲時報), or the European Times, according to a 2009 report by the China News Service (中國新聞社), or CNS. The France-based newspaper is owned by CNS through a Hong Kong holding company. CNS, a PRC state news agency that reports on the global Chinese diaspora, has operated directly under the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) since 2018.

Portugal’s first domestic Chinese-language newspaper was the above-mentioned Jornal Sino (葡華報), first published in March 1999 by Zhan Liang (詹亮), then vice president of the Chinese Portuguese Industrial Merchants Association. In 2001, the paper hired one full-time journalist to write original articles about the Chinese community in Portugal, and added service-oriented columns, including Portuguese-language lessons and practice tests for local driving-license exams. News about Portugal in Jornal Sino came chiefly from Xinhua, the Portuguese news agency Lusa and daily newspapers in Portugal. News about China, including the home province news coveted by recent emigrants, came from Xinhua, Chinese web portals and local branches of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese (中華全國歸國華僑聯合會), a body under the UFWD. 

In 2007, in response to increasing competition, Jornal Sino began cooperating with the European United Weekly (歐洲聯合週報), launched in 2005 by Nouvelles d’Europe and Shanghai’s Wenhui-Xinmin United Press Group (文匯新民聯合報業集團). Under this franchise arrangement, Jornal Sino could run ready-made pages of China news edited and laid out in Shanghai, along with reporting from the weekly’s European correspondents. The paper expanded its circulation and grew from 32 to 64 pages. In 2008, it launched a sister publication in Spain, United Times (聯合時報). In 2013, Zhan consolidated Jornal Sino and United Times under the Global Iberian Media Group (環球伊比利亞傳媒集團). In November 2016, with the support of the Chinese embassy in Portugal, Jornal Sino and United Times signed a cooperation agreement with the People’s Daily Overseas Edition (人民日報海外版), under which the papers would run four pages of its content each week. The People’s Daily Overseas Edition‘s then-editor-in-chief Wang Shucheng (王樹成) said the cooperation would help “jointly tell China’s story and jointly spread China’s voice.”

Jornal Puxin (葡新報) was founded by Ma Limei (馬麗梅), who moved from Guangdong Province to Portugal in 1999 and began writing articles for the Spain-based Chinese-language newspaper Hua Xin Bao (華新報). In 2005, Ma established a Portugal branch of Hua Xin Bao, which she later turned into the independent Jornal Puxin, a source of information for the local Chinese community. The paper now publishes in both Chinese and Portuguese and maintains accounts on WeChat, Weibo, Facebook, Instagram and X. According to a recent profile of Ma in Shanghai’s Xinmin Evening News (新民晚報), the paper’s turning point came in 2012, when she traveled to China and witnessed what she called “great changes” in the country. The profile says Jornal Puxin then added its Portuguese-language section and adopted the mission of “telling China’s story well.” According to the same Xinmin Evening News profile, Ma has been invited to China every year since 2012 as a “representative of overseas Chinese media,” taking part in United Front Work Department activities and visiting Tibetan areas. Through the paper’s Portuguese edition, the profile says, Ma has “helped foreigners understand the true history and situation of Tibet and Xinjiang” by distributing materials and joining exchange events with Portuguese journalists.

Lines of PRC Impact and Engagement

China’s media engagement in Portugal is shaped by Portugal’s historical colonial relationship with Macau, which has become an important platform for connecting not only with Portugal, but also with other Portuguese-speaking countries with which it shares interests, such as Brazil and Angola.

Economic entanglements with China through the Belt and Road Initiative and large Chinese investments in hard-hit Portuguese sectors  after the 2008 financial crisis also play a major role. While successive governments have expressed warmth toward continued Chinese investment, public opinion is more mixed. A 2021 survey found Portuguese views of China among the most negative in Europe, but a November 2024 poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations placed Portugal among the southern European countries most likely to see China as a “necessary partner” or ally.

Soft Ties and Sympathies

Portugal is a key player in China's European geoeconomic strategy, having granted China "a fast-track lane toward Europe with a little shiny gold," as scholar Philippe Le Corre wrote in The Diplomat in 2018, a reference to Portugal's golden visa program. Like in Italy and Greece, Chinese investment in major sectors in the wake of the country's post-2008 financial crisis served as a lifeline for Portugal and a gateway for further cooperation on China's part, amounting to 12 billion euros as  of 2018, according to a Chinese envoy.

These economic entanglements reach into the media sector, and at times overlap with Macao. With the help of its official cooperation mechanism, Forum Macao, established in 2003 to connect China with seven Portuguese-speaking countries, Macao media outlets have often acted as an intermediary for cooperation between Chinese state media and local Portuguese media, using historical ties and shared cultural-linguistic history as a basis for the relationship. Portuguese are the “Europeans who know China best,” according to Portugal’s relationship with China as a former occupier of Macau and its official handover to China in 1999, which was smooth and free of political tension compared to the Hong Kong handover 2 years before.

For example, in 2017, as Chinese state-owned enterprises were investing in a slew of other major Portuguese companies at the tail end of the country’s financial crisis, the Macau-based KNJ Investment acquired a 30 percent share in Global Media Group (GMG), one of Portugal’s largest private media organizations (GMG is also a shareholder in the state news agency Lusa). According to the company, the investment would “help the Macao SAR become known worldwide as a platform between China and Portuguese-speaking countries.” KNJ Investment’s CEO, Kevin Ho, the nephew of former Macau Chief Executive Edmund Ho and a representative to the National People’s Congress, became the media group’s vice chairman, and Macau journalist and founder of the newspaper Plataforma became an executive director. Under GMG, Plataforma launched Plataforma Media, a digital platform in English, Portuguese, and Chinese in 2018, whose goals include encouraging economic cooperation between China and Portuguese-speaking countries using Macau as a platform. The organization has journalists working in Macau and Portuguese-speaking countries and also cooperates with GMG’s Portuguese news outlets, as well as China Daily and Shanghai Daily on content. It has also launched further brands aimed at cultivating business ties in the region. In September 2023, the Macau Daily announced a collaborative “window to Chinese culture” section in the GMG-owned Diario de Noticias newspaper, which would appear weekly on Thursdays for a year.

Portugal’s participation in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has also made it a natural partner for China’s Belt and Road News Network (BRNN), launched in 2017 and chaired by the official Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, to act as a forum for international media cooperation between BRI countries. Media cooperation around the BRI began as early as 2016, when Lusa, Portugal’s state news agency spanning the Portuguese-speaking world, signed a cooperation agreement with People’s Daily at a BRI forum, where then-Lusa President Teresa Marques said that Lusa’s “contribution could be that of reporting about the ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative in the countries where we are present: not only Portugal, but also [countries] in Africa and even in Asia.” In 2019, the Portuguese Press Association and the All-China Journalists Federation signed a Belt and Road news exchange cooperation agreement in Lisbon, and two months later, Lusa became a council member of the BRNN at its first official meeting in 2019.

Hard Approaches

China engages Portuguese media directly through several channels, including through content-sharing partnerships, media fora, and op-eds from Chinese officials published in Portuguese newspapers. These activities are organized most frequently with outlets like the state news agency Lusa and public broadcaster RTP, as well as Diário de Notícias, which has published several op-eds by Xi Jinping and Chinese ambassadors to Portugal. State media outlets like Xinhua, People’s Daily, and China Radio International also operate Portuguese-language online portals and apps.

Occasionally, media engagement is conducted by government agencies themselves. In November 2018, ahead of Xi Jinping’s visit to Portugal, the State Council Information Office (the government nameplate for the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department) helped arrange a meeting between CCTV and the Press Association of Portugal to discuss collaboration opportunities. The SCIO, the China Foreign Languages Publishing Administration, and the Chinese Embassy also arranged a seminar about “Xi Jinping’s thoughts on the governance of China” that was attended by 180 people, according to Xinhua.

Though much Chinese media activity in Portugal has been spearheaded by state outlets like Xinhua and People’s Daily, Nanfang Media Group (南方報業傳媒集團), a Guangzhou-based state media conglomerate under the Guangdong provincial Party committee, launched the “Greater Bay Area Chinese-Portuguese Media Content Platform” in Lisbon in May 2025 with Guangdong’s South International Communication Center (南方國際傳播中心) and the Portugal-China Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The platform aims to collaborate with Portuguese media and think tanks to disseminate “stories of Chinese-style modernization” (中國式現代化故事) and of China-Portugal cooperation to Portuguese-speaking audiences. In attendance were the Chinese ambassador to Portugal, Zhao Bentang, as well as Zhan Liang of the Global Iberian Media Group.