ACJA Hosts 2023 Belt and Road Journalists Forum

On October 12, 2023, the official All-China Journalists Association (中華全國新聞工作者協會), or ACJA, a Chinese Communist Party-led professional association that serves a key role in implementing press control policies, gathered nearly 100 heads of journalist organizations and media representatives from more than 40 countries and regions in Beijing to mark the 10th anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative. Sun Yeli (孫業禮), then a deputy head of the Central Propaganda Department (中央宣傳部), addressed the forum. ACJA president He Ping (何平) urged attendees to jointly tell good stories of Belt and Road cooperation and to sing the “main melody” of peace, development and win-win cooperation. The forum ran under the Belt and Road Journalists Network (“一帶一路”記者組織合作平台), a platform launched in 2019 that describes itself as jointly initiated by journalist organizations in Belt and Road countries, but whose executive vice chairman and secretary-general are ACJA officials. Its joint declaration, Join Hands to Embark on a New Journey of the Next Decade (攜手啟航新十年——“一帶一路”記者組織聯合宣言), called on members to promote friendly press exchanges as a means of advancing political mutual trust and economic ties between states — what it called “friendly exchange” (友好交流). It pledged joint reporting tours to cover Belt and Road achievements “objectively and truthfully”, a formulation that equated objectivity with documenting successes and made no provision for reporting on the initiative’s setbacks or controversies. It also proposed an “International Home of Journalists” (國際記者之家) network. Guy Mettan, a Swiss journalist who has led the Geneva Press Club and authored Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria, told the forum the West would try to undermine a multipolar world.