Activity Category: Media Engagement Activity

China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency, the Yunnan Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, and the Yunnan government jointly hosted the 2025 Global South Media and Think Tank Forum in Kunming, Yunnan Province from September 6-10, gathering 500 journalists, scholars, government officials and entrepreneurs from more than 260 media outlets across 110 countries. Making the broader diplomatic objectives of the forum clear, Hu Heping (胡和平), a deputy director of the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department, told attendees that China’s Global Governance Initiative (GCI) provides “important guidance” for reforming global governance systems—an agenda China has pushed strongly to carve out a more central role for itself and Russia with talk of more “democratic” (i.e., less US-centric) decision-making. Invoking a key foreign policy principle of Xi Jinping and the central leadership, Xinhua president Fu Hua (傅华) suggested the forum and ongoing cooperation would help build “a community with a shared future for humanity.” Key participants included Khamphan Pheuyavong from Laos’ ruling People’s Revolutionary Party and UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming, who addressed the forum via video calling for enhanced global sustainability and cultural exchanges. Fleming, herself an experienced journalist appointed to her post in 2019, was quoted in official Chinese sources as calling for participants to “restore balance to the global information ecosystem,” a notion that perhaps was intended to signal the need for real inclusiveness, but that in context bolstered China’s efforts to sideline ideas about journalistic and media freedom. Under Xi, China has promoted the idea of “journalism with Chinese characteristics” (中国特色新闻学), with the aim of “transcending the journalism discourse hegemony constructed by the West” (超越西方构建起的新闻话语霸权). The talk of global cooperation on information issues came alongside clear framing of the United States as a destructive player engaging in “cognitive warfare” and “ideological colonization” against Global South nations. The forum promoted cooperation among Global South media and was set to release two signature documents: the Yunnan Consensus pledging expanded cooperative news production, and a research report on China’s contribution to global public intellectual products distilling best practices from South-South initiatives.