Jinan Opens Propaganda Hub in Frankfurt

On December 2, 2024, the Jinan International Communication Center (濟南國際傳播中心), a municipal external propaganda platform guided by the propaganda office of the Jinan CCP Committee (濟南市委宣傳部), opened a German branch in Frankfurt together with the German bureau of Nouvelles d’Europe (歐洲時報). Sun Shihui (孫世會), then executive deputy head of the propaganda office, and Hu Xudong (胡旭東), editor-in-chief of the paper’s German bureau, attended the unveiling. Jinan named Hu an honorary overseas promoter of “Spring City culture” (泉城文化海外推薦官), after the city’s nickname, formally enlisting a newspaper editor to market Jinan abroad. The two sides also signed an international communication agreement. According to the Jinan Daily (濟南日報), the official newspaper of the Jinan CCP Committee, the center had placed more than 30 articles promoting the city’s “high-quality development” in Nouvelles d’Europe since 2023, echoing a Xi Jinping slogan that the leadership has treated as the fundamental requirement for economic policy since 2017. The report said the branch would widen Jinan’s international “circle of friends” (朋友圈), invoking a CCP notion of friendship that ties foreign goodwill to alignment with China’s positions, and that the center would “tell China’s story well” (講好中國故事). The Jinan Daily called Nouvelles d’Europe Europe’s “most influential” Chinese-language daily. The Paris-based paper is in fact owned by a company controlled by the CCP’s United Front Work Department. The Jinan center is one of many local international communication centers that Beijing has promoted since 2018 to raise China’s “discourse power.”