People’s Daily and EU Reporter Sign Content-Sharing Agreement

On September 20, 2015, the EU Reporter publisher Colin Stevens signed a memorandum of understanding in Beijing with Yang Zhenwu (楊振武), president of the People’s Daily (人民日報), the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship newspaper. The two sides agreed to exchange news, features, and video content and to build working relationships between staff in Brussels and Beijing. The signing took place during a People’s Daily-organized “One Belt One Road” (一帶一路) media conference, at which the EU Reporter was described as the only Western European outlet among approximately 60 invited media organizations. Stevens also met with Liu Yunshan (劉雲山), then the Politburo’s fifth-ranked member and the official overseeing propaganda and ideology, at the Great Hall of the People. Stevens claimed the agreement gave the EU Reporter access to a potential Chinese audience of “one point three five billion people,” apparently overlooking that China’s extensive state controls over its domestic news environment make meaningful foreign editorial access effectively impossible. No text of the MOU has been made public. Stevens, who founded the EU Reporter in 2008, has worked for decades as a journalist in the UK.