China Daily Partners with Egypt’s Al-Ahram
A partnership deal with Egypt’s most widely circulated daily newspaper, announced earlier this month, enables the government-run China Daily to distribute its English-language print edition to audiences in eight Egyptian cities, including the capital, Cairo. The arrangement, which appears to make use of the existing circulation network of Al-Ahram (金字塔報), one of the region’s most influential Arabic news sources, will place the China Daily in a wide range of locations — including embassies and consulates, government offices, universities, research institutions, hotels, and bookstores.
A video shared by the China Daily announcing the partnership showed copies of the China Daily running off presses at an unspecified Al-Ahram print facility before being placed on newsstands and in bookstores. The edition was identified under the masthead as “Global Weekly,” which elsewhere in the world is a 32-page China Daily tabloid released every Friday. The headline for the online and video report on the partnership declared: “China Daily Printed in Egypt for First Time.”
China Daily is operated by the Information Office of China’s State Council, which is essentially the foreign office of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department (中共中央宣傳部). The newspaper has struck similar arrangements with media outlets around the world, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Hindustan Times, Kenya’s Star newspaper, and many others. Last year, the paper, which China’s government regards as one of its chief propaganda voices overseas, partnered with France’s Le Figaro to publish the inaugural French edition of its “China Watch” supplement, which in Chinese is revealingly referred to as the “China International Image Special Issue” (中國國家形象專刊) — a testament to its role not as a news source but as government communication.
The deal with Al-Ahram, a state-owned Egyptian media outlet that, founded in 1875, is one of the oldest newspapers in the Arab world, is the latest move in China’s broader push to expand its media presence in North Africa and the Arab world.