A post by the Hong Kong independent media outlet Boom News (爆炸頭) commemorating the 14th anniversary this past week of the death of Tiananmen activist Li Wangyang (李旺阳) was removed from social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
The posts commemorated Li, a labor organizer and pioneering advocate for independent trade unionism in China who played a leading role in the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy movement. After 22 years in Chinese prisons, Li was released in 2012 in such poor health that he required immediate hospitalization. He was found dead in his hospital room on June 6 of that year. Authorities ruled his death a suicide and cremated his body without his family’s consent.
Meta offered no public explanation for the takedowns and also permanently terminated the outlet’s monetization on both platforms. The removal coincides with growing restrictions on commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, not only in China, where any reference to June 4 is prohibited and removed from the internet, but also in Hong Kong, where authorities have arrested people for posting about the anniversary on social media and a once-massive annual candlelight vigil is no longer allowed.
Boom News is a YouTube-based platform focusing on Hong Kong stories, with close to 50,000 subscribers on the platform.
In recent years, as China’s demographic crisis has moved toward the center of government concerns about the country’s social and economic future, state media have played a critical role in pushing the appeal of marriage and childbirth to millions of young women who are less than enthused by the idea. But now the CCP’s flagship People’s Daily (人民日报) is going a step further — organizing its own singles events to do its part for the nation.
On May 30, 600 single young people from over 40 military units and government agenciesgathered in Beijing for a state-organized mixer themed “Youth in Full Bloom, Military and Civilian Hearts United.” Organizers included the PLA, the Beijing Women’s Federation, and People’s Daily Online (人民网), which provided the infrastructure through its proprietary dating app, “Hello, Good Times” (你好友趣), launched in October 2024. The dating app is a technical response to the Party’s 2021 directive to “build a new type of marriage and childbearing culture.” That policy charged propaganda organs with changing the way young Chinese thought about marriage and family.
In 2025, China recorded a new historic low birth rate, with the population declining for a fourth consecutive year, down by 3.39 million over 2024. Marriages also declined sharply in 2024. In recent years, the leadership has rolled out various initiatives to reverse the trend, from cash bonuses to longer parental leave, but ultimately to little effect. But while China is trending low on new births, its official media are clearly not running low on fresh ideas.
Fu Cha (富察), editor-in-chief of Taiwanese publishing house Gusa Press (八旗文化), was released from a Shanghai prison in May after serving three years for “inciting national secession,” a charge Chinese authorities use against speech, writing, or advocacy seen to contest China’s territorial claims. Fu remains unable to return to Taiwan, however, according to a June 8 report in the Liberty Times (自由時報), because his February 2025 verdict included a one-year supplementary sentence stripping him of political rights, which begins running only after his prison term ends.
Fu Cha, who holds Taiwanese citizenship and is of Manchu descent, was detained in China in March 2023 after traveling there to cancel his household registration. His detention was connected to his work at Gusa Press, which has long published titles challenging the CCP’s official narratives on Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. The CCP internally flagged over a hundred of the press’s titles as problematic, but used only five as the basis for sentencing, according to a May 11 analysis by Storm Media (風傳媒). His three-year prison term was calculated from the date of his 2023 detention, not his February 2025 sentencing, which is why he was released as early as May this year.
China’s top judicial authorities publicly named Fu Cha in their March 2026 annual reports as an example of punishment for what they called “stubborn Taiwan independence elements” (嚴懲台獨頑固分子), according to Storm Media — a move the publication describes as a cautionary signal to Taiwan’s publishing industry. Under Chinese law, the supplementary sentence allows security authorities to impose exit bans, mandatory check-ins, and communication restrictions for its duration, meaning Fu Cha cannot leave China until at least May 2027.
Since she rose to prominence as the face of China’s #MeToo movement in 2018 after publicly accusing a celebrity television anchor of sexual harassment, Xianzi (弦子) has suffered continued victimization by the state and its vast system of information controls for her efforts to speak out. In the latest effort to silence her, the social media platform Weibo banned her account on May 26, citing unspecified violations of its community guidelines, according to Radio Taipei International.
Xianzi, whose full name is Zhou Xiaoxuan (周曉璿), first came to public attention in 2018 when she accused Zhu Jun (朱軍), a well-known host at state-run China Central Television, of groping and forcibly kissing her while she was an intern there in 2014. A court rejected her case in 2022, citing insufficient evidence. The latest ban is not her first. Her account has been silenced multiple times since 2018, including for a full year following the 2021 court ruling that first dismissed her claims.
Among the slogans Xianzi has posted to Weibo, where she will likely re-emerge if the past is anything we can go by: “Stand tall and straight, and you need not be afraid” (堂堂正正，就不要害怕).
For decades since Xinhua opened its first African bureau in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1950, China’s state news agency maintained a modest presence on the continent, part of the PRC’s broader international newswire infrastructure. But over the past two decades — and especially since the launch of Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative in 2013 — Beijing’s footprint in the African media space has expanded into something of a different order altogether. Xinhua now operates 37 bureaus across the continent, dwarfing any other news agency, African or foreign. Chinese digital television giant StarTimes has become the second-largest pay-TV operator in Africa. As Western news organizations have lost staff correspondents across Africa, China has moved to fill the media gap — not only through its own outlets and ventures, but through a sophisticated web of partnerships with local media and governments, and training programs for journalists.
Yet for all the outside analysis, one perspective has been consistently missing from this debate: that of African journalists themselves. How do the reporters at the center of this story actually experience China’s media push? And what do they make of it?
This is exactly what Emeka Umejei, a Nigerian-born media scholar who spent over a decade as a journalist himself, set out to understand. In his new book, China in African Media: Between Influence Operations and Decolonization, published by Bloomsbury, he draws on interviews with journalists across 14 African countries to offer what has been lacking: an account of China’s media strategy told from the journalist’s point of view.
Emeka Umejei: If you are from Africa or from the Global South, you would have noticed that anything people from the Global North do with African countries is framed as a continuation of colonial ideology. The PRC has been smart. They know that. So they say: Our engagement in Africa is win-win. We were also colonized. So every one of our engagements is part of decolonization. They play on that delicate balance to win many battles in Africa.
At the Third Plenum of the 20th CCP Central Committee in July 2024, the CCP proposed to establish a more effective international communication system. And when they say that, the PRC is talking about decolonization. Then, in September 2025, the Xinhua Institute published a policy paper titled Colonization of the Mind: The Means, Roots and Global Policies of US Cognitive Warfare. So what the PRC is trying to say is that the US system is colonial, but its own system is decolonial — fed from the ground by what local people want, not imposed.
So I decided to investigate the PRC’s multimodal engagements in African media, whether it advances decolonization or Chinese propaganda. Does it actually advance decolonization in African journalism, or Chinese propaganda in African media? The answer is obviously no. China is not doing anything different from the US or the UK.
The problem is that African political actors have yet to realize this. And if China gains the kind of hegemony in Africa that the US had, it’s going to be much, much worse. Nobody is thinking about the next twenty, thirty or fifty years. When China achieves that level of hegemony economically, in the media, in every part of the African continent — how will that affect democracy in Africa? Nobody is talking about this. These are the critical issues nobody is paying attention to. That’s what motivated my research.
DP: For those not familiar with the topic, can you give us a brief overview of how Chinese media have expanded across Africa over the past decade or so, and what types of engagements between Chinese media and their African counterparts can be seen across the continent? I’m guessing there are a lot of regional differences.
Umejei: Over time, while Western media organizations were pulling out of Africa, Chinese media organizations such as Xinhua, China Daily, CGTN Africa and the People’s Daily have expanded in Africa.
There are several engagements between Chinese and African media. I can list them for you. You have the China-Africa media exchanges for African journalists. You have media partnership and content-sharing agreements. You have African media having membership in the Belt and Road News Network (一带一路新闻合作联盟), a Beijing-headquartered media alliance chaired by the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper. And you have what they call opinion writers in Africa, where African journalists, scholars and columnists publish op-eds in mainstream African newspapers, with the aim of spreading Chinese narratives on specific topics. There’s also the digital space — a digital satellite television service was launched across Africa [with China’s involvement].
Emeka Umejei’s latest book.
In terms of approach, they basically have the same objective. There could be regional differences, but the goals and objectives are actually the same. It’s all about, so to speak, influence operations. The recruitment process is very, very different across the regions. The way they recruit journalists to attend media exchanges in Nigeria differs from the way they recruit in Sierra Leone or Egypt. These are different methods of recruitment. But in terms of the objective, which is to influence, it’s the same.
DP: Your book argues that the PRC’s most effective work in African media is done through partnerships with local outlets. How did that strategy come about, and why is it effective?
Umejei: I think what happened was that the Party realized that there’s no trust for Chinese media in Africa. People are just skeptical of Chinese media organizations, saying: Okay, if the Chinese media organizations cannot critically engage with the political leaders in China, how do we trust them to engage critically with us in Africa? So, having realized that, they said: Okay, the best thing we should do is to have a partnership. So instead of just coming to Africa to engage directly, they now have engagement with local media.
There are these media exchanges where they take journalists to China; those journalists come back to Africa and become advocates for the PRC in newsrooms across Africa. Then you have the media partnership and content-sharing agreements, which let them disseminate their own messaging through content they share with African media organizations without it being censored. Most of this content is free of charge. It is not paid for. You also have the Belt and Road News Network, which incorporates African media organizations and journalists, and the Belt and Road Journalist Network, a network comprising African journalists.
In the long run, it gives them a multifaceted influence across African media and Africa generally. Because you have the Chinese media, which is not doing well in Africa even though it’s there, but these other engagements are more profound than Chinese media operations. That’s the essence.
DP: The title of your book frames a tension between “influence operations” and “decolonization.” Many African journalists and scholars argue that Western media have imposed their own editorial values and agendas. Does China’s media expansion genuinely offer an alternative to that dominance, or are African journalists simply being asked to swap one outside power for another?
Umejei: If you ask me, I would say that Chinese media engagement in Africa does not offer an alternative to the West. I’ll give an example. When I was doing fieldwork for my PhD in Kenya, I spoke to [African] journalists who were working for CGTN, Xinhua andChina Daily. They will tell you that it’s the same thing. The Chinese media cover Africa the same way that the West covers Africa, except when Chinese economic and political interests are involved. For instance, if it involves Chinese economic and political interests, they’re going to be very, very positive about it. But if it has nothing to do with China and no Chinese company is involved, they’ll just report it the way the Western media will.
People want to learn, but it just isn’t there, because the real purpose of the training isn’t journalistic. It’s an influence operation.
So they’re not offering any alternative. It’s just that they want to make African journalists think: Oh, the West impose their own agenda. So this is the truth of the matter. It’s not as if [China] offers any genuine alternative. Africans generally are not switching sides. Instead, they will have to contend with both sides. It will be a coexistence. So you have both Chinese ideology and Western ideology coexisting in Africa.
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Emphasizing Positive News
正面报导为主
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“Emphasizing positive news” has been a guiding principle of China’s Central Propaganda Department (中宣部) since at least 1984. At a February 1995 conference of editors in chief of provincial-level newspapers, propaganda minister Ding Guangen said: “By supporting unity and stability, emphasizing positive news and speaking with one voice, we have achieved success in setting examples, leading and encouraging [the people] (People’s Daily, February 27, 1995). Ji Bingxuan, a deputy propaganda minister, said: “The relationship between positive and negative news must be well-managed. We must always support the guiding principle, which is to encourage unity and stability by emphasizing positive news. This principle must be followed with news reports … China is so vast and diverse, its development so unequal.”
DP: China often presents itself as a partner of the Global South as a whole, but, as you said in your book, the Global South is not monolithic. Do you think China’s media strategy is actually adapting to different local contexts, or is it essentially a one-size-fits-all approach?
Umejei: What they have done, and they’ve done well, is the partnership. For instance, with their partnership in Zimbabwe, when you listen to this news, this CCP-sanctioned narrative, it comes from a Zimbabwean media organization. As a Zimbabwean, you are more likely to believe it. So you could say yes, it’s through local organizations, and that makes it easier for them, it makes it easier for the message to be sent.
Take Nigeria as an example: people do not read CGTN or China Daily. Instead, you are going to see national newspaper This Day and daily newspaper Daily Trust pushing Chinese narratives in their articles and the readers do not know it is coming from China. So it makes it very, very effective. The locals don’t see China. They don’t see the PRC. But they see this content being disseminated in local media. That’s the advantage.
Xi Jinping hosts African leaders ahead of the 2024 edition of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. SOURCE: Xinhua News Agency.
Chinese media engagement in Africa does not offer an alternative to the West.
DP: You were also talking about how journalists from different countries have a different view of China. You were saying, for example, that South African journalists might have a different understanding of China than Zambian journalists. So it also depends not only on China but also on the local context, I guess.
Umejei: Right. You see, where a country has an established democracy, that itself pushes back against the whole PRC propaganda effort. Take South Africa. The democracy there is established, and the media is solid. The South African media is different from the media in other parts of Africa. So it’s difficult to influence what happens there. You’d get serious pushback. Unlike in Nigeria, where even if you just give journalists some stipends, they’ll do your dirty work. But you won’t get that in South Africa, because if you try it, other media organizations will come after you, and you don’t want that. So those are some of the contextual realities that mediate the influence. It really only holds where you have a very, very dominant, established democracy like South Africa. Nowhere else in Africa. I’d say it’s only in South Africa you find that. Not Nigeria, not even Ghana.
DP: It’s always important to consider the agency of local journalists, and not assume they simply accept what China and other powers offer. Your research is based on interviews with journalists across 14 African countries. In their own words, how do African journalists describe the experience of Chinese training programs — from how they were selected to what they actually took away from it?
Umejei: I want you to understand something about Africa. I was a journalist for more than a decade. In Nigeria, there were times when I didn’t receive a salary for more than 15 months. So I wasn’t getting my monthly salary. Now, China comes to train you. You have the opportunity to go to China. They’ll pay for your ticket and everything. You come back and you’re able to save maybe two million or three million [in local currency]. With the money you save, you can build a house or buy a car. Everyone is happy. So journalists are happy that they can go to China. It’s mostly about the economic benefits. If I go there then I come back, I can build my house in the village. I can buy a new car, or I can repair my car. If I don’t go, how can I do that? So I should be grateful to them. That comes before anything.
That indebtedness is what the Chinese also play on. Most African journalists become indebted and advocates for the PRC. These are critical issues. Nobody is talking about the economic aspects of it. Because of the economic aspect, they don’t really bother about what happens, whether the training is good or bad. It doesn’t concern them. But among them, there are some people who say: Okay, even though we went there, when we were going, we thought we were going to learn about journalism. But we didn’t learn much about journalism. We went there, it was just hospitality.
DP: In the book, some journalists mentioned the training courses are mostly about how beautiful China is, but that the technical training falls flat, can you expand on that?
Umejei: Yes, there’s very little actual journalism in these programs. People want to learn, but it just isn’t there, because the real purpose of the training isn’t journalistic. It’s an influence operation. The aim is to have a positive outlook on China, so you’ll advance its interests in Africa. That’s the whole point of it. It’s not about you: you’re not part of the equation.
And that’s what makes it so hard for participants to grasp. It’s not about you. You go to China, come back, and you’ve learned nothing about journalism. You feel cheated. They hand you the equipment but never teach you how to use it, which is painful, because you could easily have learned it and put it to use back home. But that was never the purpose. The purpose was simply for you to get to know China, see what they’ve built, and go home and tell people about it. That’s all they want.
A group of African journalists visit Chongqing after the conclusion of the 2024 FOCAC Summit. SOURCE: CGTN.
Most African journalists become indebted and advocates for the PRC.
DP: You also document cases of self-censorship among African journalists who engage with Chinese media partnerships. How widespread is that and is it self-imposed, or are there more explicit pressures, like the role of local embassies?
Umejei: When journalists return from training in China, they’re added to a WhatsApp group. Most of the people who have gone for training in China are part of it, and the Chinese embassy uses that group to disseminate information and talking points.
If you’re in that group, it works like a leash. You won’t write anything negative about China, because you’re always thinking about the next training trip. They keep a pool of journalists. Once you’ve gone, someone else gets added to the pool and sent next. That rotation keeps everyone in line. You don’t want to write something critical and risk being excluded from the group, because exclusion means no more training opportunities and no more money from them. Nobody wants to end up in that bad group.
A few people do come back and say, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” But only a few.
DP: After all those conversations, is there one thing a journalist said to you that you feel really captures the essence of what is happening between China and African media today?
Umejei: One of them told me: We don’t feel our engagement, our training in China, is unethical. Why? Because our countries are also engaging with China. So why should we not engage with them? Why should we not go there for training? People are going there to borrow money, to collect money for infrastructure development. What is wrong if a journalist is going to get training there?
That kind of captures what it is. It means that Chinese engagement with African countries is indirectly influencing the media space too, because journalists are involved in that. The government is also playing with China. So why should you, as a journalist, not play with China? That’s what it is for me.
DP: Could you talk about responses that African countries and journalism communities should have? How can they maintain their independence in the face of outside media pressures?
Umejei: One of the things Africa should do first is that African political actors and policymakers should fund their own journalism. If you continue to wait for external actors to fund journalism training, this will continue. African governments decide to fund training opportunities for journalists themselves, and what we’re saying will continue, unfortunately. So there’s no better response than to say, “Okay, if we have the media, let’s look for a way to develop the journalists themselves.” If you get opportunities, even if it’s for two weeks, make it a mandatory professional training program for journalists, funded by the government, a government agency, or someone locally. It must not stand alone, not dependent on outsiders. Until that is done, we’re just joking, actually.
The way to maintain independence is sustainability — to be self-sustaining. It means you have to fund yourself. If you can’t fund yourself, if you can’t sustain yourself, you won’t be able to be independent, because you’ll be depending on people to sustain you. Once you depend on foreign organizations to sustain you, that’s a problem.
There is also a need to have an African-grown global media, which is not there. I don’t think there’s any global media from Africa. There’s no global media that tells the true African story on the global stage. There is none. That’s where the problem is. That’s actually the first problem. Because if there were an African-grown global media corporation that would tell the true African story on the global stage, it would be very, very difficult for other global media — from the West or from China or from wherever — to tell a different story of the African reality on the global stage.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X was making no secret of its ambitions in China. Its new standalone messaging app, XChat, came equipped with Simplified Chinese language support and was listed simultaneously on the China App Store, suggesting X had its sights set on a vast base of Chinese users. But the app was buried in China before it could even get off the ground. X — or more precisely, “404” — marks the spot.
According to a post by the influencer known as Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher (李老师不是你老师), who goes by @whyyoutouzhele on X, outlets including Xinhua, People’s Daily Online, The Paper, and Jiemian News had each published reports on XChat’s impending launch — only to delete them. Teacher Li’s post drew nearly 970,000 views. Searches for “XChat” on Weibo, WeChat and Douyin returned no results.
A search for “XChat” on Weibo returns a message: “We’re sorry, relevant results cannot be found.”
XChat, an encrypted, ad-free messaging service with no user data tracking, is part of Musk’s broader “everything app” strategy for X and has been compared for this reason to China’s WeChat.
What do you get when you combine three of the Chinese Party-state’s favorite themes — the innovative potential of AI, confidence-boosting messaging about the greatness of national culture, and wholesome children’s programming? The answer has arrived in the form of “The Fantastic Quest for National Treasures” (國寶奇趣探秘集), billed as the country’s first wholly AI-generated animated series focused squarely on child education. Not surprisingly, it was produced by the AIGC Innovation Content Center at Mango TV, the streaming platform of Hunan TV (湖南衛視), which for the past two decades has been synonymous with entertainment innovation (Is anyone old enough to remember “Super Girl”?).
For China’s broadcast authorities, no doubt, this production is packed with all the right messages. The cartoon, which began exclusively streaming on Mango TV on April 3, is a perfect marriage of the cultural, technological and political priorities of the country’s leadership. It commercializes generative AI in children’s programming to instill cultural identity and national pride — fitting the broader push under Xi Jinping to deepen the country’s “cultural confidence” (文化自信).
The 12 episodes of “The Fantastic Quest for National Treasures” focus on the adventures of Huahuo (花火) and Dingdong (叮咚), who time-travel to understand the stories behind some of China’s most famous artifacts. As the protagonists visit five museums across China, they explore such antiquities as a pig-shaped bronze vessel from the Shang Dynasty and a bird-shaped container from the Western Zhou.
The show is not China’s first AI-generated animated production. In February 2024, state broadcaster CCTV aired “Poems of Timeless Acclaim” (千秋詩頌), a 26-episode AI-generated series that animated classical Chinese poetry. That program was only partly aimed at young audiences, though it shared with the Mango TV series the leadership’s favored pairing of deep history and dazzling new technology, bearing the message that China’s future is as vast as its past is glorious.
Late last week, in a move that signaled future regulatory trends for the industry, China’s film and television regulator summoned major production companies and streaming platforms — including iQIYI, Mango TV, and Tencent Video — for a symposium on “wholesome aesthetics” in drama production. Though it is unclear whether the two events are connected, the symposium came just six days after sharp official criticism was directed at the hit costume drama Pursuit of Jade (逐玉), primarily from an account affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
In the April 2 symposium, the National Radio and Television Administration (中國廣播電視總局), or NRTA, criticized what it called “lookism” (顏值至上) — referring to the casting of actors for their looks rather than their talent. It also spoke out against “traffic dependency” (流量依賴), the practice of centering productions on social media celebrities with substantial existing fan bases, which are expected to drive viewership. The readout from the NRTA meeting seems to suggest such an approach was being pursued without care to quality. “What the people demand of television dramas has never been merely that they look good in terms of appearance,” it said, “but that the story holds up to repeated viewing.”
As the NRTA stated that actors must “look the part” (演什麼要像什麼), it was impossible for media not to relate these latest signals to the controversy recently surrounding Pursuit of Jade in China. While the drama has been a genuine streaming phenomenon in China and across the region, even topping charts in Taiwan, its male lead, Zhang Linghe (張凌赫) — who plays a battlefield general — has prompted amusement with his flawless, K-pop complexion even in the midst of battle. This has earned him the affectionate or mocking online nickname “General Foundation” (粉底液將軍). The portrayal seems to have rankled some in the military, and on March 27, “Junzhengping” (鈞正平), a social media account linked to the PLA, complained that such portrayals undermine “the spirit of masculinity.”
Last week, the Hong Kong Museum of History reopened its flagship permanent exhibit after more than five years of renovation. Do the math. The museum closed its doors just months after Hong Kong’s National Security Law was enacted on June 30, 2020 – and it has been closed ever since. The revamped exhibit, called “The Hong Kong Story“ in a nod to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s storytelling formula for what the Chinese Communist Party calls “external propaganda,” displays over 2,800 artifacts spanning six millennia. But it’s the re-framing of the narratives threading the artifacts together that it most worth attention — that is, if you are a media outlet with even an iota of critical spirit.
Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper, published by Malaysia’s Media Chinese International, was the only major outlet in Chinese to touch the story as a matter of journalistic truth-seeking. It ran a point-by-point comparison of the exhibit’s previous and new language. Among the changes noted was a complete erasure of references to the Tiananmen Massacre, which was recast as “political turmoil in the late spring and early summer of 1989.” Gone from the exhibit entirely, the Ming Pao reported, is a previous image that showed one million Hong Kongers taking to the streets in 1989 in support of the demonstrators in China.
Also apparent was the effort to recast the British acquisition of Hong Kong, previously described as “cession” (割讓) — language still widely used even in pro-establishment sources — as “forcible occupation” (強佔). Similarly, the 1967 leftist riots, previously referred to in the exhibit as the “1967 riots” (六七暴動), are now characterized as “Anti-British Resistance” (反英抗暴).
Government-aligned media outlets were notably uncritical. The Ta Kung Pao, published by China’s central government, ran a celebratory feature emphasizing how satisfied visitors are with the reopened exhibit. Sing Tao Dailypreviewed the new exhibit content with no critical evaluation whatsoever. The most brutally direct response came, unsurprisingly, from Hong Kong exile media outlets. UK-based Green Bean, an outlet run by exiled Hong Kong illustrators, posted a cartoon of a figure on a ladder hanging a new sign over the museum entrance that reads: “Falsification” (篡改).
