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Erasure and Resistance in Southern Mongolia

Written by Dalia Parete on . Posted in Interviews.

When the Party declared in 2020 that Mongolian-language education would be pulled out of the curriculum throughout schools in China’s Inner Mongolia region, the reaction from the public was immediate. Parents protested by keeping their children at home. Students gathered outside schools in tears, according to an account from one human rights monitoring site, and chanted: “Our mother tongue is Mongolian — until death, we are Mongolian.” 

The movement of civil disobedience spread rapidly, drawing in artists, civil servants and even Mongolian-ethnic police officers who refused to carry out orders. Thousands of arrests followed, as well as the closure of many local media. Today, China continues its campaign of assimilation, moving against digital communities maintained by Mongolian speakers. 

Soyonbo Borjgin⁩⁩ was one of the journalists working forInner Mongolia Life Weekly (內蒙古生活週報) when the crackdown occurred. A reporter who had spent years doing sports coverage, and writing feature stories about Mongolian life under Chinese rule, Borjigin quickly became enmeshed in the social movement. After publishing an interview about the need for mother-tongue education, the newspaper was accused of “narrow nationalism.”  With the Weekly shuttered and his career in Chinese journalism over, Borjigin left for the United States, landing at Voice of America’s Mongolian service. 

In early 2026, he launched PropagandaScope, a data platform that tracks Chinese state media in real time — monitoring which political figures appear, which phrases are amplified. One particular area of interest for him is how various regions are targeted with specific variances in ideological messaging. Borjigin spoke with Lingua Sinica about the gradual decline of the Mongolian cultural space within China, the abrupt violence in 2020, and how AI tools can help us better understand China’s media messaging.

Throughout this interview, Borjigin uses the term “Southern Mongolia” (南蒙古) to refer to his place of birth. This is a term preferred by Mongolian activists, diaspora communities, and many ethnic Mongolians who reject the framing embedded in “Inner Mongolia” (内蒙古).

Dalia Parete: Earlier this year, you launched the online platform PropagandaScope, and we’ll get to that. But before we do, let’s go back. You worked as a journalist for Inner Mongolia Life Weekly. What did the Mongolian-language media landscape look like back then? How many outlets existed, and what kind of journalism was possible?

Soyonbo Borjgin⁩:  The Mongolian-language media system in Southern Mongolia is similar to the Chinese-language media ecosystem, but also affiliated to mainstream society. When you become an ethnic minority, you are very marginalized, so a lot of what we do depends on what Chinese-language media do. But to a certain degree, we do have our own small space to write interesting stories.

The Inner Mongolia Life Weekly (内蒙古生活周报) was born in 2000, during the urbanization phase of Chinese news media. We also had the Inner Mongolia Daily (内蒙古日报), that was filled with feature writing, of similar style to the Guangzhou-based newspaper Southern Weekly (南方週末), famous for its investigations and social commentaries. We didn’t work quite on that level, but we tried to do something similar in the ethnic minority language space. 

We did feature writing. We did sports. We had a “Modern Love” column written by our readers, which was my idea, stolen from the New York Times. And we did a little bit of economics reporting, because the local propaganda office wanted us to report on local economic development. We didn’t really cover a lot when it came to politics. Only during the Two Sessions, or maybe when Xi Jinping attended a military parade. Then we’d have a big picture of him. Otherwise, our editor-in-chief actually told us: You guys, this newspaper is not designed for political reporting — so you should actually write less about politics. We were all very happy about that. When reporting about politics, you don’t have the independence to write whatever you want because you have to translate it from the official Chinese sources. And, because we were a Mongolian newspaper, we had a very small chance to actually interview political figures.

In Southern Mongolia, the media is organized by level — provincial and county. The higher your media outlet is in the hierarchy, the more respect you get. When I showed my press ID from a provincial-level outlet, the propaganda office treated me well. County-level journalists were treated worse. Journalists from Xinhua, China’s top state news agency, were treated the best. Basically, the Communist Party’s ranking system runs through the entire media world.

DP: As early as 2006, two Mongolian-language websites were shut down. This was fourteen years before the 2020 crackdown. From your point of view, did the erosion feel gradual, or did 2020 come as a rupture?

SB: I see it happening both ways. At the infrastructure level, it happened gradually. In 2020, it happened all of a sudden.  

Before 2020, local law required all public signs to be bilingual, Chinese and Mongolian, in equal size. But when I was growing up, a lot of translations (into Mongolian) were wrong. Many Mongolians talked about this. They sent letters to the local government saying this sign is translated incorrectly, that sign is translated wrong. And the government actually took some measures to require the person responsible to adjust it to the correct form. But this was really gradual. It happened very slowly. 

A restaurant in Southern Mongolia, with both Mongolian and Chinese language signage. Source: Vagabond Journey.

From kindergarten through college, I learned Mongolian, but my class was really small. I grew up in Hohhot, the capital, and we only had 29 kids. I didn’t even have a same-desk classmate (同桌). And we had only two Mongolian schools in the whole city, for three or four million Mongolians in the region. If we spoke Chinese, parents became concerned, and teachers were upset.  

Even as a reporter much later, my press ID read “Inner Mongolia Life Weekly — Mongolian edition”  (内蒙古生活周报, 蒙古文版) and once they saw that word, the local propaganda office would ignore me. The Chinese edition just says “Inner Mongolia Daily” (內蒙古日報), no Chinese label needed. So we had trouble being taken seriously. I was in my 20s, from the Mongolian edition of our newspaper, and nobody cared. 

Marginalization has always been there. Even outside of work, if you spoke Mongolian on the bus, Chinese people would refer to it as a “bird language” (鳥語), meaning it sounded to them like gibberish. It just felt that you couldn’t belong to mainstream society. But of course you still had to be very involved in it. You watched CCTV. You were on Weibo and WeChat. You were living in society, even as society pushed you away.

If we spoke Chinese, parents became concerned, and teachers were upset.  

DP: And how did that change in 2020?

In 2020, it shifted suddenly. They shut down our newspaper and officials started to ask questions like how many Chinese friends you had, or what your opinion was on such and such a policy. 

But the policy change wasn’t the worst part. People changed too. And relationships changed overnight. A re-education teacher — who had worked at the Daily for over 30 years, an old colleague of our editor-in-chief, someone who used to say “Hi” in the hallway — told me the Mongolian language was so backward that it lacked vocabulary for scientific terms. Modern science only existed in Chinese, they said. All of a sudden, these people were looking down on you.

I think my parents’ generation felt this shift more deeply because they’d lived through the Cultural Revolution. In Southern Mongolia, more than 16,000 people were officially killed, tortured, and killed in many different ways. Every family has a traumatic story.  In 2020, a professor from Inner Mongolia University whispered to me: “This is the Cultural Revolution.” People like me, we didn’t know what that really meant. But older people were terrified. They would put their phones in the microwave and then come in and talk. Eleven people committed suicide during the 2020 protests. Thousands were arrested. And people like me, we were marked for “re-education.”  

DP: In 2020, as part of the CCP’s crackdown on the Mongolian language, Inner Mongolia Life Weekly was shut down. Can you walk us through how that unfolded?

SB: In April 2020, we heard that the National Ethnic Affairs Commission (中華人民共和國國家民族事務委員會) had submitted a document to the Two Sessions committee, saying that the level of governance in some autonomous regions had already transgressed the constitutional level, meaning they were too independent. We knew that after Xinjiang and Tibet, it was going to be us. At first, I couldn’t believe it. The bilingual education policy, which guarantees the Mongolian language and identity, had been protected since 1984 under the Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law (民族區域自治法). 

I’m the generation that grew up during globalization. My stereotype of society was becoming increasingly open. And all of a sudden, they were going to cancel Mongolian education. So we decided to have a meeting at Inner Mongolia Life Weekly, where we agreed we would report on the incoming education policy.  Our deputy editor-in-chief said at the time something like: If we cannot speak the language, who are we going to be? We need to do this for our kids. We all have kids. We have to fight for the Mongolian language. We are human.  Why don’t we do something? And then we all agreed we had to do something about it. 

DP: And how did that go?

SB: There’s a rule in the media — that as long as the propaganda office didn’t say you could not report something, you can. They never banned us from reporting on the education policy because they were never going to admit there was a language reform coming.

So we interviewed a professor from Inner Mongolia University. We couldn’t say the policy was taking effect in September. Instead, we asked: Is it better to be educated in your native language or a foreign language? Of course, he said, there are a lot of benefits to learning in your mother tongue.

The video was 30 minutes long. Within two days, it had 100,000 clicks. Generally, the average is around just 1,000 or 2,000 for Mongolian-language media. On the third day, the propaganda office called us directly — something unprecedented — and ordered us to delete it immediately. My colleague Munkhbayar also took my name off the video so I could eventually leave the country.

Protesters carrying signs written in Mongolian gathered outside Mongolia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, on August 31, 2020. Source: Reuters.

A re-education teacher told me the Mongolian language was so backward that it lacked vocabulary for scientific terms.

On August 26th, the Mongolian social media app Baiju was shut down. People moved to WeChat group chats, sending voice messages and pictures, and started gathering. Then kids began to protest. High schoolers left their campuses. Parents kept primary school children home. Authorities pressured state workers to keep their kids in school. So people took the extreme step of filing fake divorces to avoid guardianship of their kids, and make sure they weren’t held legally responsible for keeping kids in class. The government responded by suspending all divorces from September to December. 

I remember that youth tied signs to their bikes reading “Save the Mongolian Language” and rode through the streets. Shamans performed curses against the state. People raised the black banner in Mongolian tradition, in which the white banner means peace and the black banner is a declaration of war. It was a stunning display of civil society in action.

On the third day, the propaganda office called us directly — something unprecedented — and ordered us to delete it immediately.

DP: Can you tell me what happened to you and your colleagues at Inner Mongolia Life Weekly after the 2020 protests?

SB: On October 31st, I got a phone call from the authorities. They told me the newspaper had a serious political problem, what they called “narrow nationalism” (狹隘民族主義), meaning prioritizing loyalty to an ethnic group over the Chinese state. I understood this to be their way of pointing at “separatism” (分裂主義) without actually using that word. In China, ‘separatism’ carries weight and it is a charge with severe consequences, so they never said it directly. 

The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (中央紀律檢查委員會) told us something we were not expecting, that our wrongdoing was regarded as more serious than that of the Inner Mongolia TV station staff — who had actually filmed a petition signing during the protests and uploaded it to YouTube. YouTube, they said, carries no state authority. Our newspaper did. What we published, the state published, they said. We had never thought of our masthead that way. Three people at the TV station were expelled. Our editor-in-chief, deputy editor-in-chief, and a colleague were transferred to night-shift proofreading. 

After that, Mongolian media became really scared. You can sense it today in everything they write. The Inner Mongolia TV station’s Mongolian WeChat account uploads Xi Jinping’s golden sentences every day. Articles are no longer written by Mongolian journalists. There are only translations of work by Chinese journalists. The front page never carries a Mongolian name. The literature page is entirely translations of Chinese poems into Mongolian.

Sometimes I now see my former colleagues’ names in the newspaper, and they are now working as proofreaders only.

For people who are not familiar with PropagandaScope, could you introduce it? And why did you start it?

James Leibold, a professor at La Trobe University who studies Chinese ethnic policy, wanted to find out how many Mongolian schools were being renamed. His idea was to use Baidu Map APIs — Baidu has far more geolocation data in China than Google Maps. I tried to register, but couldn’t. The idea stayed with me, though, of using computational tools to understand Chinese society.

Around that time, I started experimenting with AI-assisted coding. I had some basic programming knowledge, enough to understand how it works, but not enough to write it by hand. But I realized I could actually build things.

I’d always been fascinated by Kremlinology, the practice of reading political signals through official state media. I thought: this is exactly what AI should do. Feed it key terms, run it every day, watch what state media says and doesn’t say. I built a tool. A lot of people liked it and it became PropagandaScope.

What are one or two trends you’re seeing right now in what Chinese state media is saying?

The first thing I searched for in PropagandaScope was “forging a common sense of the Chinese nation” ( 中華民族共同體意識). The idea is that you are not Mongolian, not Uyghur, not Tibetan, you are part of the “Chinese nation” (中華民族). I wanted to see which provincial media were pushing this narrative the hardest. 

For the platform, the People’s Daily, the Party’s flagship newspaper, is the baseline. I found that, for every time it uses “Chinese nation” once, Xinjiang Daily, for example, uses it 18.5 times. For Tibet Daily, its 16 times. For Inner Mongolia Daily, 11 times. But in places like Zhejiang, Guangdong, and Fujian — the more economically developed coastal provinces — the use is just 0.7 times. The targeted audience is obvious. Those coastal provinces are talking about Trump, trade wars, sanctions, and oil prices. We are being told who we are.

The second trend I’ve followed is the return of the term “people’s leader” (人民領袖), a sign that the language around Xi Jinping is getting even stronger. It is an unusually strong honorific, the kind I never heard growing up.

Swipe Right for the Motherland

Written by Dalia Parete on . Posted in News and Trends.

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.

A Record Haul for Hong Kong’s State Media

Written by David Bandurski on . Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on A Record Haul for Hong Kong’s State Media

On March 13, the Newspaper Society of Hong Kong (香港報業公會) — founded in 1954 by the city’s four largest newspapers at the time, including Sing Tao Daily and the English-language South China Morning Post — announced the winners of its 2025 Hong Kong Best Journalism Awards (香港最佳新聞獎). The Hong Kong Ta Kung Wen Wei Media Group (香港大公文匯傳媒集團), run by the PRC government’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong, took home 29 prizes. It was record for the group and the largest haul for any media outlet in this year’s competition. Twelve media outlets reportedly participated, submitting 636 entries across 78 award categories. The result, offering plaudits to a state-run outlet that has been on the front lines in attacks on independent journalists and institutions (including the Hong Kong Journalists Association), would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

A large billboard for the Wen Wei Po newspaper looms over a street in Hong Kong’s Wan Chai District in 2013. SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons.

As recently as 2016, the awards were made across a relatively diverse field. Ming Pao (明報) took Best News Reporting for its Panama Papers coverage, reporting that would be almost unthinkable in Hong Kong today. Sing Tao Daily (星島日報) won Best Scoop and Best News Photography. The South China Morning Post (南華早報) swept both English-language writing categories. And the Hong Kong Economic Journal (信報財經新聞) won Best Business News Writing. Sure, media like the government-run China Daily and Ta Kung Pao did win a smattering of awards. But never were state media so dominant as seen this month.

This year, participation has narrowed sharply, with entries concentrated among pro-establishment media — those aligned with the Chinese government. Meanwhile, Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai serves a 20-year prison sentence handed down last month under the territory’s National Security Law, .

That transformation makes the Ta Kung Wen Wei Group’s dominance worth scrutinizing. Established in January 2016 through the merger of Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po, the group is the key voice of the Chinese government in Hong Kong. The group’s chairman and editor-in-chief, Li Dahong (李大宏), is simultaneously a delegate to the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the CCP-led political advisory body. The group’s own materials state that its newspapers are delivered directly to the central organs of the party, government and military every day — and that the group has ranked first in total awards at the Hong Kong Best Journalism Awards every year since 2019, a streak that hardly seems a coincidence given the political changes in Hong Kong since widespread protests that year.

Far from acting as a professional press organization, the group has been at the forefront of attacks on Hong Kong’s independent journalism community. The charge to smear and discredit the Hong Kong Journalists Association, a longstanding institution representing real news professionals, has been led by the Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po, which have consistently attacked the association and its leadership. Writing in Wen Wei Po back in April, a pro-Beijing lawmaker called the HKJA “a suspected anti-China organization that disrupts Hong Kong,” while Ta Kung Pao published an opinion article titled “dissolution is the only solution for the HKJA.”

The 2025 Hong Kong Best Journalism Awards send a clear message about what type of journalism the Hong Kong government and Liaison Office of China’s central government intend to reward.

Xi Jinping: A Year in the Headlines

Written by Alex Colville on . Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on Xi Jinping: A Year in the Headlines

Last year, an apparent drop in the frequency of appearances by President Xi Jinping in the state media — alongside cancelled participation in international gatherings such as the BRICS summit — invited speculation that China’s strongman was losing his grip on power. Closely observing the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship People’s Daily newspaper, we argued last July that these shifts were overstated. It was just too early to tell.

The headline results for 2025 are now in. So what observations can we now make about the standing of China’s top leader?

Before we jump into the analysis, it’s important to note again for those less familiar with CCP-run media that the People’s Daily is a constrained and consensus-based Party flagship paper with a high level of consistency in terms of pages and text density over its history — with highly formalized and repetitive language (more on that below). This is a key reason why the paper, a political signalling platform rather than a space for news or discussion, lends itself to frequency analysis.

The Center Holds

First off, we saw no change in the decisiveness of Xi-centric discourse, nor did we see any rising challenges from other members of the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) — an important indicator of shifts at the top. In the full year 2025, Xi Jinping appeared in close to 600 headlines in the People’s Daily, more than three times the number of headlines logged by China’s premier, Li Qiang (李强), the country’s second ranking party official.

At no point during the past year did this performance gap narrow in the flagship paper. Xi’s lead remained commanding, as it has done throughout his tenure. As readers can see from the graph below, the performance of all PSC members remained steady in 2025, with moderate declines for both Li Qiang and Zhao Leji (as well as Li Xi) against 2024 levels.

You may notice that above we referred to Xi-centric discourse rather than Xi-centric “coverage.” This is an important distinction, and critical to understanding how CCP media operate within China’s political and media systems. The articles in the People’s Daily do not just “cover” events on the political calendar in the same way that media elsewhere in the world do.

While coverage in a Western newspaper of a political leader’s attendance of a major diplomatic summit would warrant perhaps one report around key issues and points of relevance — with perhaps separate op-eds that reflect independent viewpoints — in China’s system of power signalling it results in a separate article for each diplomatic exchange that resulted. Consequently, a front page during a busy period for Chinese diplomacy can sometimes feel like a Xi Jinping identity parade.

During a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in August last year, the People’s Daily ran a front-page article for each head of state with whom Xi met.

Why is this ridiculousness necessary?

The Politics of Repetition

In the political system operated by the CCP, repetition is a crucial form of signaling and demonstrating power. This is an absolutely essential part of the People’s Daily’s role. Repetition is a basic way to instill the “main line” (主线) and ensure that the CCP media, as “mouthpieces” (喉舌) of the Party, are the “weathervanes” (风向标) pointing the political direction. This is why six handshakes at a single diplomatic summit become six distinct reports on the paper’s front page.

Understanding the political role of repetition also helps us contextualize another important observation from our 2025 numbers — the fact that headline mentions of Xi Jinping, while decisively in the lead, are also notably down.

When we look at headline appearances for members of the PSC (above), as well as front-page image counts (below), we can see that Xi had seen a notable decrease in appearances on both counts.

What does this mean?

In our analysis back in July last year, we noted that headline counts and images closely follow calendar events, and that over time the total counts can balance out. In other words, Xi’s counts may seem down in July, but then surge in August or October with a busy calendar or a concerted campaign of messaging around events such as Party plenums. Now, with all the data for 2025 accounted for, we can see that this downward trend was no error.

Headline mentions of Xi Jinping, while decisively in the lead, are also notably down.

It is true that Xi made fewer headline appearances this past year in the People’s Daily than in the two years previous. How dramatic was the shift? Xi’s appearances saw an overall drop of 21 percent in 2025. It was a similar story in image counts, where there was a 19 percent drop from the preceding two years. That is not negligible. And yet, as we said at the outset, name checks in front-page headlines for other PSC members remained uniform across all of these years — and far below the soaring heights enjoyed by Xi.

Does this quantitative drop signal a power drain?

While there is always room for error in the perilous business of CCP gazing, the broader context of People’s Daily signaling cautions against over-interpreting this decrease in frequency. First of all, we see continued wall-to-wall “coverage” — again, this is repetition and signalling — of Xi in People’s Daily, combined with a lack of any real challenger. This indicates that he is decisively in control of the narrative, and certainly that he remains the “core” (核心).

Secondly, there are other ways, beyond imperiled leadership, to understand these numbers. One possibility is a general drop in the number of global trips Xi made in 2025. As reporters and analysts have noted, Xi has delegated appearances at major international summits to his premier, Li Qiang. Skipping some of these summits naturally lessened Xi’s 2025 tally — which is to say that it lessened instances not just of “coverage,” but of repetition.

For those tempted to read too much into those absences, it’s important to note that Li’s attendance of these summits in particular did not drive a corresponding increase in article and image numbers for the premier. This is not because those events were not covered, but because they were not repeated like incessant drum beats to promote the leadership core.

The repetition that to most of us appears senseless, and even ridiculous, is a privilege enjoyed only by the man at the apex.

As we enter 2026 and Xi Jinping edges another year closer to the next Party Congress (2027), China’s repetition complex is something to carefully observe. Will the downward trend in his numbers continue? Only time will tell if there is real strength in Xi’s numbers.

Dynastic Differences

Written by LS Staff on . Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on Dynastic Differences

China’s state-backed film The Battle of Penghu (澎湖海戰), set for 2026 release, depicts the Qing dynasty’s 1683 defeat of Ming loyalists in Taiwan under the slogan “Unifying Taiwan is unstoppable.” But the reception of the promotional trailer, released on October 25, reminded authorities that history is never so simple. Some Chinese online criticized the film for celebrating the Qing’s conquest while sympathizing with Ming loyalists, according to Taiwan’s Central News Agency. One commenter sarcastically suggested Beijing might also make a film about Wu Sangui (吳三桂), the Ming general who infamously opened the gates for Qing forces. Authorities have since blocked negative comments on social media.

Molding the Message

Written by Dalia Parete on . Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on Molding the Message

In many countries, training the next generation of journalists means fostering the skills needed to go after the story and report in the public interest — serving the needs of the audience. In China, where media work is defined by the ruling Communist Party as essential to maintaining regime stability, journalism education takes a fundamentally different path. The profession exists not to hold power accountable, but to serve what Xi Jinping calls “the Party’s news and public opinion work” (党的新闻舆论工作).

That reality was on full display on October 11, 2025, when journalists, university representatives, and officials from the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department, the Ministry of Education, and the All-China Journalists Association (ACJA) convened in Beijing for the 2025 edition of the “China Journalism and Communication Forum” (中国新闻传播大讲堂). The ACJA, though ostensibly a “non-governmental organization,” in fact serves as an important layer of media control, regularly taking charge of training and licensing journalists to ensure compliance with the Party’s objectives.

Held every year running since 2020 — even through the years of Covid-19 lockdown, a sign of its critical nature — the journalism and communication forum serves as a key mechanism for synchronizing state media practices with academic training, ensuring that Party control over journalism flows seamlessly from classroom to newsroom. It functions as an annual training exercise, reinforcing the reporting frameworks that journalists and educators must follow to serve Party objectives. While the mandate to serve the Party has always been at the heart of media under the CCP, Xi Jinping has strongly reiterated the principle, telling media in February 2016 that they must be “surnamed Party” (必须姓党).

Marxist View of Journalism Definition
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Marxist View of Journalism
马克思主义新闻观
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The “Marxist View of Journalism” is a shifting set of ideas that prescribe and justify the Chinese Communist Party’s dominance of the news media and application of controls on information. The concept defines journalism in China as fundamentally distinct from Western journalism, particularly rejecting the notion of the press as a fourth estate. At its core, it means that the CCP must and will control the media profession in order to maintain control over public opinion and maintain its hold on power. The concept is central to the training and licensing of journalists in China.

Since launching in 2020, the forum’s themes have consistently focused on news gathering standards and international communication — a crucial topic as China seeks to enhance its global media influence — and, since last year, the integration of artificial intelligence into journalism practice. Over the past six years, the forum has invited 199 news workers to deliver lectures, according to a read-out this week from the National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA), the official government press and publication regulator that is in fact the same body as the Party’s Propaganda Department. Successive forums have produced 192 long-form video courses and 500 short video courses that have, according to the NPPA, reached more than 200,000 journalism students and faculty at over 700 universities nationwide.

Held over the weekend at the Communication University of China (CUC), this year’s forum brought together 32 lead instructors from 22 news organizations, and was attended by representatives from 11 universities. But beyond skills-based capacity building, the focus is on fostering what the leadership calls the “Marxist View of Journalism” (马克思主义新闻观), which justifies CCP control of media to maintain social and political stability.

The theme of this year’s forum was not truth-telling, or how media can remain sustainable amid competition from digital platforms and social media, or any of the topics generally found at journalism-related events worldwide. It was “New Thought Leads the New Journey: Journalists’ Adherence to Principle and Innovation” (新思想引领新征程：记者的守正与创新). “Thought” in this context was a reference to “Xi Jinping Thought,” the ruling ideology of the country’s top leader. “Adherence to principle,” meanwhile, was about remaining true to Party orthodoxy. And “innovation”? This was simply the idea that media must adapt their methods and their models — even as they are, as ever, ideologically tethered to the Party.

Promotion Unlocked

Written by LS Staff on . Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on Promotion Unlocked

Sun Shangwu (孫尚武), deputy editor of the state-run China Daily (中國日報) newspaper, will become deputy director of China’s central government Liaison Office (中聯辦) in Hong Kong, according to a report by Hong Kong’s Sing Tao Daily. The 56-year-old Sun, the paper reported, has “extensive foreign propaganda experience” (外宣經驗豐富) and will oversee external communication work for the office, which also closely controls such outlets as the Ta Kung Pao (大公報). This “extensive” experience is an apparent reference to Sun’s launch in 2021 of China Daily’s “Media Unlocked” (起底) studio, a combative social media brand that claims to produce “investigative documentaries” (调查纪录片) but more often peddles outright disinformation targeting critics of China in the West. “Media Unlocked” recently launched a personal attack on Simon Fraser University’s Darren Byler, who has criticized internment camps in Xinjiang.

Historical Revisions on Parade

Written by Editors on . Posted in Features and Analysis. No Comments on Historical Revisions on Parade

For the Chinese leadership, the 80th anniversary of the country’s victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan in World War II is a major milestone — an opportunity to signal the power of the ruling Chinese Communist Party to people at home, and the country’s global ambitions to audiences abroad. These goals were on full display during the ritualized pageantry of the military parade yesterday in Beijing, attended by Russian leader Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

Preparations for the celebrations, coinciding with this week’s Tianjin meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an event that has sparked lively discussion and speculation about whether or not we are witnessing a fundamental shift in the world order, were months in the making. In recent days, the logistical preparations have brought the center of the capital to a literal standstill.

But in the days ahead of this week’s parade of high-tech weaponry, ideological moves of equal or greater importance have prepared the way for the CCP’s new historical consensus. This view rewrites the history of global war and peace to firm up the narrative of China’s centrality. It was the CCP, the story goes, that decisively won the war for Asia and for the world.

Backbone Narratives

On Sunday, the China Youth Daily, an official newspaper under the Chinese Communist Youth League (CCYL), ran an article by Shi Quanwei (史全伟), a research fellow at the Party History and Literature Research Institute of the CCP Central Committee, that argued that the CCP had been the “backbone” (中流砥柱) of the entire nation’s resistance during the War of Resistance Against Japan. Shi argued that it was the united front leadership, guerrilla warfare tactics, and exemplary governance of the CCP that made it crucial to China’s wartime resistance.

“The experience of three revolutions, especially the War of Resistance, has given us and the Chinese people this confidence,” he wrote. “Without the efforts of the Communist Party, without Communists serving as the backbone of the Chinese people, China’s independence and liberation would have been impossible.”

Just as the celebrations yesterday invited talk of the conspicuous sidelining of the United States as a global leader — and by extension what state media like to call the “US-led West”(美西方) — reconstructed narratives made much of the historically inflated importance of the US in the global conflict 80 years ago. 

Quoting from several global talking heads, the government-run China Daily pressed the point that the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the quintessential inflection point in American narratives of fascist resistance, had been given too central a role in the broader global story — as had the role of the United States in the Pacific theater. Instead, it was the CCP that had led the decisive grassroots resistance years before the belated American entry. As the descendant of one Soviet pilot was quoted as saying, glossing over the role of Republican forces in China at the time: “China’s resistance war was already underway before the Pearl Harbor incident. Chinese forces long tied down Japanese military strength and manpower, preventing them from extending their influence to the Pacific and the entire Far East region at that time.”

According to this wave of writing and commentary on WWII history, promoted through new platforms and accounts through August as well as traditional state-run outlets, the emphasis on the US role had for decades overshadowed, or inexcusably sidelined, the role of China in the global conflict.

On August 16, an article appeared on WeChat that claimed American academia had deliberately downplayed China’s role — which was to say, eliding all nuance and fact, the role of the CCP. In recent years, the author wrote, the geopolitical rivalry between China and the US had led American historians to overlook China’s role in the Pacific theater, “fully exposing the United States’ political manipulation of history to gain political advantage.” 

A man identified as a descendant of a World War II-era Soviet fighter pilot praises China’s central role in the Pacific theater, accusing the US broadly of historical revisionism.

That argument, of course, has many flaws — not least the absurd assumption that US historians (like Chinese ones?) are an organized and geopolitically-motivated force, lacking professional integrity and unable even to distinguish between the present-day People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC) that was China’s recognized government during World War II.

But the nature of the messenger in this and many other instances of historical redrafting in recent weeks is perhaps more telling than the the substance. The author of this piece, “How Has American WWII Historical Research ‘Drifted’?,” was a scholar from the American Academy (美国研究所), a unit within the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations (中国现代国际关系研究院) — a front organization operated by the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and charged with engaging with foreign scholars.

And what of the outlet that published this piece — a drop in the wave of efforts to re-center China at the expense of the truth? It is a website launched in 2021 called “China’s Diplomacy in the New Era” (习近平外交思想和新时代中国外交), an outlet under the China International Communications Group (中国外文出版发行事业局), or CICG. The office, which masquerades as a press group, operates scores of online outlets including such government sites as China.com.cn, and has been tasked by Xi Jinping as a key vehicle for the CCP’s international communication. CICG’s parent is the Central Propaganda Department of the CCP Central Committee.

The social media account of “China’s Diplomacy in the New Era” — whose Chinese moniker bears the name of Xi Jinping himself — has been pushing a variety of articles on World War II in recent weeks, mostly re-interpreting the conflict through the lens of current geopolitics, colored with familiar state narratives, including contemporary Chinese claims to sovereignty in the South China Sea.

As the soldiers, tanks, missiles and drones goose-stepped and rolled along Chang’an Avenue on Wednesday, and Vladimir Putin had his smiling moment with Xi Jinping, some might have felt a sense of America sliding out of contemporary relevance. But behind the physical demonstrations of military might and the cementing of partnerships, there was an insistent narrative effort on all fronts to re-position China — and by extension, the CCP — at the center of the global historical narrative. For the leadership’s vision of a “new type of international relations,” nudging American leadership out of contemporary geopolitics is only half the battle; ensuring that it slips out of the history books may be equally important.

Propaganda Pushback

Written by LS Staff on . Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on Propaganda Pushback

The Armed Forces of the Philippines dismissed as “propaganda” a China Daily video showing General Romeo Brawner Jr. allegedly avoiding reporters at Singapore’s Shangri-La Dialogue, held May 30-June 1. The video was posted online yesterday by “Media Unlocked” (起底), a social media brand of China Daily that takes a shallow and confrontational approach while purporting to explore topics more deeply. In the video, the “Media Unlocked” reporters appear to have not clearly identified themselves as reporters. They then allege that Brawner “dodged the question” about what they characterize as “the Philippines’ recent provocations in the South China Sea.”

A screenshot of the China Daily “Media Unlocked” video in which Brawner and others are cornered for questions about territorial disputes.

Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. noted that China had not sent an official delegation to the security forum, where he addressed Beijing’s assertions in the West Philippine Sea (西菲律賓海) — referring to the portion of the South China Sea claimed by the Philippines.

The incident in Singapore reflects how maritime disputes between the Philippines and China over the South China Sea have intensified in recent months and spilled over into the information space, becoming a contest of narratives. But it also offers an illuminating look at how Chinese state media go on the attack — seeking to create and distribute propaganda and disinformation on issues of core interest through prescribed proxy media brands and viral content. The “Media Unlocked” video was produced by Meng Zhe (孟哲) and Xupan Yiru (徐潘依如), who are identified elsewhere as reporters for “the Unlocked Media Studio of China Daily” — though not in the video itself. The “Unlocked” brand is part of a growing social media “studio” system implemented by central CCP-run media in recent years, partly to distance core state media brands from more provocative statements and conduct, and partly to disguise their state affiliation on social media platforms. Notably, the military delegation from the Philippines was approached at the same time by a reporter from Yutuantantian (玉渊谭天), a social media brand under the CCP-run China Media Group. In April 2023, a top CMG executive said the account had been “planned in advance and prepared over the long term to deliver powerful punches at critical moments.”