Founded in 2015 by Chen Shiming (陳世明), a restaurant owner turned media entrepreneur, France-based Mandarin TV (歐視TV) — rebranded in 2021 from “French Chinese TV” (法國華人衛視) — makes little effort to disguise its ambition to serve the agenda of the Chinese state. The outlet describes its mission as “spreading China’s voice, telling China’s story well” (傳播中國聲音，講好中國故事) — language that mirrors the goal for external propaganda set out by Xi Jinping in August 2013, less than two years before Chen’s media outfit set up shop in Paris’s 8th Arrondissement.
In interviews with Chinese media, Chen has said he hopes his station can counteract what he says are deeply biased views toward China in France, his home for the past four decades. “I want to show the real China to the French,” he told the Yueqing Daily (樂清日報), a county-level CCP-run newspaper in coastal Zhejiang province. The real China for Chen is apparently reflected by the country’s strictly controlled state-run media. As Chen himself acknowledged in a 2021 interview, the channel openly collaborates with central CCP media like China Central Television (中央電視臺) and China Radio International (中國國際廣播電臺), both under the China Media Group conglomerate directed by the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department. The channel has also cooperated with regional state broadcasters like Wenzhou TV (溫州電視臺).
Founded by through Chen’s C-MEDIA Group (歐洲中誼文化傳媒集團), and claiming to be the only Chinese-language television station authorized by France’s media regulator Arcom, the station broadcasts 24-hour content, almost entirely from its Chinese state partners. The same state content, including from CCTV and Xinhua News Agency, fills its YouTube channel.
