The info war has also reached Asia, Africa and South America, where Russia has mobilized diplomats and state-controlled media like the global RT network to press its case. The goal isn’t necessarily to win support, but to keep unaligned countries on the sidelines. While some countries, most notably China, have taken Russia’s side, others, like India, have avoided antagonizing Russia so as not to lose Russian military or energy contracts. Many others have done so simply because they know and care little about Ukraine. Russia’s line to them is that…
Tag: News and News Media
China’s Echoes of Russia’s Alternate Reality Intensify Around the World
When Twitter put up a warning message atop a Russian government post denying civilian killings in Bucha, Ukraine, last week, China’s state media rushed to its defense. “On Twitter @mfa_russia’s statement on #Bucha got censored,” wrote Frontline, a Twitter account associated with China’s official English-language broadcaster, CGTN. In a Chinese Communist Party newspaper, an article declared that Russians had offered definitive evidence to prove that the lurid photos of bodies in the streets of Bucha, a suburb of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, were a hoax. A party television station in Shanghai…
How Beijing Has Muted Hong Kong’s Independent Media
HONG KONG — Citizen News, a small online news site in Hong Kong known for its in-depth coverage of courts and local politics, said it would stop publishing on Monday night, deepening concerns about the collapse of the city’s once-robust media. Just days earlier, another independent online media outlet, Stand News, closed after hundreds of police raided its offices and arrested seven people. Two former senior editors at Stand News and the publication itself were charged with conspiracy to publish seditious materials. The latest closures are the final chapters in…
Why Peng Shuai Frustrates China’s Propaganda Machine
The Chinese government has become extremely effective in controlling what the country’s 1.4 billion people think and talk about. But influencing the rest of the world is a different matter, as Peng Shuai has aptly demonstrated. Chinese state media and its journalists have offered one piece of evidence after another to prove the star Chinese tennis player was safe and sound despite her public accusation of sexual assault against a powerful former vice premier. One Beijing-controlled outlet claimed it obtained an email she wrote in which she denied the accusations.…
Peng Shuai Said to Be in Videos From China’s State Media
Nearly two weeks after people across the world began asking “Where is Peng Shuai?,” two questionable videos surfaced Saturday on social media of a person who appears to be the Chinese tennis star at a restaurant. The videos were shared on Twitter by the editor of a state-run newspaper, but the seemingly unnatural conversation in one video and the unclear location and dates of both raised questions about Peng’s safety and whether she was appearing in the videos of her own free will. A third video, said to be of…
U.S. and China Agree to Ease Restrictions on Journalists
WASHINGTON — The United States and China announced an agreement on Tuesday to ease restrictions on foreign journalists operating in the two countries, tempering a diplomatic confrontation that led to the expulsion of some American reporters from China during the last year of the Trump administration. The deal was first reported by China Daily, a newspaper controlled by the Chinese government, and later confirmed by a statement issued from the State Department. Under the agreement, made public just a day after President Biden met with President Xi Jinping of China,…
RTHK’s Swift Turn From Maverick Voice to Official Mouthpiece
HONG KONG — Not long after Patrick Li took over as the government-appointed director of Hong Kong’s public broadcaster, a digital lock pad appeared outside his office entrance. In the past, the director’s office had been where staffers at the broadcaster, Radio Television Hong Kong, gathered to air grievances with management decisions: programming changes, labor disputes. Now, the lock pad signaled, such complaints were no longer welcome. For many employees, the closed room was an emblem of the broader transformation sweeping through RTHK, the 93-year-old institution venerated by residents as…
Zuo Fang, a Founder of China’s Southern Weekly, is Dead
Zuo Fang, a trailblazing journalist who helped start China’s most influential reform-era newspaper and edited it with the conviction that the press should inform, enlighten and entertain rather than parrot Communist Party propaganda, died on Nov. 3 in Guangzhou, China. He was 86. His death, in a hospital, was announced by the newspaper he co-founded, Southern Weekly. Southern Weekly — the paper prefers that English name over another common translation, Southern Weekend — was started in 1984 as the sister publication of Nanfang Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist…
China Evergrande Gets Soft Treatment in Chinese Media
As China Evergrande Group teeters on the edge of collapse, videos of protesting home buyers have flooded social media. Online government message boards teem with complaints and pleas for intervention to save the huge property developer. The hashtag “What does Evergrande mean for the real estate market?” has been viewed more than 160 million times on one platform. But if trouble threatens for China’s economy, you wouldn’t know it from reading the country’s front pages. The name “Evergrande” has barely been mentioned by top state-run news outlets in recent weeks,…
Luo Changping Detained in China After Criticizing ‘The Battle at Lake Changjin’
Luo Changping built a reputation as a muckraking journalist in China, a place where few dare pursue the calling, until he was forced out of the industry in 2014. Now a businessman, he has run afoul of the authorities again, this time over a critique spurred by a blockbuster movie about the Korean War. The police detained Mr. Luo, 40, on Thursday, two days after he posted commentary on social media questioning China’s role in the war, the subject of a new film, “The Battle at Lake Changjin.” The movie…