Report: Chinese Censorship Expanding Abroad

Four ways China uses to influence media outlets: direct action by Chinese officials to punish overseas outlets that fail to heed Chinese restrictions, economic incentives to induce self-censorship among media, indirect pressure applied through proxies like other foreign governments or advertisers, and finally cyberattacks and physical assaults.

By Paul Mozur

China Central Television headquarters in Beijing.

Chinese censorship, far from a merely domestic concern, is increasingly spilling over the country’s borders.
That’s the takeaway from a new study from the Center for International Media Assistance (pdf) that traces the Chinese government’s influence on Western media within and outside of China, as well as Chinese-language media and other outlets in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America.
“With more than half of China’s population now accessing the Internet and some political content going viral despite domestic censors’ efforts, the CCP’s (Chinese Communist Party) nervousness of overseas news trickling in has increased,” wrote Sarah Cook, author of the study and an analyst for Freedom House.
The Center for International Media Assistance is part of the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting democracy funded by the U.S government. 

Freedom House is an independent democracy and human rights advocacy group.

The study breaks down four ways China uses pressure to influence media outlets outside of China: direct action by Chinese officials to punish overseas outlets that fail to heed Chinese restrictions, economic incentives to induce self-censorship among media, indirect pressure applied through proxies like other foreign governments or advertisers, and finally cyberattacks and physical assaults that the report says are not conclusively traceable to Chinese authorities.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a faxed request for comment on the report.
Concerned it is losing the soft-power battle to the U.S. and frustrated with what it believes is an anti-China bias in foreign media, Beijing has grown increasingly eager to improve the country’s image abroad in recent years, partly by doing more to control or influence the way it is portrayed in the media. 

As a result, the government has spent lavishly on an effort to expand the reach of its official media organizations, including by launching an American branch of state broadcaster CCTV that aims to mimic the success of Al-Jazeera.

At the same time, it has increased restrictions on foreign media inside the country.
Referring to Western media, the report chronicles difficulties faced by journalists in getting visas to report in China, cyberattacks that have hit organizations that carry reports critical of China and the blockage of foreign news sites in China. 

The Wall Street Journal reported in January that it, along with the New York Times, was subject to attacks by Chinese hackers.
The report also looks at Chinese influence in overseas Chinese media as well as in developing countries across Southeast and South Asia, Latin America and Africa. 

In one section, it notes the 2010 arrest of two Vietnamese citizens for using shortwave radio to transmit a broadcast from a radio network run by the banned Falun Gong religious movement into China.

It also references a separate report (pdf) from the Center for International Media Assistance that describes direct Chinese government aid to state-run media in Africa and Latin America, training programs that bring journalists from countries in those regions to China on free trips, and the multi-billion dollar expansion of China’s state-run media groups globally.
Pressure from the Chinese government on Chinese language media in both Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as in other countries has also increased, according to the report.
But China isn’t only using strong-arm tactics in its to burnish its own image. 

Interestingly, while the report urges Taiwan to strengthen rules against heavy investment in local media from China or those with heavy Chinese interests, it also says that pressure against Taiwan independence groups has slackened somewhat in part because the resulting bad publicity is seen as counterproductive for China’s goal of eventual unification.
Overreach from Beijing has also occasionally been counterproductive in the U.S. 

In 2012, in an incident not mentioned in the report, Chinese diplomats asked an Oregon city to force a Taiwanese-American businessman to take down a mural he painted on a private building advocating independence for Tibet and Taiwan. 

The town’s mayor rebuffed the request, citing the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, eliciting cheers from many on Twitter and in articles online.
The report encouraged all media outlets to be transparent about pressures faced from China, and took governments to task for not doing enough to protect journalists working in the country.
“Foreign governments should respond vociferously to assaults and visa delays of foreign correspondents holding their citizenship,” the report says, adding that foreign governments should use diplomatic options to signal that visa delays for foreign correspondents are unacceptable.
“To date, the response from Western governments to growing harassment of international media in China has often been timid,” it adds.