For China Media Project, David Bandurski looks at the real agenda behind the Xinhua World Media Summit currently taking place in Beijing:
This global summit — with phone, fax and headquarters right inside the CCP’s official Xinhua News Agency — describes itself in its official literature as “a non-governmental, non-profit, high-level media conference regularly hosted in turn by world media organizations in the countries of their headquarters.”
But Xinhua News Agency is one of the paramount official mouthpieces of the Communist Party of China, and it receives direct support from the party, so it is much more than a mere “media organization.” Xinhua News Agency chief Li Congjun (李从军), the chief visible figure behind the summit’s creation, is a member of China’s central party committee, and was also deputy chief of China’s Central Propaganda Department for more than six years before he took on the top Xinhua job.
Exactly how “non-government” can we suppose this summit is?
[…] Back in August, a critical piece of theory in the official CCP journal Qiushi righteously declared that “monopoly is the natural enemy of freedom.” It attacked the West for its greedy monopolization of news and information resources, and called for the creation of “a free and fair international news and information order.”
But China doesn’t want to destroy the current “news and information order.” It wants to re-draw its borders and take a larger chunk of the territory for itself.
That is why the World Media Summit itself is listed as a critical strategic measure for strengthening Xinhua News Agency’s global influence in an article Li Congjun himself wrote for the official magazine China Journalist back in February of this year.
