beyondbrics

These days, as European governments in fiscal distress look to Beijing for rescue and countries from Australia to India brace against China’s challenge to the US’s regional hegemony, it no longer raises eyebrows when you call China a global power.

But this week, China gave a little-noticed demonstration of another kind of global power it longs for: media power.

Founded and hosted by Xinhua, the official news agency, the World Media Summit held its second meeting in Beijing. In a news report on the event earlier this week, Xinhua said:

Currently, as the world’s situation is undergoing great change, the reform of the world’s media order is inevitable… The world’s media are calling for the establishment of a fairer, win-win, inclusive, responsible global media order [and] need to have all media from different regions participate in reporting equally.

This vision of a new world order closely echoes Beijing’s often-voiced obsession with soft power. China wants a “right to be heard”; it is misunderstood; and the Western media describe the country in a biased way, Chinese officials complain frequently.

The astonishing thing is that some of the most powerful men of global media have agreed to sit down and be used as props in Beijing’s show.

Eleven heavyweight media executives including New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr, BBC director-general Mark Thompson and AP president Tom Curley attended the summit and discussed things such as the protection of intellectual property rights, journalists’ safety, the media’s role in disasters and media cooperation in the new media era.

That, at least, was the agenda according to Xinhua, which not only hosts and heads the World Media Summit’s secretariat and its website but also seems to have produced all media coverage there is about the event. Requests by foreign journalists based in Beijing for accreditation were politely declined (by Xinhua).

The organisers must have learned from the inaugural session in 2009 where some media access led to the fact that Beijing lost control of the coverage: Rupert Murdoch, who was there on behalf of News Corp, used the conference for an appeal to Beijing to open up its media industry and ‘compete in a marketplace of ideas’ which he described as ‘noisy, messy, colourful’.

Obviously, that’s not really to China’s taste. This year, two remarkably clear and simple messages came out of the meeting: China will “as always guarantee the legitimate rights of foreign news organisations and their reporters and provide convenience for their reporting work in the country,” and China wishes that “foreign media would issue increasingly precise, balanced and objective reports about China” – according to Xinhua, that is.

The attendees had their picture taken with Liu Yunshan, the head of the ruling Communist party’s propaganda department and as such the country’s highest censorship official. Murdoch was not present this time. Senior vice president Joe Welch attended on behalf of News Corp.

Related reading:
China warns neighbours over US backing, FT
China: Red carpet treatment to foster closer business ties, FT
A rich friend for Turkey, beyondbrics
RMB internationalisation file, beyondbrics