Digital Hope or Digital Trap?

In a 2022 article in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) journal Qiushi (求是), Shen Haixiong, president of the China Media Group (CMG), a state-owned entity formed in 2018 consolidating CCTV, China National Radio, and China Radio International, took an unusual step. In highlighting the global reach of CMG’s coverage of the Twentieth National Congress of the CCP, he cited detailed engagement metrics from foreign social media platforms to demonstrate the success and international influence of CMG. Quoting data indicating that CMG’s content ‘reached a total of 25.2 billion global views across diverse platforms’, Shen’s data-centred rhetoric marked a significant departure from previous leadership discourse on media impact. For instance, when summarising the coverage of the Nineteenth National Congress of the CCP in 2017, media leaders only briefly mentioned social media metrics, and even these were limited to domestic platforms like Weibo (see Pan 2017). This shift towards citing foreign platform engagement data underscores the growing emphasis Chinese media places on their performance across global digital platforms.

In China’s party-led media system, the priorities emphasised or advocated by media leadership usually dictate the focus of on-the-ground journalists in their reporting tasks (Tsai 2017). Shen’s article thus serves as a vivid example illustrating how China’s foreign-aimed reporting duiwai baodao (对外报道) has become increasingly reliant on popular social media such as Facebook and Twitter (now X), despite China neither owning these platforms nor allowing access to them within its borders. Compared with traditional foreign reporting channels such as foreign publishing (对外出版) and transnational broadcasting (对外广播), the emergence and popularity of foreign platforms, particularly successful US-owned ones, present a near-perfect complementary strategy: they boast large user communities, incur minimal distribution costs, and provide virtually global reach. While scholars have generally concluded that China is becoming more strategic and digitally driven in its approach to global media influence (Kurlantzick 2022; Molter and DiResta 2020), their focus has primarily centred on the causal relationship between leadership directives and media outlet actions. For instance, it is common for scholars to cite Chinese President Xi Jinping’s speeches on enhancing international communication competence in the digital age and to note the consequent proliferation of China-backed accounts across various platforms (Cook 2020). However, less attention has been focused on the impact of digital transformation on the work of foreign-aimed journalists. Does this digital shift simplify or complicate the work of China’s foreign-aimed reporting?

This essay explores the inner workings of Chinese foreign-aimed journalists (外宣记者) engaged in digital news production, revealing the tensions and challenges these professionals face in navigating a transnational and digital landscape. The facts and data presented in this article are primarily drawn from my fieldwork conducted in Beijing in 2021, supplemented by follow-up interviews, encounters, and additional fieldwork focusing on China’s foreign-aimed journalists. This research has been carried out in both China and Thailand.

Inside the Digital Shift in China’s Foreign-Aimed Reporting

Behind the increasing visibility of Chinese media on foreign social media platforms lies a systemic reform that has been rapidly pushing digital shifts among Chinese news outlets over the past decade. Foremost among these changes is the structural change pioneered by the People’s Daily (人民日报) when the flagship outlet launched its All-Media News Production Platform (全媒体新闻平台) in 2015. More commonly known by its nickname, Central Kitchen (中央厨房), this mechanism refers to an internal system in which news content is centrally produced or gathered and made available to journalists and editors from various departments for adaptation across multiple formats and platforms—analogous to a central kitchen providing ingredients for different cooking methods (New Media 2018).

Following the lead of the People’s Daily, media organisations across China began establishing their own central kitchens, accelerating digital transformation in both domestic and foreign-aimed reporting. However, this mechanism appears to be more crucial for the latter sector, given the challenges and competition Chinese media faces on the global stage. By offering readily accessible information and news material, a central kitchen can facilitate timely multilingual and multi-format delivery to global audiences, potentially enhancing Chinese media’s competitiveness in the international news arena (Shi and Zhang 2018).

Of course, no single mechanism could suffice. Along with the central kitchens came other changes. In terms of talent recruitment, major outlets have begun to secure digitally savvy young graduates to fill emerging positions such as ‘social media journalist’. As well as individuals with media writing or basic foreign language skills, media outlets today tend to favour those proficient in video editing or graphic design. Financially, the Chinese Government has significantly increased funding to support digital initiatives, such as short documentaries and well-designed infographics. Most outlets have received government funding to support equipment purchases, post-production design, and even overseas advertising and marketing. Moreover, synchronised content distribution has become commonplace, with certain content published across various publisher and journalist accounts. Notable examples include the widespread sharing of The Song of Shi San Wu (十三五之歌), an animated music video with American-accented performers gleefully singing and chitchatting about China’s Thirteenth Five-Year Plan, or the livestreaming of the construction of Wuhan’s Huoshenshan and Leishenshan hospitals.

Even communication within the CCP’s propaganda system has become increasingly metrics centred. Since about 2018, data on content performance on foreign social media became central to internal communications within China’s propaganda system. A bottom-up summary-and-report mechanism emerged, connecting frontline journalists, editorial offices, media executives, and top officials in the Central Propaganda Department (中宣部), which oversees China’s propaganda work (Wang 2023). This mechanism primarily tracks the ‘performance’ across foreign social media of foreign-aimed reporting on national leaders and major events. While these metrics rarely impact journalists’ pay directly, reviewing social media data—including reach, clicks, views, and comments—has become routine for both ground-level staff and media leadership. These changes suggest that the metrics of foreign social media have brought a new sense of optimism to Chinese media organisations. There is a growing belief that these quantifiable indicators represent the true international influence of Chinese media.

But do the journalists themselves share this optimistic view? And what does the digital transformation mean to their everyday newsmaking work?

Everything Can Perform Well Digitally, No?

What directly accompanies the normalisation of platform-centred news production, however, are the heightened expectations from the Central Propaganda Department. The success of one story, as measured by visible metrics, creates an expectation that other China-related stories can achieve a similar reception on social media. Driven by this perspective, the Propaganda Department has, in effect, placed an even heavier burden on journalists. Their simple yet challenging hope is that content aligning with the CCP’s propaganda agenda will not only go digital but also achieve significant success—measured in terms of metrics. It is then the foreign-aimed journalists who face unprecedented pressure in the production process.

Paradoxically, Chinese journalists initially viewed digital-oriented work quite differently: most hoped for less intensive control and censorship in digital news production. Young journalist Chen Li (a pseudonym, as are all other journalists’ names in this essay) exemplified this initial optimism. When first assigned to a social media team focused on YouTube and Facebook content production, she viewed this work as a promising ‘free zone’ within China’s media system. Chen initially believed that the freedom and audience-centred culture of foreign social media platforms would encourage Chinese journalists to produce content more aligned with reader preferences and less constrained by CCP directives. While her team initially enjoyed relative freedom when they launched a publisher page on YouTube, the page was soon flooded with content they were instructed or advised to post. This is what journalists like Chen usually call ‘compulsory work’ (规定动作).

However, this CCP-favoured ‘compulsory work’ is often at odds with what platforms prioritise. Unlike the traditional one-to-many model preferred and utilised by the Chinese media system, most social platforms today are designed to encourage a many-to-many interaction. Content creators, be they publishers or influencers, who fail to understand or adapt to this model often struggle to generate traffic on these platforms—an issue that seems to trouble many Chinese journalists working in platform-based newsmaking (Wang-Hai 2024).

Li Xinyi, whose team focused on reaching a Southeast Asian audience, once collaborated with a China-based Filipino influencer to make a video. Noticing that the same content performed significantly better on the influencer’s personal page, Li was prompted to conduct a comparative analysis. Both her team and the influencer shared China-related news and lifestyle content, yet the latter consistently achieved higher engagement, even though Li’s team’s videos were typically more professionally produced. Li believes the real reason for the difference in performance lies not in production quality but in how the two pages engage with their audiences. ‘He [the influencer] has been trying to “share” with his followers, whereas we have always been trying to “impose” ideas,’ Li concluded.

Li’s conclusion, in fact, applies to most pages and accounts managed by Chinese media. What is usually being imposed are the key events on the CCP’s agenda. China’s Two Sessions, for example, are the object of extensive mandatory coverage each year across various platforms and in multiple foreign languages, despite a shared recognition that foreign audiences have limited interest. Journalists must not only publish content related to the Two Sessions but also regularly report on its performance. As a direct consequence of this forced reporting agenda, platforms experience a loss of followers and declining engagement when they are flooded by political content. Journalists must then spend extra time and energy to recover their following, attempting to win back followers lost due to the overly propagandistic style imposed on them. Some try to constantly experiment with new genres or formats to report on the CCP agenda, while others attempt to intersperse the political coverage with softer, more interesting news. Regardless, these additional attempts and efforts are often invisible work, which is generally ignored or underestimated.

From Telling China Stories to Selling China Stories

Another significant change in recent years is how foreign-aimed journalists have developed a more multifaceted understanding of their role. They have evolved from traditional storytellers to content marketers and brand managers—a shift that has largely been driven by the advent of social media platforms and their quantifiable metrics. Before the dawn of social media, foreign-aimed reporting in China was mostly publishing and broadcasting-focused, and journalists’ role was to tell China’s story in as palatable a way as possible (Brady 2018). Now, however, new platforms have made content evaluation much more quantifiable. This has prompted a business turn in the newsroom: journalists must know not only how to write a story well, but also how to sell it effectively. Consequently, the journalist’s role is increasingly resembling that of a product manager: they must manage the pages or accounts of their publication as though it were a brand (see Petre 2021).

In Chinese newsrooms, the normalisation of foreign platforms has led to the infiltration of commercial thinking, bringing about revolutionary changes in how journalists perform their role. First, more and more journalists have started to learn how to engage in commercial hustling, as exemplified by the adoption of social media ads and paid boosting options provided by social media companies. Facebook and YouTube ads—a function initially designed for digital businesses—have been leveraged by Chinese journalists as a shortcut to promote content to a wider readership. Moreover, journalists have begun to conduct audience analysis to provide better targeted content. The age, language, location, gender, interests, and even time zones of social media users have become common considerations before posting content. Additionally, journalists are now savvy about stretching their advertising money on social media. For example, when they want to reach English speakers, most have acknowledged that ‘it’s cheaper to advertise to people in India than in the United States’. Most notably, journalists have largely learned how to do this by themselves, as most senior employees at the media management level are not social media savvy and, therefore, cannot provide systematic guidance.

Second, journalists have also started to expand their outreach work by cooperating with non-media actors such as provincial or local-level publicity offices (地方外宣) and communication departments of state-owned companies (企业外宣). These collaborations are encouraged by the CCP, which has been demanding the strengthening of foreign propaganda efforts by these two types of bodies (Lyhne-Gold 2024; Zhi 2019; Yi 2024). Many newsrooms have now established business partnerships with local governments and state-owned companies, offering their content production teams and space on their relatively established pages on foreign media platforms to post content for these ‘clients’. During my fieldwork in Beijing in 2021, it was not uncommon to see young journalists taking on managerial roles overseeing outreach work with clients. For instance, Liu Yong transitioned from being an English-language reporter to a social media manager in just a few years. He quickly moved into a role developing business partnerships and collaborations with local governments interested in working with his newsroom’s content team. After selection and negotiation, Liu takes orders from these clients and produces content (such as social media–friendly videos) to post on their social media portals. Usually, this content aims to promote the image of a Chinese city or province. Additionally, state-owned companies often seek to work with these professionals to manage their Facebook pages or company websites as they expand globally and recognise the need to brand themselves through social media.

Last, journalists have taken on additional roles on an irregular or semi-regular basis. These include collaborating with advertising agents to enhance content performance, working with information technology providers to navigate internet issues and access foreign media by bypassing China’s Great Firewall, and negotiating content-sharing agreements with foreign social media influencers or media outlets. What these ad hoc responsibilities have in common is that they place journalists on the front lines of managing digital content production mechanisms, often with limited support from their employer. Consequently, these individual journalists find themselves solving problems and shouldering more responsibilities than their traditional roles would typically entail.

Platforms with Foreign Genes

The rapid and government-propelled digital transformation reveals the CCP’s confidence in emerging platforms as amplifiers of media influence. This optimism, however, noticeably contrasts with the experiences of journalists: those involved in daily newsmaking and distribution are identifying significant issues with relying on foreign platforms, even though they are a shortcut to accessing a broader readership. While media worldwide has also faced challenges adapting to a new normal of social media-centred transformation (Cohen 2019; Meese and Hurcombe 2021), the Chinese experiences differ notably from those of their Western media counterparts. The core reason for this discrepancy lies in China’s longstanding wariness of Western internet infrastructure. Since the 2010 China Google drama, when Google withdrew from mainland China over internet censorship, the Chinese Government has been advancing its ideology that cyberspace is an extension of national territory and should be thoroughly governed by the state (Yeo 2016). As a result, the CCP has been overseeing all content flows while excluding all foreign websites that do not align with local internet laws. This approach has led to the development of a unique and relatively isolated Chinese internet ecosystem, distinct from the global online landscape.

This digital isolation extends to social media as well. After two decades of evolution in relative isolation, both ordinary users and media professionals in China have developed a distinct digital savvy tailored to Chinese social media. This ecosystem is marked by state-controlled internet firms rather than fully for-profit entities, pervasive content censorship, and special privileges for state media journalists. For example, Chinese netizens have come up with the Martian language (火星文) or other homophonic puns (谐音梗) as grassroots methods to swiftly and smartly bypass internet censorship. However, official media accounts enjoy exemptions from strict censorship, allowing direct posting without tricky workarounds. This significantly streamlines work for the journalists managing these accounts.

Yet, on Silicon Valley platforms, neither the omnipresent censorship nor the media privileges are applicable. This new environment presents a double-edged sword: on one hand, journalists have more freedom in deciding what content to post without the constraints of censorship; on the other, unlike on domestic platforms, they no longer enjoy the special status afforded to official Chinese media. The recommendation algorithms now treat content from Chinese media outlets the same way they treat posts from any other user. Many journalists have expressed how the algorithmic landscapes of Facebook and Twitter challenge their professional identity as supposedly more trustworthy information providers. Increasingly, Chinese journalists find themselves prioritising content’s performance over its inherent newsworthiness, shifting their focus from ‘what to post’ to ‘what would make a post popular’ (Wang-Hai 2024).

This, however, is not the worst of it. Evidence suggests that platforms have begun paying special attention to accounts potentially associated with the Chinese Government. Companies like Meta have started scrutinising what they term ‘operations’—government-backed campaigns believed to disrupt the platform’s information landscape. These operations are seen as potentially damaging, capable of heightening partisan tensions in democratic societies such as the United States. China-backed online activities have become a major focus of these efforts (Bond 2023).

The story is a bit different for journalists. From the Chinese journalists’ perspective, US-owned platforms are increasingly ‘disrupting their work’. Many operate as page or account editors for outlets now tagged as ‘government-sponsored media’. During my fieldwork in recent years, Chinese journalists have frequently expressed frustration with foreign platforms, citing experiences such as noticeable traffic limitations even on non-political content, sudden editor account suspensions, and freezing of advertising functions from time to time. While no definitive explanation for these unusual experiences has emerged, a sentiment widely shared among Chinese journalists is that foreign platforms are hostile to their work. Many view these actions as an extension of US–China tensions, with US companies specifically targeting Chinese media.

Concluding Thoughts

Current discussions of China’s foreign-aimed journalists often revolve around how they operate within China’s propaganda machinery or are inferred from the content they publish (Brady 2018). However, this oversimplified portrayal can be enriched by examining the inner workings of their newsrooms. Whether in digital form or not, news is the result of a complex production process that involves extensive negotiation and compromise. The rapid adoption of emerging platforms, including US-owned ones, reflects the Chinese Government’s recognition of the potential of digital and networked distribution. From the Chinese journalists’ perspective, however, this digital shift is not merely a technological transition. It also represents a new chapter in their ongoing struggle to balance journalistic autonomy with the constraints of a highly controlled professional environment.

Much like China’s media marketisation trend of decades past, the emergence of new technologies has not precipitated a fundamental transformation of journalists’ daily priorities in China, nor has it led to an approach that mirrors that seen in other national contexts where these technologies are employed. The case of China’s foreign-aimed journalists highlights the slow evolution of the journalism profession in China. While there has been a measured rise in originality and autonomy among journalists, it has not fundamentally diminished the CCP’s absolute control over the news media. These dynamics merit further attention in the study of journalistic practice in the digital age.

Featured Image: Alone on stage,  Pxhere.com  (CC)

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