China Central Television building Beijing
BEIJING (AFP) — China’s Communist Party wants stepped-up international propaganda to match the nation’s rising might, a move that would include new television channels and overseas newspapers, officials said.
After setting up French and Spanish language television channels ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China Central Television (CCTV) is also planning new channels in Russian and Arabic, station officials told AFP on Wednesday.
“We began preparing for the Arabic channel in September,” said an official with the new service who asked not to be named.
“We plan to launch in September… and will hire about 100 Arabic speaking people … we don’t need to worry about the money, CCTV has all the money.”
In a speech Monday the nation’s top official for ideology, Li Changchun, called for more overseas propaganda, which he said should focus on singing the praises of the Communist Party and China’s economic achievements.
“We must independently develop an image of a strong and new nation for the entire world to see,” the official Xinhua news agency quoted Li as saying.
“We want our people to pound their chests and say: ‘The sick man of east Asia is not China. The great Chinese people have risen among the nations of the world and China is not poor, backward and stupid.’”
The Global Times, run by Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily, is also planning an English version in the near future, an editor there said.
It would be the nation’s second English-language paper after the China Daily.
Meanwhile Xinhua is also planning to open more bureaus as it expands global news gathering efforts to improve the quality of its international reports, said an editor who identified himself as Chen.
According to Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post newspaper, the Chinese government has earmarked 45 billion yuan (6.6 billion dollars) for the makeover of its media, which is all state-run.
4 responses so far ↓
Look on it more like old Friends Linking up……. « Centurean2’s Weblog // January 15, 2009 at 10:46 am
[...] January 15, 2009 · No Comments China plans global media expansion [...]
Commie friends Reunited….. « uk1884 // January 15, 2009 at 10:47 am
[...] January 15, 2009 by centurean2 China plans global media expansion [...]
Xero // November 30, 2009 at 5:32 am
Ok, seriously.
Just because the Government is Communist doesn’t mean everything it does is ‘evil’ and full of propoganda. The Chinese are not that bad actually… Give them a chance.
pjwalker911 // November 30, 2009 at 6:04 am
Zero,
Hahahaha! That’s good! Are you available for the Comedy Club and Saturday Night Live? We’ll make you a star.
Nobody said the Chinese people are evil. I have never said that, only that it’s government which is by definition, a tyranny, is evil and the elites who run it (who are also in cahoots with the evil rulers of the West).
Chinese people who submit complaints to the government are taken to “black jails” where they are beaten and tortured into submission. Tibetans are suppressed in every way, tortured and beaten on a daily basis. Foreign press routinely barred from the area. Uighurs, the same treatment. Women are force-sterilized. Mobile execution vans roam the countryside. Dissidents are rounded up before every major event and imprisoned indefinitely. Internet users who merely search for topics like “democracy” are hunted down by internet police and arrested. The majority of people are worked to death in squalid conditions often 14 hours per day. I don’t need to go on because the truth is obvious. China is an Orwellian Police State Prison as bad as North Korea which it sponsors. And Communism is evil, in any form because it is authoritarian and destroys the right to an individual’s self-determination. So shove it with your total BS propaganda you disgusting, stinking, nitwit communitarian whore.