China's Moral Inferiority

Beijing wants greater sway over global public opinion. Instead, its propaganda outlets make Chinese leaders look like bullies.
By Li Yuan

Demonstrators gathered at Victoria Park in Hong Kong over the weekend.


Images of masked thugs massing in Hong Kong’s streets.
Unproven allegations that protesters are being led by the C.I.A.
Comparisons between activists and Nazis.
As protests continue to roil Hong Kong’s streets, China’s state-led propaganda machine has gone into overdrive to persuade the world that radical Hong Kong protesters have put the city in peril.
Through social media and other digital arenas, English-language messages from China have painted a picture of a tiny minority of foreign-influenced ruffians intimidating a silent majority of law-and-order residents.
But instead of making China’s case, Beijing’s ham-handed international efforts have largely failed to sway world public opinion.
They took a further blow on Monday, when Facebook and Twitter removed hundreds of accounts that they said appeared to be state-backed efforts to sow misinformation and discord in Hong Kong.
Perhaps more significantly, Twitter took the further step of forbidding state-run media outlets from paying to get their tweets promoted so that they appear prominently in users’ timelines. 
Chinese state-run outlets like the English-language China Daily newspaper and Xinhua, the officials news agency, have used promoted tweets to put their own spin on Hong Kong’s turmoil.


Pinboard@Pinboard

Every day I go out and see stuff with my own eyes, and then I go to report it on Twitter and see promoted tweets saying the opposite of what I saw. Twitter is taking money from Chinese propaganda outfits and running these promoted tweets against the top Hong Kong protest hashtags


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Call it a failure of Chinese “soft power” — what the political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr., who coined the term, defined as getting others to want what you want.
China wants soft power but, judging by Beijing’s propaganda, doesn’t know how to get it.
The contrast has been stark.
On Sunday, millions of peaceful demonstrators clogged the city streets to call once again for the city’s leaders to give in to their demands and give the people greater say in a political system controlled by Beijing. 
The protesters — organizers put their number at 1.7 million — offered a more sympathetic narrative than the world saw the week before, when violent clashes broke out in protests at Hong Kong’s airport.
Chinese state media, on the other hand, in recent days has shown images of Chinese paramilitary police across the border in the mainland engaged in crowd-clearing exercises.
The Twitter account of Global Times, a nationalist tabloid controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, posted a video on Monday calling four pro-democracy Hong Kong figures “The Gang of Four,” a term that refers to the former Chinese leaders who were blamed for plunging the country into the disastrous Cultural Revolution. (The tweet has since disappeared.)
Pro-China activists also appeared in Australia, Canada and Europe, putting on less-than-wholesome displays.
In Toronto on Sunday, pro-mainland protesters shouted words like “traitor” and “loser” as well as crude epithets at a crowd of Hong Kong supporters.
One widely circulated video showed four flashy sports cars revving their engines with Chinese flags hoisted out their windows.
“Worst ‘Fast & Furious’ movie ever,” said one person on Twitter.
China’s tactics may ultimately work in Hong Kong, though so far protesters appear unbowed by threats of a crackdown.
And at home, where independent news sources like The New York Times are blocked, China’s propaganda push appears to be astonishingly effective.
Many internet users there reacted with outrage at the images last week of a Global Times "reporter" who was beaten by protesters at the airport.
Chinese social media is awash with the bloodied faces of police and shaky images of foreigners who state media have claimed — wrongly — are secret protest leaders.
China is using the same tactics abroad, but they don’t play well. 
These include comparing protesters to cockroaches and some cringe-inducing anti-democracy rapping.
“Who are you?/Who’s hiding behind the scenes?,” go the lyrics to a rap disseminated by the foreign arm of China Central Television, the state broadcaster.
“All I see is a beautiful dream turning to nightmare.”
China, since 2010 the world’s second largest economy after the United States, has been determined to build the nation’s soft power.
It envies the sort of unconscious sway that the United States enjoys simply through the pervasiveness of its economic and cultural heft.
President Trump isn’t going to win any trade wars because people in China love the “Transformers” movies or watch “Game of Thrones,” but American mass media and other cultural exports increase people’s familiarity and warmth with the country’s ideals.
China could use some of that sway about now.
Its credibility and legitimacy are under assault in Washington and elsewhere as China hawks rise in prominence.
Under Xi Jinping, China has come up with a wide range of initiatives to woo the world with its ideals and its wallet.
The “China Dream” envisions a peaceful world in which China plays a leading role.
Projects like the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank are intended to show the benefits of China’s growing wealth.
“It is easy to dismiss such talk as ‘slogan diplomacy,’” wrote David Shambaugh of the George Washington University in 2015.
“But Beijing nonetheless attaches great importance to it.”
“We should increase China’s soft power, give a good Chinese narrative and better communicate China’s messages to the world,” Xi said not long after he became the president in 2013.
In his most important media policy speech in 2016, Xi instructed the top official media organizations to learn to tell compelling Chinese stories and build flagship foreign-language media outlets with global influences.
Xinhua, CCTV, Global Times and the rest have bolstered their presence in the United States and elsewhere and taken to the very same social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter that Beijing blocks at home.
Some accounts have amassed followers of over 10 million.
However, the Hong Kong protests have suggested that Beijing still knows hard power much better than soft. 
Instead of offering a competing narrative of a Hong Kong that could prosper under Chinese rule, it has instead made itself look like a bully.
Though troops haven’t crossed into Hong Kong, images distributed around the world by Chinese media outlets show heavily armed personnel preparing for urban conflict.
Beijing is forcing businesses, both global and local, to keep their Hong Kong employees in line or risk getting cut off from the vast Chinese market.
On Sunday, Beijing announced a new policy that will buff up the socialist city of Shenzhen just across the border so it can compete head-to-head with capitalist Hong Kong.
Some young mainlanders are so worked up with nationalistic fervor that they are using software to bypass Chinese censors to log into Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to blast and shame those who support Hong Kong.
While that may have some effect on Chinese students living abroad, it has otherwise had little impact.
Contrast China’s approach with Russia’s: Moscow-tied groups have used social media to tremendously disruptive effect in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.
But China needs to build a positive image for itself, not tear down the reputation of others.
That is why a recent CCTV tweet, comparing the Hong Kong protests to the Nazi rise in Germany in the 1930s, undermines Beijing more than it helps. 
The People’s Daily version compares the persecution of Jews, socialists and trade unionists with protesters storming Hong Kong’s main legislative building, blocking roads and attacking reporters, including an accusation that demonstrators “trampled the freedom of the press.”
Should it continue down the same rhetorical path, China risks eroding what little soft power it has.
As Mr. Nye once explained to Chinese university students, “the best propaganda is not propaganda,” because during the Information Age, “credibility is the scarcest resource.”

Thuggish Nation

Twitter and Facebook shut Chinese accounts targeting Hong Kong protests
By TAMI ABDOLLAH

Freedom fighters: People gather in Lafayette Square in front of the White House in Washington, Sunday, Aug. 18, 2019, in solidarity with the "Stand With Hong Kong, Power to the People Rally" in Hong Kong. 

WASHINGTON — Twitter said it has suspended more than 200,000 accounts that were part of a Chinese influence campaign targeting the protest movement in Hong Kong.
The company also said Monday it will ban ads from state-backed media companies, expanding a prohibition it first applied in 2017 to two Russian entities.
Both measures are part of what a senior company official portrayed in an interview as a broader effort to curb malicious political activity on a popular platform that has been criticized for enabling election interference around the world and for accepting money for ads that amount to propaganda by state-run media organizations.
The accounts were suspended for violating the social networking platform’s terms of service and “because we think this is not how people can come to Twitter to get informed,” the official said in an interview with The Associated Press.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns, said the Chinese activity was reported to the FBI, which investigated Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election through social media.
After being notified by Twitter and conducting its own investigation, Facebook said Monday that it has also removed seven pages, three groups and five accounts, including some portraying protesters as cockroaches and terrorists.
The Chinese government said Tuesday it wasn’t aware of the allegations.
Facebook, which is more widely used in Hong Kong, does not release data on such state-backed influence operations.
Neither does it ban ads from state-owned media companies.
“We continue to look at our policies as they relate to state-owned media,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to the AP.
“We’re also taking a closer look at ads that have been raised to us to determine if they violate our policies.”
Twitter traced the Hong Kong campaign to two fake Chinese and English Twitter accounts that pretended to be news organizations based in Hong Kong, where pro-democracy demonstrators have taken to the streets since early June calling for full democracy and an inquiry into what they say is police violence against protesters.
The Chinese language account, @HKpoliticalnew, and the English account, @ctcc507, pushed tweets depicting protesters as violent criminals in a campaign aimed at influencing public opinion around the world. 
One of those accounts was tied to a suspended Facebook account that went by the same moniker: HKpoliticalnew.
An additional 936 core accounts originated from within China attempted to sow political discord in Hong Kong by undermining the protest movement’s legitimacy and political positions.
About 200,000 more automated Twitter accounts amplified the messages, engaging with the core accounts in the network.
Few tweeted more than once, the official said, mostly because Twitter quickly caught many of them.
The Twitter official said the investigation remains ongoing and there could be further disclosures.
Though Twitter, Facebook and most other foreign social media platforms are banned in China, they’re available in semiautonomous Hong Kong.
At a daily briefing Tuesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said he was “not aware” of the allegations of fake accounts, but added that Chinese had the right to “express their opinions about” the situation in Hong Kong.
The free speech organization PEN America welcomed the tech companies’ actions and urged them to do more.
“China’s government has denied its citizens access to global outlets for communication. That they now turn around and stealthily unleash a campaign of disinformation on the very same platforms represents a new height of hypocrisy,” chief executive Suzanne Nossel said in a statement.
The Twitter campaign reflects that the Chinese government has studied the role of social media in mass movements and fears the Hong Kong protests could spark wider unrest, said James Lewis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“This is standard Chinese practice domestically, and we know that after 2016 they studied what the Russians did in the U.S. carefully,” Lewis said.
“So it sounds like this is the first time they’re deploying their new toy.”
Twitter has sought to more aggressively monitor its network for malicious political activity since the 2016 presidential election and to be more transparent about its investigations, publicly releasing data about state-backed influence operations since October so others can evaluate it, the official said.
“We’re not only telling the public this happened, we’re also putting the data out there so people can study it for themselves,” the official said.
As for state-backed media organizations, they are still allowed to use Twitter, but are no longer allowed to pay for ads, which show up regardless of whether you have elected to follow the group’s tweet.
Twitter declined to provide a list of what it considers state-backed media organizations, but a representative said it may consider doing so in the future.
In 2017, Twitter specifically announced it would ban Russia-based RT and Sputnik from advertising on its platform.

American Colleges Hosted an Important Part of China’s Propaganda Set-Up. Now They’re Bailing Out.

Congress has demanded more scrutiny of Confucius Institutes.
By DAN SPINELLI

The patron saint of China's propaganda machine

When the University of Minnesota established a Confucius Institute, or center for Chinese language learning, in September 2008, it quickly turned into one of China’s overseas success stories. 

With its efforts to promote the study of Chinese among students “from preschool to 12th grade,” the Minnesota center won plaudits from Hanban, a Chinese government organization that oversees the institutes and China’s other international language partnerships. 

Three years after its opening, the Minnesota outpost was named a Confucius Institute of the Year and between 2014 and 2018, China contributed more than $1.2 million toward the Minnesota center’s operation, according to a report in the Minnesota Daily student newspaper.
In June, the university will cut ties with Hanban, and Minnesota’s Confucius Institute will close. University officials cited a desire to refocus “our China-related activities through a strengthened and enhanced China Center,” spokesperson Katrinna Dodge said in an email to Mother Jones. 

In doing this, Minnesota joins the ranks of roughly a dozen other American colleges that have abandoned their partnerships with Hanban amid increasing criticism of Beijing’s growing authoritarianism and hostility to free speech. 

“Most agreements establishing Confucius Institutes feature nondisclosure clauses and unacceptable concessions to the political aims and practices of the government of China,” the American Association of University Professors concluded in a 2014 report, which said the centers “function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom.”
Beijing first imported Confucius Institutes to American universities in 2004, offering generous subsidies and even staff, but the centers have attracted controversy from the start. 

As retired Communist Party bigwig Li Changchun once said, these institutes are “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.” 

Marshall Sahlins, a University of Chicago anthropologist, called them “academic malware” with propaganda objectives “as old as the imperial era.” 

Many scholars and lawmakers wanted nothing to do with the institutes, which use an authoritarian government’s money to bankroll hundreds of classes and programs at colleges, high schools, and elementary schools. 

Now, as tensions between the US and China have increased, the White House, lawmakers from both parties, and the intelligence community have singled out Confucius Institutes as a nefarious symbol of China’s creeping influence.
In a January Senate hearing, FBI Director Christopher Wray said China posed a threat “more deep, more diverse, more vexing, more challenging, more comprehensive, and more concerning than any counterintelligence threat I can think of.” 

He acknowledged last year that federal agents had targeted some Confucius Institutes with “appropriate investigative steps” over concerns of improper Chinese influence. 

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced a bill last month that would require Confucius Institutes to register with the Justice Department as foreign agents, which quickly gained bipartisan support, and the most recent defense appropriations bill restricts schools with Confucius Institutes from receiving Pentagon language grants. “
“Foreign governments should not be funding student organizations on the campuses of democratic societies,” says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, who examined Chinese influence in American higher education for a November report. 

“And certainly not the foreign government of authoritarian countries.”
In addition to citing concerns about transparency and censorship, lawmakers have also identified a glaring discrepancy between the freedoms afforded to Confucius Institutes in the United States and China’s crackdown on a similar slate of American-run centers abroad. 

In February, a bipartisan report from the Senate Homeland Security subcommittee on investigations identified “over 80 instances in the past four years” in which China interfered with State Department efforts to set up and access “American Cultural Centers” at Chinese universities. 

The US chose to stop funding the program last year amid continuing obstacles put in place by China. 

The report also noted that “nearly 70 percent” of US schools neglected to report Hanban contributions to the Department of Education, despite a requirement that postsecondary institutions report foreign gifts above a certain threshold.
Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), the subcommittee’s top Democrat, released a statement with the report that compared China’s influence activities with Russia’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 presidential election. 

“Given what our country experienced during the 2016 election and what we’re preparing to grapple with in 2020,” he said, “it is critical that we be vigilant in combatting foreign efforts to influence American public opinion.”
Diamond does not consider Confucius Institutes a security issue on par with China’s increasing surveillance of its own citizens or its widespread theft of intellectual property, but he argues that unless contracts with Hanban are made public, and assurances put in place to ensure American law governs the centers, the agreements “should be terminated.” 

Gao Qing, a Chinese agent who directed George Mason University’s Confucius Institute and now runs a nonprofit in Washington, DC, that advocates for these centers nationwide, wrote in an email to Mother Jones that Confucius Institutes are meant to offer “apolitical educational programs” and not “engage with any political activity and do not teach politics and policies.”
Confucius, the ancient philosopher whose teachings fell out of favor after the Communist Revolution, became the perfect symbol for China’s renaissance when fifteen years ago, government officials formed a Chinese language-learning center in Seoul. 

More than a century after China ceded control of the Korean peninsula to Japan—and with it, wider influence over the Asia-Pacific region—Beijing was mounting a comeback in its own backyard. 

Who better to adorn the name of its signature foreign influence project than Confucius, a philosopher with a name much easier to market overseas than Marx or Mao.
In the United States, interest in learning Chinese had been rising, but a shortage of qualified instructors left school administrators searching for help. 

By 2008, only 3 percent of elementary schools with language programs taught Chinese. 

After planting roots in South Korea, in 2004, Chinese officials unveiled their first US outpost at the University of Maryland. 

Between 1991 and 1994, Annapolis had slashed funding for state universities by nearly 20 percent, resulting in dramatic cuts at College Park, the University of Maryland’s flagship site. 

Administrators eliminated eight departments and 23 degree programs, according to the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit education news site, so an infusion of Chinese funding looked even more appealing. 

But some faculty members became uncomfortable with the arrangement. 

David Prager Branner, then an associate professor of Chinese, told Mother Jones the agreement to accept funding from the Chinese government constituted a “betrayal of the University’s primary obligation: cultivating young minds and teaching them to cultivate themselves.”
“I imagine the prestige of having the first such Institute in the United States, plus generous (as we were told) funding, more than made up in their minds for the failure to apply normal academic standards,” he wrote in an email. 

He noted that the influx of new instructors with their Hanban-approved textbook “were not even vetted by the University’s own Chinese language faculty.” 

In an email to Mother Jones, a Maryland spokeswoman sent a statement from Donna Wiseman, the university’s Confucius Institute director: “As part of our partnership with Hanban, we are responsible for making decisions about the programs we offer to the community and the extracurricular activities we coordinate on campus.”“
The partnership is a tricky one, as administrators at the College of William and Mary discovered when the Dalai Lama received an invitation to speak on campus seven years ago. 

As the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, whose land has been under China’s control for centuries, the Dalai Lama is considered a “wolf in monk’s robes” by the Chinese government. 

His appearance at any American university would upset Chinese officials, but especially so at William and Mary, which months earlier had established its own Confucius Institute. 

Ahead of the visit, a university administrator flew to Beijing and briefed Hanban leaders as part of what two knowledgeable sources described as a tense, difficult conversation that included pushback from Chinese officials. 

Nonetheless, the visit went on as planned and the university’s Confucius Institute remains in operation with continuing support from Hanban.
The dust-up was awkward, but ultimately inconsequential for the university. 

Occasional controversies over transparency and improper influence, experts say, largely depend on administrators’ care in reviewing contracts and removing any questionable language from their agreements. 

Qing says Confucius Institutes “affirm the primacy of US law,” but Hanban’s website includes a set of bylaws that several administrators around the country found concerning. 

One line implies that Chinese law, with its noticeably weaker free speech protections, would ultimately govern Confucius Institutes on US soil. 

A current Confucius Institute director at an American college, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about the partnership, said this part of the agreement had “to be watered down” for his school to participate. 

The Chinese officials did not object, he said, and seemed almost to expect the pushback. 

“Some of these nuances take time to learn,” he told Mother Jones. 

“Somebody may, without realizing it, sign the template thinking that’s the way to go forward.”

When George Washington University was first considering whether to form a Confucius Institute, faculty members were put off by a provision in Hanban’s generic agreement that its partners respect the “One China” principle which maintains that Taiwan is part of the People’s Republic of China. 

The US formally adopted this policy in 1979, but the provision still concerned administrators who interpreted it as a backdoor way to stifle academic discourse about Taiwan. 

The university ultimately agreed to a contract, years later, when the provision was no longer required.
A common criticism lodged against Hanban is the secrecy of its contracts. 

“At most Institutes, the terms of agreement are hidden,” a report from the conservative National Association of Scholars found in 2017. 

The key to keeping institutes free of undue influence, several administrators and experts reiterated, involves vetting the contracts more rigorously. 

No matter how innocuous a single institute may be, now that President Trump’s foreign policy has appeared to settle on an adversarial approach to Beijing, it is likely that they will become increasingly isolated. 

Sen. Marco Rubio, one of the most persistent critics of China in Congress, expressed a growing Washington consensus when he asked during a Senate hearing this year whether China had become “the most significant counterintelligence threat this nation has faced, perhaps in its history but certainly in the last quarter century.”

The Enemy Within

China’s Communist Party runs this U.S. TV station: CGTN America, which based in Washington and available in 30 million United States households, does Beijing’s bidding.
By Paul Mozur

From China Central Television’s Beijing offices, Xi Jinping addressed CGTN America’s Washington staff via videoconference in 2016. “Good morning, President Xi,” they responded in a rehearsed moment.

It broadcasts forced confessions to American audiences. 

It avoids subjects that displease Beijing. 

It cuts away when wind musses the hair of Xi Jinping, the Chinese dictator.
China Global Television Network America, which reaches 30 million households in the United States, is an arm of China’s propaganda machine. 

It is controlled by the Communist Party and serves as part of what Xi has called Beijing’s “publicity front.”
But when the American authorities asked about those ties, CGTN America argued that the Chinese government doesn’t tell it what to broadcast.
That contention, made last month in a filing with the United States Department of Justice, may not get a warm reception in Washington. 

In the wake of Russian influence in the 2016 election, American officials are trying to get a clearer picture of efforts by China to build influence in the United States. 

The claim by CGTN America, an overtly state-owned organization, represents a direct challenge to that effort.
“They have put the Department of Justice into a position of looking utterly ridiculous and toothless if it simply walks away from this type of false claim,” said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University.
“This is right up there with Pravda claiming to be a health magazine,” he added, referring to the onetime official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 

“On its face, it doesn’t hold.”
CGTN America, based in Washington, is part of the international arm of China Central Television, Beijing’s main domestic propaganda organ. 

It runs a typical newsroom except when it comes to stories about China, said four current and former employees, who asked for anonymity to protect their careers. 

Some stories, like the 2012 escape from China of the activist lawyer Chen Guangcheng or 2014 protests in Hong Kong calling for freer elections, were covered only briefly days after the news broke, three of them said.
Employees were rebuked when a report mentioned Falun Gong, the religious group that Beijing considers a cult. 

Images of the flag of Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims, are banned from broadcasts.
CGTN made the filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, at the urging of the Justice Department. 

FARA requires those doing publicity work for foreign-controlled groups to submit government disclosures.
American officials have stepped up their requests that foreign-controlled groups make FARA filings in response to Russian interference in the 2016 election. 

Two years ago RT America, a Russian-backed broadcaster, made a similar filing at the urging of the Justice Department.
Chinese companies and organizations in general have come under greater scrutiny as the trade war has intensified, including the deals they strike to buy up American firms and technology. 

Some American officials contend the companies pose a security risk.
As part of its demands that CGTN America make a filing under FARA, the Justice Department in a December letter to the broadcaster said it put Xi in a positive light and had attempted to influence the American public during the recent trade dispute.
“Reporting China’s policy positions and presenting them in a positive light are primary reasons for CGTN’s existence,” the letter said.

The Justice Department’s Letter to CGTN America
In December, the Justice Department sent a letter to CGTN America, the American arm of state-run China Central Television, outlining the reasons why it should register as a foreign agent. (PDF, 17 pages, 0.92 MB)
17 pages, 0.92 MB
CGTN America did not respond to emailed requests for comment. 

American officials sometimes challenge filings, requiring registrants to disclose more data about their relationships with foreign governments.
Unlike the Russian influence campaign, which is designed to split Americans, the Chinese propaganda effort tends toward the sunny side. 

Recent broadcasts on CGTN America extolled traditional Chinese medicine and China’s economic rise, while its website offers a link to its panda coverage.
China’s influence push may be ham-handed compared with Russia’s, but it is well funded. 

Official Chinese media spend heavily to advertise on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter that are banned within China. 

China Daily, an English-language, state-controlled newspaper, buys advertising inserts in American newspapers, including The New York Times.
Based in a glassy office building four blocks from the White House, CGTN America employs about 180 journalists — many of them Americans — devoted to covering the United States. 

It broadcasts seven hours of programming a day through cable and satellite providers like AT&T and Comcast. 

Its employees cover a wide variety of topics, from news to features to business, and occasionally win awards for their coverage.

Current and former CGTN employees say CCTV editors in Beijing dictated plans for covering China. 

American employees sometimes pushed back and the Chinese allowed some flexibility when Beijing’s orders didn’t specifically forbid or dictate content. 

But three people interviewed said they had little choice but to air propaganda clips when Beijing said so.

For instance, in November CGTN America was told to broadcast a piece that played down China’s imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of members of the Uighur ethnic minority group. 

The Times and others have reported that the mostly Muslim Uighurs are held against their will, often in dismal conditions, and subject to an indoctrination program designed to discourage Islam.
The piece that aired portrayed the camps as successful vocational training and antiterrorism centers and Uighurs as grateful. 

CGTN America employees packaged the clips with context citing international criticism, but the video nonetheless ran, at times without their framing.
Other times there was less recourse. 

CGTN has broadcast the televised confessions of people accused of a wide variety of crimes in China, with those confessions sometimes touted internally as “exclusives” by editors, one former employee said. 

China forces people to make false, televised confessions to serve its own propaganda needs.
CGTN broadcast the confession of Peter Humphrey, a British private investigator who was imprisoned in China in 2013 and accused of illegally obtaining and selling Chinese citizens’ data.
Mr. Humphrey, who has since been released, had been drugged, chained to a chair, locked in a cage and then made to read out a statement written by the police in front of the cameras. 

The anchor who presented the footage, James Chau, is now a goodwill ambassador with the World Health Organization. 

He declined to comment.

Peter Humphrey, a British private investigator who was once jailed in China. His confession, which had been forced, was broadcast by CGTN’s forerunner.

The news organization “collaborates with the security and police organs to extract forced confessions from prisoners under extreme conditions of duress,” Mr. Humphrey said, adding that the confession was packaged to “distort reality, intrude on privacy and fairness, and humiliate me.”
Chinese leaders get different treatment, said three current or former employees. 

During a 2014 visit by Xi Jinping to Greece, a clip that showed him getting off the plane with unruly hair was eradicated from broadcasts, one current employee said.
One CGTN America show, “The Heat,” is occasionally edited if it is too critical of China, two of the people said.
“CGTN wouldn’t exist or have any significant funding if it weren’t for the Chinese government,” said Sarah Cook, a senior analyst for East Asia at Freedom House, a pro-democracy research group in the United States. 

“And of course that comes with editorial strings attached.”
The Chinese government’s power over CGTN was underscored by a 2016 event at state media facilities in Beijing in which Xi said official media and publicity broadly were “crucial for the party’s path.”
A group of CGTN employees in Washington attended via video conference. 

They had been kept after midnight several days in advance to prepare, without being told why, according to two of the people. 

When Xi greeted them, the group waved and, in a rehearsed moment, called out in unison, “Good morning, President Xi.” 

The moment became a source of tension internally, these people said.
“Media analysts say this is very much about cultivating a more robust image for the Chinese leader,” the CGTN America anchor Roee Ruttenberg said in the channel’s coverage of Xi’s appearance, “through all of the different outlets that in theory fall under his control.”