Global Times: Giving Voice To What China Can't Say Openly

In a 2016 interview to Quartz, Hu Xijin, editor of Chinese tabloid Global Times had said of the belligerent tenor of the publication that it reflects what China’s Communist regime is thinking but can’t say openly. Officials of the country’s foreign and defence ministries, Xijin had said, “can’t speak willfully, but I can”.

Xijin’s claim may sound typical of media barons and editors world over making exaggerated claims of the access they have to top echelons of governments. However, Xijin isn’t quite like most editors; nor is Global Times like other sundry news organisations. If the recent escalation of border conflict between India and China in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley has everyone outside of China interested in what the tabloid has to say, this is indeed so because it represents not the carefully calibrated diplomatic position of the PRC regime but the bellicose propaganda of a powerful section within the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Thus, the main CCP mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, and other Chinese media organisations like Guangming Daily, China Daily, Xinhua News Agency or the China News Service continue to exercise a modicum of restraint while reporting on international affairs, like the ongoing India-China impasse in Ladakh. Editorial content in Global Times, on the contrary, is hawkish and pugnacious, meant to provoke China’s foreign adversaries.

Yet, given the massive social media penetration and worldwide outreach of the daily tabloid, and the fact that it is a subsidiary of the People’s Daily, the impression that Global Times reflects the actual thinking within the CCP is hard to shake off. This notion is further amplified by Xijin, a powerful card-carrying member of the CCP. Xijin furiously tweets the tabloid’s content, ensuring a multiplier effect through the micro-blogging website on which he has over 3,70,000 followers, nearly double the number of copies that the English edition of Global Times, launched in 2003, claims to print. That Xijin and his colleagues stridently push the English edition’s content on social media platforms, unlike other Chinese news publications, is indicative of the stress on a global audience while the daily’s Chinese edition caters to a niche readership within China, which is invested in the CCP propaganda on foreign affairs. It was, perhaps, in continuation of this scheme to gain a worldwide readership that the tabloid launched its off-shore editions in the US (2013), South Africa (2014) and across Europe (2016) – the content in all of these driven by CCP propaganda.

It, hence, came as no surprise when Indian media and the country’s leading commentators on politics, diplomacy and defence reacted angrily on June 22 when the Global Times mocked India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the Galwan Valley standoff. “India knows it can’t go to war with China”, screamed a headline in the tabloid. Going gangbuster on Modi’s recent controversial statement of there being no intrusion on Indian territory in Ladakh, the article said that the Indian Premier “understands his country cannot have further conflict with China” and so wants to cool tensions. US President Donald Trump too has now designated Global Times, along with the People’s Daily, China Central Television and China News Service – all CCP controlled outfits – as “foreign missions”.

This Jekyll and Hyde character of the Chinese media, where the official mouthpiece projects a tactful view on international issues but a tabloid with obvious patronage of the Establishment puts out rabid statements, serves the PRC regime well. It allows China to test the waters on thorny subjects through offensive editorials in Global Times while giving leeway to the ‘Shanghai Gang’ comprising the diplomatic corps and business magnates to continue asserting that the PRC’s official position isn’t always accurately reflected by the tabloid.