[INTERVIEW] 'China could censor South Korean content if Seoul aligns with IRA, CHIPS Act'

This file photo shows the logo of mobile messaging service WeChat on the screen of a tablet in Toulouse, southwestern France. U.S. President Joe Biden on June 9, 2021 revoked executive orders from his predecessor Donald Trump seeking to ban Chinese-owned mobile apps TikTok and WeChat over national security concerns, the White House said. AFP-Yonhap

Economic coercion over THAAD was early sign of how willing China is to exert economic pressure on other countries

By Kim Yoo-chul

Over the last several decades, China has invested heavily in its own propaganda media system in an effort to influence public opinion on China and to suppress anti-Beijing sentiment.

According to last year's report by Freedom House, China's central government was using more sophisticated, covert and coercive tactics, including intensified censorship and intimidation to spread pro-Chinese narratives. Its main goal, Freedom House says, was to increase the level of its influence on public opinion in its favor, sometimes as a way to ensure its investments in target countries.

China's foreign ministry dismissed the report as false and "driven by ulterior motives."

Beijing's investments include funding media organizations and communications networks in targeted countries, training reporters and engaging with foreign publics on various social media platforms. From the standpoint of press freedom, fair and objective journalism becomes skewed, thus threatening the resiliency of civil society and even the media.

Speaking to The Korea Times, Joshua Kurlantzick, a veteran journalist and a senior fellow for Southeast Asia and China at one of the most influential think tanks in Washington, claimed that Beijing wants to have greater influence over "discourse power," the ability to shape global narratives on many issues, including about China itself.

But he added that despite spending huge amounts of money on its state media outlets, China has so far had mixed success in terms of expanding its global influence.

"Beijing clearly believes that leaders and media from liberal democracies (not just in the West but also in free Asian states like South Korea) dominate the global discourse power, and their media sets the terms of how issues are discussed. China is hoping to break that monopoly of the media of major liberal democracies, including the South Korea, Japan and other Asian liberal democracies, which is why it has invested so much in its own state media outlets. However, Beijing has had only mixed success in bolstering its state media outlets, despite spending huge sums on them," Kurlantzick said in a recent interview.

Joshua Kurlantzick

He is the author, most recently, of "Beijing's Global Media Offensive: China's Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World." He has also served as a columnist for Time, a correspondent for The Economist and is serving on the editorial board of Current History.

The establishment of Xinhua and CGTN, for example, is viewed as the Chinese government's intention to help its representative state media be recognized as credible and considered to be competitors of leading Western media, according to media critics.

But the expert, currently focused on Beijing's relations with Southeast Asia and China's approach to soft power at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), said he does not think China's investments in CGTN and China Radio International have been successful.

"CGTN and China Radio International simply still aren't perceived as credible sources by most news consumers, because they seem propagandistic _ and have gotten more so in the last few years," he said. China rebranded CCTV as CGTN, which claims to broadcast to 1.2 billion people worldwide

However, China's state-run Xinhua News Agency is a different story as its news is used by media all over the world, although sometimes attributing them and sometimes not, according to Kurlantzick, previously a fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy and a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy.

"Xinhua has the possibility of being very powerful. Xinhua is signing content sharing agreements with local media all over the world. This allows Xinhua to increasingly get a larger part of the news coverage of newspapers, magazines, and online news outlets all over the world, so Xinhua has been China's greatest state media success story. Plus, (various) training programs have been highly effective at influencing journalists who come to China, as has China's efforts to wield power over discourse at universities around the world _ and directly by trying to sway politicians in other countries," he responded.

Despite its attempts to widen its influence over global media, the Great Firewall in China, ironically, is preventing internet users from viewing or posting socially- and politically-sensitive media content.

As the control of the media and messages could possibly undermine winners and losers in the battle for global influence in the media industry, the internet is the key battleground. China has initiated a range of policy initiatives from blocking Western social media platforms and buying media outlets to setting rules for the digital sphere.

Kurlantzick said the Chinese communist party is unwilling to allow open discussions that happen on Twitter and Facebook in China and added instead that they have created a kind of "walled garden" internet, in which users have little connection to the outside world, rely on WeChat, which he believes is heavily monitored and censored.

A sign at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, Dec. 8, 2022. Twitter has failed to provide a full report to the European Union on its efforts to combat online disinformation, drawing a rebuke from top officials of the 27-nation bloc. AP-Yonhap

"Countries like South Korea and other liberal democracies should indeed push for China to allow foreign correspondents back in and to allow other social media platforms back into China. But I think there is little chance of the latter happening, I'm afraid. And most people that China is trying to disseminate info abroad to, on Twitter or Facebook, are probably not aware that these platforms are banned in China," he added. "China is promoting to many other countries, and has been taken up in some ways by Vietnam, Thailand, Russia, Myanmar, and some African states."

South Korea's choice

Beijing has shifted some of its English-language press in South Korea toward justifying pro-Beijing policy agendas. Specifically, a few years ago, when Seoul decided to deploy the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system to counter North Korea's evolving missile threats, various leading Chinese media ran editorials and stories highlighting the economic impact of the THAAD deployment on South Korea. China is South Korea's largest trading partner.

"And, yes, the economic coercion over THAAD was an early sign of how willing China is to use economic coercion against countries. In most countries with sizable numbers of Chinese speakers, there are virtually no independent Chinese language media left, and people also look to WeChat for news, which is heavily censored and filtered. Beijing actually has been incredibly successful in controlling Chinese language media globally, even in places with unfavorable views of China," he responded.

Kurlantzick also said Beijing has been enormously successful in having state-owned firms or owners within countries with pro-Beijing sentiments buy up the local Chinese language media in most countries.

While Chinese authorities have partially lifted Beijing's unofficial ban on South Korean entertainment content, allowing a South Korean film to be available to see on a Chinese OTT, recently, six years after Seoul's deployment of THAAD, Kurlantzick did not deny the possibility of China imposing other types of sanctions against South Korea.

The TikTok logo is seen on a cell phone on Oct. 14, 2022, in Boston. The Kentucky Senate passed a measure Friday, Feb. 10, 2023, to ban TikTok from state government-issued devices, reflecting bipartisan concerns about the Chinese-owned social media app. AP-Yonhap

"I think South Korea has no choice but to reject Beijing's 'unofficial requests' because if you allow China to make these requests and you give in to them, it will only result in more requests, more economic coercion, etc. ― which already has been done with China over THAAD for instance ― intense economic coercion of South Korea. And even though China is resuming distributing some South Korean content, they probably will stop after South Korea presumably aligns with the U.S. on IRA, CHIPS, etc.," Kurlantzick said.

The CFR fellow pointed out that because China is so powerful, compared to 2007 when he wrote a book called "Charm Offensive," he said, "My goal from the book was to see how it had adapted its soft and sharp power techniques today, how successful they were, and their impact on the globe."