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China plans global media expansion: officials
2009-01-15
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.
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