Building media power

While the new US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton talks of smart power — a more effective combination of hard and soft power — China is racing ahead to boost its global media clout. Beijing is planning to hand out more than two billion US dollars each to its state media monopolies to raise their international profile and augment China’s soft power.

The state television company CCTV, which last year opened channels in French and Spanish, now plans to have Arabic and Russian broadcasts. The Chinese news agency, Xinhua is expected to double it its international bureaus and bring them up to 200. Xinhua is also expected to start a 24 hour news channel to compete with CNN and BBC. Meanwhile the Chinese Communist Party’s paper, the People’s Daily, is planning to launch an English edition of its international newspaper, The Global Times.

With the big American media in financial doldrums and the Indian media (the only one in Asia with strong depth at home and a potential global reach) dumbing itself down, Chinese media is determined to meet Beijing’s demands for intellectual power projection across the world.

The writer is a professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore