The Olympics and media always went hand in hand. This was already the case at the very first Olympics of the modern era in 1906 when correspondents telegraphed the results and their impressions to the world. Even back then, it made little sense to hold a global sporting event only for local spectators. And the media always reported a lot about the host country: About the party atmosphere in Athens and the nightly torchlight processions, but also about the organizational chaos. Back in 1924, there were already 1,000 journalists on-site in Paris.
Since then, media coverage of the host country has become a key motivation for hosting the expensive Games. In 2008, this strategy worked out well for China: The image of the emerging superpower ended up with a big boost. This year, on the other hand, it looks like China’s public image might take a big hit instead – at least in parts of the world like Europe and the USA, where human rights issues play a role.
Therefore, the Chinese government is currently trying everything in its power to control media coverage. Since it has little influence over classic media of democratic countries, it is instead evading them as much as possible. For example, the state propaganda factory produces videos that show a serene Xinjiang. And that is not all, even US media personalities are being paid to cheer for the 2022 Olympics, as Fabian Peltsch reports today. That’s perfectly legal, of course. But it shows how the structures of an open society can be hijacked from the outside.
Tomorrow, on Friday, the Games will officially kick off and will be held until February 20. This time, 3,000 journalists have been accredited for the event. Marcel Grzanna has taken a look at the advice the organization Reporters Without Borders is giving journalists along the way. Here, too, it is about controlling the perception of the country. TV stations should not broadcast pre-recorded images from China and instead use their own footage, whenever possible. And reporters should distinguish between the party, the people and the nation. The CP does not necessarily represent the entire population, and “China” is not necessarily identical to the communists’ vision of their country.
The Olympic Charter even predates the 1924 Olympics in Paris. The Olympics are based on a philosophy that calls for the self-improvement of people and society. It is true that they have always taken place in countries with all kinds of constitutions and forms of government. But it is China’s brazen propaganda of an ideal world that is provoking an allergic reaction in the free world today. If China were just a little more transparent, open, and honest, at least like it was in 2008, the backlash would not be as strong.
Since the mid-1990s, the Chinese government has been deliberately manipulating public opinion in the US and Europe with paid comments in online forums. Now, Beijing is paying foreign Internet users to improve the tattered image of the 2022 Winter Olympics. The Chinese consulate in New York has hired a US PR agency to buy young influencers to spread the Chinese narrative in the West with sponsored content.
New Jersey-based Vippi Media reportedly signed a $300,000 contract to generate at least 3.4 million impressions on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, aimed primarily at a younger audience, before and during the Olympics. The explicit goal is to share “interesting and meaningful things before/during/after Beijing Winter Olympics.” Examples include the athletes’ preparations for the Games, modern technology, emotional moments, or Beijing’s cultural monuments.
The contract split the content into three categories. 70 percent is intended to promote Chinese culture. 20% is to highlight “cooperation and any good things in China-US relations”. The focus of the remaining 10 percent will be contributed by the Chinese consulate as needed. Examples include China’s fight against climate change and environmental protection. The general idea is to focus exclusively on positive messages about China.
Vippi Media founder Vipinder Jaswal dismissed these activities as harmless. “What we are trying to do is to simply highlight the integrity and dignity of the Olympic;” he told the British newspaper The Guardian. Jaswal previously worked for the conservative Fox News network, which is now one of China’s biggest critics. These days, he says, “boycotts don’t help mutual understanding … I don’t support boycotts.” Jaswal is facing criticism in the US for his deals with China’s propaganda department.
However, influencers trying to sway public opinion in China’s favor are by no means the exception. In December, the New York Times reported how Beijing is instrumentalizing foreign YouTubers and other content producers living in China for propaganda purposes. For example, they are given access to regions where foreign journalists have long been barred from entering. In one case, Israeli-born vlogger Raz Gal-Or was allowed to visit the cotton fields of Xinjiang in April 2021 – just when fashion companies like H&M and Nike had announced that they would no longer buy cotton from the region due to the forced labor of Uyghurs.
Gal-Or only indirectly addresses the accusations. His video is primarily intended to feign normality. He drives a tractor with well-fed farmers and plays air guitar on a traditional dotar lute during a house visit. “They have their own culture and they have a lot of unique traditions. But when I came here, I’ve realized that there is really a true harmony between how they find themselves as Chinese and as Uyghurs,” the young man tells Chinese state media in another video. “Everything is totally normal here.”
The message of other content producers is that the re-education camps in Xinjiang are a myth and that the West is merely envious of China’s success. There is the Shenzhen-based father-son duo Lee and Oli Barret, for example, who celebrate Beijing’s “superior” covid control. Or retiree Kirk Apesland, aka “Gweilo 60,” who repeatedly stresses what the West can learn from China. Nevertheless, “Gweilo 60” now wants to return to Canada because of better health insurance.
The videos in question often seem self-produced. Behind the camera, however, are typically professionals from the Chinese state media who direct them. Raz Gal-Or’s travel video, subtitled in several languages, was shared by Chinese embassies and Chinese foreign media around the globe – and was thus able to generate unusually high traffic.
YouTube and Google’s algorithms favor content that is shared a lot, which flushes the videos to the top of search engines. Often, accounts are created for the sole purpose of sharing videos like Gal-Or’s, writes the New York Times. Of the 534 accounts that re-shared the video after it appeared, two-fifths had only ten or fewer followers. For some, Gal-Or’s video was even the first they had ever shared.
Video platforms such as YouTube have set themselves an obligation to label sponsorships & endorsements to ensure transparency about paid political advertising. However, they are somewhat powerless against opinion pieces that appear to be self-produced, like Gal-Or videos, because a direct link to the Chinese government cannot be proven in most cases. This allows the Chinese government to spread its narrative on a large scale without making it look like propaganda at first glance.
However, this strategy called “borrowing a mouth to speak” is only a small part of China’s campaign to become a global media superpower. China’s head of state Xi Jinping had already mentioned the phrase “telling China’s story well” at a Politburo meeting on “propaganda and ideology” shortly after taking office in 2013.
In particular, the China Global Television Network (CGTN), as the international branch of the Chinese state broadcaster CCTV is called, has since massively expanded its influence. The media house, which reports to the party’s Central Propaganda Department, operates six channels in English, French, Arabic, Russian and Chinese. Programs are broadcast in more than 140 countries. Production studios are located in London, Washington, and Nairobi. Anchors are usually from the respective countries.
While Western media companies are laying off more and more staff, CGTN is recruiting young journalists with generous salaries. Last summer, for example, the British press reported that CGTN was luring so-called ‘Media Challengers’ at British universities with prize money of $10,000 and the promise of professional journalism education. The aim of the ‘Media Challenger’ campaign is to “build a platform for aspiring young people around the world to display their talents, chase their dreams, and acquire a deeper understanding of China,” according to CGTN’s website.
CGTN’s propaganda and the army of influencers may seem crude. However, the plan to sway international discourse in China’s favor by using mass and range could succeed. Videos on TikTok and YouTube are not selected and categorized by traditional media gatekeepers. Who gets to see them, in the end, is determined by algorithms. For many young TikTok users, this type of content could be the first time they learn about the situation in Xinjiang. And they might hear about Olympic moments of happiness before reports of arrested activists kill their sports enthusiasm.
During the Olympic Games, which officially begin tomorrow, numerous TV stations around the world will inevitably have to rely on pre-produced footage from Chinese state television. Covid regulations for journalists massively restrict their freedom of movement. Media coverage is very difficult under these conditions. That is why the non-governmental organization “Reporters without Borders” (RSF) has published a special guide. It urges German media to exercise caution when cooperating with China’s state media. “Our handbook is intended to raise awareness of Beijing’s international media strategy in our country – and to provide guidance to editorial teams when opportunities for cooperation arise,” says RSF Executive Director Christian Mihr.
The guideline categorically recommends: “Editorial cooperation with Chinese propaganda media should not be initiated, and existing ones should be terminated.” The RSF warns that even in supposedly neutral reporting sequences, “subtle narratives of the regime in Beijing can be conveyed”. Even if media images were accompanied by critical texts and the source of the sequences was disclosed, these images would acquire a power of interpretation that would have an effect on audiences in the interest of the Chinese government. Existing cooperation with media close to the government should be reduced “to a minimum.”
The German public radio and television broadcaster NDR has already come under massive criticism in the past for producing joint discussion programs with the state television station CGTN. CGTN is the international branch of China’s state television CCTV. The UK had revoked the station’s broadcasting license in early 2021 due to its close ties to the Chinese government. CGTN was then also temporarily off the air in Germany. German public state-owned international broadcaster Deutsche Welle also worked closely with the central broadcasting body CCTV in the past.
Foreign reporters will be unable to conduct investigative work outside the Olympic bubble during the Olympics. This will likely tempt journalists to exchange information with the many volunteers of the organizing committee. However, in an interview with China.Table, journalist Qin Liwen from Berlin warns not to mistake the information obtained in the process as personal opinions.
“Without exception, all volunteers and other staff are downright trained to either evade questions or give answers that paint the regime in a good light,” Qin says. “That doesn’t mean you can’t ask questions. But you should be aware that you are actually speaking with the Ministry of Propaganda of the People’s Republic of China.” Qin should know, as she helped run the English website for the organizing committee BOCOG during the 2008 Summer Games.
To cover the potential demand for information and visual material From China in German editorial offices, Reporters Without Borders, therefore, recommends increased cooperation with independent media with a China focus and located abroad whenever possible. Only “as a last resort” should “short sequences from sources close to the state be adopted under certain circumstances.” Cooperation with foreign correspondents should be increased.
However, the government of the People’s Republic is preventing an expansion of the correspondent network in its country. In fact, it is making it harder and harder for foreign publishers and TV broadcasters to work on the ground. Especially US media has suffered a massive bloodletting of correspondents, because new visas were denied, or because existing visas were revoked on short notice. The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC) also identified new intimidation tactics in its annual report published on Monday (China.Table reported). According to the report on media freedom, correspondents experience increasingly aggressive threats.
The RSF demands that Chinese media should be subject to the “same positive obligations” in Germany as domestic media. They should respect “certain basic standards”; violations of these standards should be sanctioned. In practice, however, it is problematic that basic standards such as sincerity, pluralism, and respect for human dignity are not defined. What some consider sincere, others consider as fake news. At least publishers and editors can define standards and carefully select their partners in their own houses.
According to the RSF, caution should be exercised when cooperating with interview partners “whose titles bear harmless and positive terms – such as peace, people, friendship, development, understanding, unity.” There is a very high chance that these are organs belonging to the so-called United Front, which spread Chinese positions and interests in influential parts of society through relentless global networking.
The 25-page handbook also deciphers the autocrats’ lines of argumentation in numerous topics. For example, considering the party, the people, and the nation as the same: The party claims that it speaks for all Chinese without exception. According to this logic, any criticism of the party is an attack on the Chinese people. The regime has used this practice for many years. A popular accusation against critics, which it readily applies and is constantly repeated by international media, is that the feelings of 1.4 billion Chinese have been hurt. The RSF sees this as the party’s attempt to “deflect any criticism of its rule” and emphasizes that “the distinction between the party and the people, however, is crucial.”
The competition between China and the West is not a clash between civilizations, the organization writes: “The real competition is between repressive CCP values and practices and the freedoms written in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” The RSF bases its argumentation on numerous media reports and publications by Western researchers, such as the book “Hidden Hand” by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg.
Nvidia’s role in the Chinese EV market is growing. According to Ali Kani, Vice-President of the US manufacturer of computer chips, Nvidia has signed more supply contracts in China than ever before. No sign of decoupling here (China.Table reported).
Nvidia’s Chinese customers include EV developers such as Geely’s Polestar, IM Motors, Li Auto, R Auto, and search engine giant Baidu. The latter is increasingly pushing into the market for autonomous driving. These companies not only want to use Nvidia’s chips but also base their vehicles on Nvidia’s DRIVE Technology. This Deep Learning-based computing platform allows autonomous vehicles to process large amounts of sensory data and make driving decisions in real-time. This is an important step toward fully autonomous driving.
The company’s first processor for autonomous driving, Nvidia DRIVE Xavier, manages 30 trillion operations per second and can be found in production cars and trucks. The second generation, called Nvidia DRIVE Orin, has only recently been on the market and can already process 254 trillion operations per second. Chinese startups Nio and Xpeng are already using Orin in their latest vehicles. In January, Chinese startup Pony.ai also announced the integration of Nvidia DRIVE Orin into its sixth-generation autonomous driving system. According to the company, this will pave the way for mass production of cars with fully autonomous driving level 4. In addition to the Chinese suppliers, Nvidia is also cooperating with Mercedes, Audi, Volvo, and Hyundai.
The third processor generation, Nvidia DRIVE Altan, presented in April 2021, is capable of much more: Altan can perform over 1000 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS), which is four times more than Nvidia DRIVE Orin. Nvidia’s goal is for Altan to become standard in vehicles by 2025. Nvidia also referred to Altan as “system-on-a-chip.”
The majority of Nvidia’s business to date has been with graphics cards and chips for PCSs, servers, and video game consoles. The automotive business has so far accounted for only a small part of Nvidia’s annual sales, which are estimated at more than $26 billion. Over the next six years, however, the company aims to earn at least $8 billion in the automotive industry. “Enabling autonomous vehicles is an enormous undertaking. The challenge is huge, but so are the rewards,” says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
China is one of the world’s most important markets for software-controlled vehicles, i.e. cars whose function is based primarily on powerful onboard computers. To perform autonomous driving functions, manufacturers rely on powerful chips.
However, chips are currently in short supply, and this has also hit the Chinese automotive industry hard (China.Table reported). Still, the Chinese EV grew again in 2021 for the first time in three years. This was largely thanks to strong EV sales, which accounted for 15 percent of total passenger vehicle sales in China (China.Table reported). Sales of NEVs more than doubled to 2.99 million vehicles in 2021, according to the China Automobile Association. In 2022, the association expects the overall passenger car market to grow by five percent, with NEVs accounting for a quarter of total sales. Moreover, at the end of this year, government purchasing subsidies EV in China are expected to expire (China.Table reported). This clearly shows that Beijing is confident that the market is stable enough to be self-sustaining.
China’s market is difficult to navigate, and it is not easy for Nvidia to balance its business amongst the political tension between the US and China. Since the US sanctions against Huawei, it became clear to every Chinese company how quickly they can be cut off from US technology. At the same time, Chinese laws require that vehicle data generated in China cannot be transferred abroad. Danny Shapiro, Vice President of automotive at Nvidia, explains that this is the reason why his company uses Chinese data centers. This allows Nvidia to ensure that data used to train artificial intelligence in cars also remains in China.
Meanwhile, Nvidia’s planned acquisition of the British microprocessor specialist ARM, which belongs to Japan’s Softbank, is the subject of controversy in China. The $40 billion purchase, announced in September 2020, would be the largest semiconductor deal in history. Should it still succeed, Nvidia would become one of the most powerful players in an ever-growing, important sector (China.Table reported).
It is not only the U.S. regulators that have already gotten involved due to “significant antitrust concerns.” The Chinese also publicly voiced their displeasure, including Huawei. The acquisition of ARM also needs to be approved in the EU and the UK, not just in China and the US.
China’s state-run Global Times newspaper calls the proposed acquisition “troubling” given the tensions between the US and China. “If ARM falls into US hands, Chinese technology companies would certainly be placed at a big disadvantage in the market,” a comment in the paper said.
Chinese companies placed on the US Entity List could potentially be excluded from using ARM-based chips (China.Table reported). At the same time, European companies that use ARM technology could, in turn, have difficulties supplying to China. According to insider reports, Nvidia therefore no longer expects the ARM takeover to go through at the moment. The company has already started to withdraw from the deal. The main reason is the skepticism of the US competition authorities.
Nvidia’s withdrawal from the ARM acquisition would at the same time prioritize the Chinese market and clear the way for a smoother supply to the Chinese automotive industry. Due to the rapid growth of autonomous driving, the segment will remain a good business for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, China will nevertheless also try to catch up in this field as well and, ultimately, become independent.
Eileen Gu (Chinese name Gu Ailing) is young, hip and doesn’t really fit into the outdated image of top Chinese athletes. In addition to her sports career, she is a model and brand ambassador for brands such as the Swiss watch brand IWC Schaffhausen, Red Bull, and the ski brand Factions. But the Chinese sporting goods manufacturer Anta also uses her in its advertising. Eileen Gu was born in San Francisco in 2003 to an immigrant Chinese mother and a US father. At the Winter Olympics, however, the 18-year-old is now competing for China in ski freestyle.
As a special form of skiing, freestyle skiing also requires creativity and artistic expression. The athletes perform acrobatic tricks such as jumps, flips, and turns. The entire run is scored on a scale of 1 to 100 by a panel of judges. It is a sport that is considered far too dangerous for China’s lone children and has therefore probably not received much support from parents so far.
This was also the case for Eileen Gu. Her mother didn’t want her daughter to ski race – she said it was far too dangerous. As a result, Gu ended up freestyle skiing and became one of the sport’s most promising talents. Gu’s biggest success to date came at the 2021 X Games skiing action festival in Aspen, Colorado. There, she became the first female rookie to win three medals. She was the first woman ever to compete in three freestyle disciplines. And she won a medal in each: gold in the halfpipe, gold in the superpipe, and bronze in big air (also called aerials). Overnight, Gu became the first Chinese woman to win a gold medal at the X Games. Her post about the victory on the Chinese short message service SinaWeibo received 23 million views. Just two months later, Gu won three more medals at the Freestyle World Cup in Calgary.
The 18-year-old is building one of the few remaining bridges between the US and China through her participation in the Beijing Winter Games. At a time when both governments are more and more geopolitically distanced from each other, and the US has declared a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Games, Gu is a soft power personified. Before the Games even started, China’s media were hyping the freestyle star. Her sponsor Red Bull, for example, shot a series of videos featuring Eileen Gu, which the technology company Tencent distributes on its platforms in China. The South China Morning Post newspaper recently showed photos of Gu eating a large portion of jiaozi straight after she arrived in China. The stuffed dumplings are Gu’s favorite, as her grandmother in San Francisco, who is from Beijing, always cooks them for her.
At the age of three, Eileen Gu stood on skis for the first time in the USA – it was the starting signal for a fast-paced career. And in 2019, at the tender age of 15, she decided to compete for China at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. “This was an incredibly tough decision for me to make,” the US American announced on her Instagram account at the time.
But the announcement hardly made waves in the sports world at the time. After all, no one knew in which discipline Gu would prove to be so outstanding that she would have any chance of winning a medal. However, Gu quickly changed that. At the 2020 Winter Youth Olympics in Lausanne, Switzerland, Gu won twice gold and once silver. She also racked up trophies in Canada and South Tyrol. Then came the successes at the X Games and in the World Cup.
Olympic athletes changing flags happens all the time. However, it is unclear whether Gu also changed her citizenship for her Olympic entry for China. The Olympic Charter allows dual citizenships; China does not. It remains unclear whether Gu was given a Chinese passport at all, whether she is allowed to have both passports as an exemption rule, or if she is now exclusively a Chinese citizen. The situation is similar for a large number of players on China’s ice hockey team who are native-born Americans or Canadians with Chinese roots. Nothing is known about their status either.
Either way, Eileen Gu’s decision now turns out to be a real PR coup for China. At 18, she has become the youngest athlete on Forbes’ “China 30 under 30” list. This has made her famous far beyond the borders of sports. She is not only good at sports, but her academic achievements are also impressive. For example, she was able to finish high school a year faster than her classmates – giving her more time to hone her technique and thus increase her chances at the Olympics. Thanks to her good grades, Gu can also score points with Chinese parents.
But Gu’s huge following among young people will matter much more. Brands such as jewelry manufacturer Tiffany & Co. and luxury fashion outfitter Louis Vuitton have also noticed this. For these brands, Gu shines as a brand ambassador from the covers of glossy magazines in China, Hong Kong, and Paris – and thus reaches the next generation of customers.
It’s only fitting that Gu herself has ambitious goals. She wants to prove to the world that PR and discipline can create a whole new dimension of reach, sympathy, and fan base. “The opportunity to inspire millions of young people where my mom was born, during the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Games is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help to promote the sport I love,” Gu wrote on Instagram. “If I can help inspire a young girl to break a boundary, my wishes will have come true.” No propaganda attempt by Chinese sports officials could have delivered such an authentic message. Ning Wang
The Olympic Torch is on its way through the sports venues of the Beijing Games. On Wednesday morning, in sunny and cold temperatures, Vice Premier Han Zheng handed over the torch in the Beijing Olympic Park to a true pioneer of Chinese winter sports: Luo Zhihuan, now 80 years old, was a speed skater in 1963 and was the first Chinese to win a gold medal in a winter sports discipline. Luo passed the torch to taikonaut Jing Haiping. The now 55-year-old is China’s first taikonaut, who has been in space three times on different missions.
For three days, the torch is now passed from hand to hand of the approximately 1,200 torchbearers between the ages of 14 and 86, as well as two robots. Numerous athletes, celebrities, contributors to the Olympics, and others are honored in this way. On Wednesday, China’s basketball legend Yao Ming handed over the torch to Greece’s ambassador to China, Georgios Iliopoulos. In Athens, Greece, the torch is symbolically lit before all Olympic Games and sent on its journey to the venue, and this time was no exception. Present were also two stars of the 2008 Summer Games: The architect of the Olympic stadium “Bird’s Nest” Li Xinggang and filmmaker Zhang Yimou, at the time director of the opening ceremony. The torch was also carried by several dozen contributors to the fight against COVID-19, including doctors and nurses.
The participation of Qi Fabao caused irritation in India. In 2020, Qi was the commander of the first lethal encounter between India and China’s border troops in 45 years in the disputed Galwan Valley. He sustained a serious head wound at the time and has since been considered a hero in China. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in the incident; China never disclosed its own casualty toll.
Luo Zhihuan was the only one allowed to carry the torch past spectators. About 400 officials, volunteers, athletes, and journalists were invited to the opening ceremony. Since then, the torch has been moving through the city without spectators due to the Covid pandemic. ck
The Olympics and media always went hand in hand. This was already the case at the very first Olympics of the modern era in 1906 when correspondents telegraphed the results and their impressions to the world. Even back then, it made little sense to hold a global sporting event only for local spectators. And the media always reported a lot about the host country: About the party atmosphere in Athens and the nightly torchlight processions, but also about the organizational chaos. Back in 1924, there were already 1,000 journalists on-site in Paris.
Since then, media coverage of the host country has become a key motivation for hosting the expensive Games. In 2008, this strategy worked out well for China: The image of the emerging superpower ended up with a big boost. This year, on the other hand, it looks like China’s public image might take a big hit instead – at least in parts of the world like Europe and the USA, where human rights issues play a role.
Therefore, the Chinese government is currently trying everything in its power to control media coverage. Since it has little influence over classic media of democratic countries, it is instead evading them as much as possible. For example, the state propaganda factory produces videos that show a serene Xinjiang. And that is not all, even US media personalities are being paid to cheer for the 2022 Olympics, as Fabian Peltsch reports today. That’s perfectly legal, of course. But it shows how the structures of an open society can be hijacked from the outside.
Tomorrow, on Friday, the Games will officially kick off and will be held until February 20. This time, 3,000 journalists have been accredited for the event. Marcel Grzanna has taken a look at the advice the organization Reporters Without Borders is giving journalists along the way. Here, too, it is about controlling the perception of the country. TV stations should not broadcast pre-recorded images from China and instead use their own footage, whenever possible. And reporters should distinguish between the party, the people and the nation. The CP does not necessarily represent the entire population, and “China” is not necessarily identical to the communists’ vision of their country.
The Olympic Charter even predates the 1924 Olympics in Paris. The Olympics are based on a philosophy that calls for the self-improvement of people and society. It is true that they have always taken place in countries with all kinds of constitutions and forms of government. But it is China’s brazen propaganda of an ideal world that is provoking an allergic reaction in the free world today. If China were just a little more transparent, open, and honest, at least like it was in 2008, the backlash would not be as strong.
Since the mid-1990s, the Chinese government has been deliberately manipulating public opinion in the US and Europe with paid comments in online forums. Now, Beijing is paying foreign Internet users to improve the tattered image of the 2022 Winter Olympics. The Chinese consulate in New York has hired a US PR agency to buy young influencers to spread the Chinese narrative in the West with sponsored content.
New Jersey-based Vippi Media reportedly signed a $300,000 contract to generate at least 3.4 million impressions on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, aimed primarily at a younger audience, before and during the Olympics. The explicit goal is to share “interesting and meaningful things before/during/after Beijing Winter Olympics.” Examples include the athletes’ preparations for the Games, modern technology, emotional moments, or Beijing’s cultural monuments.
The contract split the content into three categories. 70 percent is intended to promote Chinese culture. 20% is to highlight “cooperation and any good things in China-US relations”. The focus of the remaining 10 percent will be contributed by the Chinese consulate as needed. Examples include China’s fight against climate change and environmental protection. The general idea is to focus exclusively on positive messages about China.
Vippi Media founder Vipinder Jaswal dismissed these activities as harmless. “What we are trying to do is to simply highlight the integrity and dignity of the Olympic;” he told the British newspaper The Guardian. Jaswal previously worked for the conservative Fox News network, which is now one of China’s biggest critics. These days, he says, “boycotts don’t help mutual understanding … I don’t support boycotts.” Jaswal is facing criticism in the US for his deals with China’s propaganda department.
However, influencers trying to sway public opinion in China’s favor are by no means the exception. In December, the New York Times reported how Beijing is instrumentalizing foreign YouTubers and other content producers living in China for propaganda purposes. For example, they are given access to regions where foreign journalists have long been barred from entering. In one case, Israeli-born vlogger Raz Gal-Or was allowed to visit the cotton fields of Xinjiang in April 2021 – just when fashion companies like H&M and Nike had announced that they would no longer buy cotton from the region due to the forced labor of Uyghurs.
Gal-Or only indirectly addresses the accusations. His video is primarily intended to feign normality. He drives a tractor with well-fed farmers and plays air guitar on a traditional dotar lute during a house visit. “They have their own culture and they have a lot of unique traditions. But when I came here, I’ve realized that there is really a true harmony between how they find themselves as Chinese and as Uyghurs,” the young man tells Chinese state media in another video. “Everything is totally normal here.”
The message of other content producers is that the re-education camps in Xinjiang are a myth and that the West is merely envious of China’s success. There is the Shenzhen-based father-son duo Lee and Oli Barret, for example, who celebrate Beijing’s “superior” covid control. Or retiree Kirk Apesland, aka “Gweilo 60,” who repeatedly stresses what the West can learn from China. Nevertheless, “Gweilo 60” now wants to return to Canada because of better health insurance.
The videos in question often seem self-produced. Behind the camera, however, are typically professionals from the Chinese state media who direct them. Raz Gal-Or’s travel video, subtitled in several languages, was shared by Chinese embassies and Chinese foreign media around the globe – and was thus able to generate unusually high traffic.
YouTube and Google’s algorithms favor content that is shared a lot, which flushes the videos to the top of search engines. Often, accounts are created for the sole purpose of sharing videos like Gal-Or’s, writes the New York Times. Of the 534 accounts that re-shared the video after it appeared, two-fifths had only ten or fewer followers. For some, Gal-Or’s video was even the first they had ever shared.
Video platforms such as YouTube have set themselves an obligation to label sponsorships & endorsements to ensure transparency about paid political advertising. However, they are somewhat powerless against opinion pieces that appear to be self-produced, like Gal-Or videos, because a direct link to the Chinese government cannot be proven in most cases. This allows the Chinese government to spread its narrative on a large scale without making it look like propaganda at first glance.
However, this strategy called “borrowing a mouth to speak” is only a small part of China’s campaign to become a global media superpower. China’s head of state Xi Jinping had already mentioned the phrase “telling China’s story well” at a Politburo meeting on “propaganda and ideology” shortly after taking office in 2013.
In particular, the China Global Television Network (CGTN), as the international branch of the Chinese state broadcaster CCTV is called, has since massively expanded its influence. The media house, which reports to the party’s Central Propaganda Department, operates six channels in English, French, Arabic, Russian and Chinese. Programs are broadcast in more than 140 countries. Production studios are located in London, Washington, and Nairobi. Anchors are usually from the respective countries.
While Western media companies are laying off more and more staff, CGTN is recruiting young journalists with generous salaries. Last summer, for example, the British press reported that CGTN was luring so-called ‘Media Challengers’ at British universities with prize money of $10,000 and the promise of professional journalism education. The aim of the ‘Media Challenger’ campaign is to “build a platform for aspiring young people around the world to display their talents, chase their dreams, and acquire a deeper understanding of China,” according to CGTN’s website.
CGTN’s propaganda and the army of influencers may seem crude. However, the plan to sway international discourse in China’s favor by using mass and range could succeed. Videos on TikTok and YouTube are not selected and categorized by traditional media gatekeepers. Who gets to see them, in the end, is determined by algorithms. For many young TikTok users, this type of content could be the first time they learn about the situation in Xinjiang. And they might hear about Olympic moments of happiness before reports of arrested activists kill their sports enthusiasm.
During the Olympic Games, which officially begin tomorrow, numerous TV stations around the world will inevitably have to rely on pre-produced footage from Chinese state television. Covid regulations for journalists massively restrict their freedom of movement. Media coverage is very difficult under these conditions. That is why the non-governmental organization “Reporters without Borders” (RSF) has published a special guide. It urges German media to exercise caution when cooperating with China’s state media. “Our handbook is intended to raise awareness of Beijing’s international media strategy in our country – and to provide guidance to editorial teams when opportunities for cooperation arise,” says RSF Executive Director Christian Mihr.
The guideline categorically recommends: “Editorial cooperation with Chinese propaganda media should not be initiated, and existing ones should be terminated.” The RSF warns that even in supposedly neutral reporting sequences, “subtle narratives of the regime in Beijing can be conveyed”. Even if media images were accompanied by critical texts and the source of the sequences was disclosed, these images would acquire a power of interpretation that would have an effect on audiences in the interest of the Chinese government. Existing cooperation with media close to the government should be reduced “to a minimum.”
The German public radio and television broadcaster NDR has already come under massive criticism in the past for producing joint discussion programs with the state television station CGTN. CGTN is the international branch of China’s state television CCTV. The UK had revoked the station’s broadcasting license in early 2021 due to its close ties to the Chinese government. CGTN was then also temporarily off the air in Germany. German public state-owned international broadcaster Deutsche Welle also worked closely with the central broadcasting body CCTV in the past.
Foreign reporters will be unable to conduct investigative work outside the Olympic bubble during the Olympics. This will likely tempt journalists to exchange information with the many volunteers of the organizing committee. However, in an interview with China.Table, journalist Qin Liwen from Berlin warns not to mistake the information obtained in the process as personal opinions.
“Without exception, all volunteers and other staff are downright trained to either evade questions or give answers that paint the regime in a good light,” Qin says. “That doesn’t mean you can’t ask questions. But you should be aware that you are actually speaking with the Ministry of Propaganda of the People’s Republic of China.” Qin should know, as she helped run the English website for the organizing committee BOCOG during the 2008 Summer Games.
To cover the potential demand for information and visual material From China in German editorial offices, Reporters Without Borders, therefore, recommends increased cooperation with independent media with a China focus and located abroad whenever possible. Only “as a last resort” should “short sequences from sources close to the state be adopted under certain circumstances.” Cooperation with foreign correspondents should be increased.
However, the government of the People’s Republic is preventing an expansion of the correspondent network in its country. In fact, it is making it harder and harder for foreign publishers and TV broadcasters to work on the ground. Especially US media has suffered a massive bloodletting of correspondents, because new visas were denied, or because existing visas were revoked on short notice. The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC) also identified new intimidation tactics in its annual report published on Monday (China.Table reported). According to the report on media freedom, correspondents experience increasingly aggressive threats.
The RSF demands that Chinese media should be subject to the “same positive obligations” in Germany as domestic media. They should respect “certain basic standards”; violations of these standards should be sanctioned. In practice, however, it is problematic that basic standards such as sincerity, pluralism, and respect for human dignity are not defined. What some consider sincere, others consider as fake news. At least publishers and editors can define standards and carefully select their partners in their own houses.
According to the RSF, caution should be exercised when cooperating with interview partners “whose titles bear harmless and positive terms – such as peace, people, friendship, development, understanding, unity.” There is a very high chance that these are organs belonging to the so-called United Front, which spread Chinese positions and interests in influential parts of society through relentless global networking.
The 25-page handbook also deciphers the autocrats’ lines of argumentation in numerous topics. For example, considering the party, the people, and the nation as the same: The party claims that it speaks for all Chinese without exception. According to this logic, any criticism of the party is an attack on the Chinese people. The regime has used this practice for many years. A popular accusation against critics, which it readily applies and is constantly repeated by international media, is that the feelings of 1.4 billion Chinese have been hurt. The RSF sees this as the party’s attempt to “deflect any criticism of its rule” and emphasizes that “the distinction between the party and the people, however, is crucial.”
The competition between China and the West is not a clash between civilizations, the organization writes: “The real competition is between repressive CCP values and practices and the freedoms written in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” The RSF bases its argumentation on numerous media reports and publications by Western researchers, such as the book “Hidden Hand” by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg.
Nvidia’s role in the Chinese EV market is growing. According to Ali Kani, Vice-President of the US manufacturer of computer chips, Nvidia has signed more supply contracts in China than ever before. No sign of decoupling here (China.Table reported).
Nvidia’s Chinese customers include EV developers such as Geely’s Polestar, IM Motors, Li Auto, R Auto, and search engine giant Baidu. The latter is increasingly pushing into the market for autonomous driving. These companies not only want to use Nvidia’s chips but also base their vehicles on Nvidia’s DRIVE Technology. This Deep Learning-based computing platform allows autonomous vehicles to process large amounts of sensory data and make driving decisions in real-time. This is an important step toward fully autonomous driving.
The company’s first processor for autonomous driving, Nvidia DRIVE Xavier, manages 30 trillion operations per second and can be found in production cars and trucks. The second generation, called Nvidia DRIVE Orin, has only recently been on the market and can already process 254 trillion operations per second. Chinese startups Nio and Xpeng are already using Orin in their latest vehicles. In January, Chinese startup Pony.ai also announced the integration of Nvidia DRIVE Orin into its sixth-generation autonomous driving system. According to the company, this will pave the way for mass production of cars with fully autonomous driving level 4. In addition to the Chinese suppliers, Nvidia is also cooperating with Mercedes, Audi, Volvo, and Hyundai.
The third processor generation, Nvidia DRIVE Altan, presented in April 2021, is capable of much more: Altan can perform over 1000 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS), which is four times more than Nvidia DRIVE Orin. Nvidia’s goal is for Altan to become standard in vehicles by 2025. Nvidia also referred to Altan as “system-on-a-chip.”
The majority of Nvidia’s business to date has been with graphics cards and chips for PCSs, servers, and video game consoles. The automotive business has so far accounted for only a small part of Nvidia’s annual sales, which are estimated at more than $26 billion. Over the next six years, however, the company aims to earn at least $8 billion in the automotive industry. “Enabling autonomous vehicles is an enormous undertaking. The challenge is huge, but so are the rewards,” says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
China is one of the world’s most important markets for software-controlled vehicles, i.e. cars whose function is based primarily on powerful onboard computers. To perform autonomous driving functions, manufacturers rely on powerful chips.
However, chips are currently in short supply, and this has also hit the Chinese automotive industry hard (China.Table reported). Still, the Chinese EV grew again in 2021 for the first time in three years. This was largely thanks to strong EV sales, which accounted for 15 percent of total passenger vehicle sales in China (China.Table reported). Sales of NEVs more than doubled to 2.99 million vehicles in 2021, according to the China Automobile Association. In 2022, the association expects the overall passenger car market to grow by five percent, with NEVs accounting for a quarter of total sales. Moreover, at the end of this year, government purchasing subsidies EV in China are expected to expire (China.Table reported). This clearly shows that Beijing is confident that the market is stable enough to be self-sustaining.
China’s market is difficult to navigate, and it is not easy for Nvidia to balance its business amongst the political tension between the US and China. Since the US sanctions against Huawei, it became clear to every Chinese company how quickly they can be cut off from US technology. At the same time, Chinese laws require that vehicle data generated in China cannot be transferred abroad. Danny Shapiro, Vice President of automotive at Nvidia, explains that this is the reason why his company uses Chinese data centers. This allows Nvidia to ensure that data used to train artificial intelligence in cars also remains in China.
Meanwhile, Nvidia’s planned acquisition of the British microprocessor specialist ARM, which belongs to Japan’s Softbank, is the subject of controversy in China. The $40 billion purchase, announced in September 2020, would be the largest semiconductor deal in history. Should it still succeed, Nvidia would become one of the most powerful players in an ever-growing, important sector (China.Table reported).
It is not only the U.S. regulators that have already gotten involved due to “significant antitrust concerns.” The Chinese also publicly voiced their displeasure, including Huawei. The acquisition of ARM also needs to be approved in the EU and the UK, not just in China and the US.
China’s state-run Global Times newspaper calls the proposed acquisition “troubling” given the tensions between the US and China. “If ARM falls into US hands, Chinese technology companies would certainly be placed at a big disadvantage in the market,” a comment in the paper said.
Chinese companies placed on the US Entity List could potentially be excluded from using ARM-based chips (China.Table reported). At the same time, European companies that use ARM technology could, in turn, have difficulties supplying to China. According to insider reports, Nvidia therefore no longer expects the ARM takeover to go through at the moment. The company has already started to withdraw from the deal. The main reason is the skepticism of the US competition authorities.
Nvidia’s withdrawal from the ARM acquisition would at the same time prioritize the Chinese market and clear the way for a smoother supply to the Chinese automotive industry. Due to the rapid growth of autonomous driving, the segment will remain a good business for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, China will nevertheless also try to catch up in this field as well and, ultimately, become independent.
Eileen Gu (Chinese name Gu Ailing) is young, hip and doesn’t really fit into the outdated image of top Chinese athletes. In addition to her sports career, she is a model and brand ambassador for brands such as the Swiss watch brand IWC Schaffhausen, Red Bull, and the ski brand Factions. But the Chinese sporting goods manufacturer Anta also uses her in its advertising. Eileen Gu was born in San Francisco in 2003 to an immigrant Chinese mother and a US father. At the Winter Olympics, however, the 18-year-old is now competing for China in ski freestyle.
As a special form of skiing, freestyle skiing also requires creativity and artistic expression. The athletes perform acrobatic tricks such as jumps, flips, and turns. The entire run is scored on a scale of 1 to 100 by a panel of judges. It is a sport that is considered far too dangerous for China’s lone children and has therefore probably not received much support from parents so far.
This was also the case for Eileen Gu. Her mother didn’t want her daughter to ski race – she said it was far too dangerous. As a result, Gu ended up freestyle skiing and became one of the sport’s most promising talents. Gu’s biggest success to date came at the 2021 X Games skiing action festival in Aspen, Colorado. There, she became the first female rookie to win three medals. She was the first woman ever to compete in three freestyle disciplines. And she won a medal in each: gold in the halfpipe, gold in the superpipe, and bronze in big air (also called aerials). Overnight, Gu became the first Chinese woman to win a gold medal at the X Games. Her post about the victory on the Chinese short message service SinaWeibo received 23 million views. Just two months later, Gu won three more medals at the Freestyle World Cup in Calgary.
The 18-year-old is building one of the few remaining bridges between the US and China through her participation in the Beijing Winter Games. At a time when both governments are more and more geopolitically distanced from each other, and the US has declared a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Games, Gu is a soft power personified. Before the Games even started, China’s media were hyping the freestyle star. Her sponsor Red Bull, for example, shot a series of videos featuring Eileen Gu, which the technology company Tencent distributes on its platforms in China. The South China Morning Post newspaper recently showed photos of Gu eating a large portion of jiaozi straight after she arrived in China. The stuffed dumplings are Gu’s favorite, as her grandmother in San Francisco, who is from Beijing, always cooks them for her.
At the age of three, Eileen Gu stood on skis for the first time in the USA – it was the starting signal for a fast-paced career. And in 2019, at the tender age of 15, she decided to compete for China at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. “This was an incredibly tough decision for me to make,” the US American announced on her Instagram account at the time.
But the announcement hardly made waves in the sports world at the time. After all, no one knew in which discipline Gu would prove to be so outstanding that she would have any chance of winning a medal. However, Gu quickly changed that. At the 2020 Winter Youth Olympics in Lausanne, Switzerland, Gu won twice gold and once silver. She also racked up trophies in Canada and South Tyrol. Then came the successes at the X Games and in the World Cup.
Olympic athletes changing flags happens all the time. However, it is unclear whether Gu also changed her citizenship for her Olympic entry for China. The Olympic Charter allows dual citizenships; China does not. It remains unclear whether Gu was given a Chinese passport at all, whether she is allowed to have both passports as an exemption rule, or if she is now exclusively a Chinese citizen. The situation is similar for a large number of players on China’s ice hockey team who are native-born Americans or Canadians with Chinese roots. Nothing is known about their status either.
Either way, Eileen Gu’s decision now turns out to be a real PR coup for China. At 18, she has become the youngest athlete on Forbes’ “China 30 under 30” list. This has made her famous far beyond the borders of sports. She is not only good at sports, but her academic achievements are also impressive. For example, she was able to finish high school a year faster than her classmates – giving her more time to hone her technique and thus increase her chances at the Olympics. Thanks to her good grades, Gu can also score points with Chinese parents.
But Gu’s huge following among young people will matter much more. Brands such as jewelry manufacturer Tiffany & Co. and luxury fashion outfitter Louis Vuitton have also noticed this. For these brands, Gu shines as a brand ambassador from the covers of glossy magazines in China, Hong Kong, and Paris – and thus reaches the next generation of customers.
It’s only fitting that Gu herself has ambitious goals. She wants to prove to the world that PR and discipline can create a whole new dimension of reach, sympathy, and fan base. “The opportunity to inspire millions of young people where my mom was born, during the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Games is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help to promote the sport I love,” Gu wrote on Instagram. “If I can help inspire a young girl to break a boundary, my wishes will have come true.” No propaganda attempt by Chinese sports officials could have delivered such an authentic message. Ning Wang
The Olympic Torch is on its way through the sports venues of the Beijing Games. On Wednesday morning, in sunny and cold temperatures, Vice Premier Han Zheng handed over the torch in the Beijing Olympic Park to a true pioneer of Chinese winter sports: Luo Zhihuan, now 80 years old, was a speed skater in 1963 and was the first Chinese to win a gold medal in a winter sports discipline. Luo passed the torch to taikonaut Jing Haiping. The now 55-year-old is China’s first taikonaut, who has been in space three times on different missions.
For three days, the torch is now passed from hand to hand of the approximately 1,200 torchbearers between the ages of 14 and 86, as well as two robots. Numerous athletes, celebrities, contributors to the Olympics, and others are honored in this way. On Wednesday, China’s basketball legend Yao Ming handed over the torch to Greece’s ambassador to China, Georgios Iliopoulos. In Athens, Greece, the torch is symbolically lit before all Olympic Games and sent on its journey to the venue, and this time was no exception. Present were also two stars of the 2008 Summer Games: The architect of the Olympic stadium “Bird’s Nest” Li Xinggang and filmmaker Zhang Yimou, at the time director of the opening ceremony. The torch was also carried by several dozen contributors to the fight against COVID-19, including doctors and nurses.
The participation of Qi Fabao caused irritation in India. In 2020, Qi was the commander of the first lethal encounter between India and China’s border troops in 45 years in the disputed Galwan Valley. He sustained a serious head wound at the time and has since been considered a hero in China. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in the incident; China never disclosed its own casualty toll.
Luo Zhihuan was the only one allowed to carry the torch past spectators. About 400 officials, volunteers, athletes, and journalists were invited to the opening ceremony. Since then, the torch has been moving through the city without spectators due to the Covid pandemic. ck
