In the fall of 2019, just before global borders closed, an international journalists’ association decided to canvass its members about a subject that kept coming up in informal conversations: What is China doing?
What it found was astonishing in its scope. Journalists from countries as tiny as Guinea-Bissau had been invited to sign agreements with their Chinese counterparts.
The Chinese government was distributing versions of its propaganda newspaper China Daily in English — and also Serbian.
A Filipino journalist estimated that more than half of the stories on a Philippines newswire came from the Chinese state agency Xinhua.
A South African media group raised money from Chinese investors, then fired a columnist who wrote about China’s suppression of its Uyghur minority.
Journalists in Peru faced intense social media criticism from combative Chinese government officials.
