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SECTION 6 Media When the Xinhua News Agency leased a massive sign in Times Square in 2011 and then agreed to a twenty-year lease for a new US headquarters on the top floor of a Broadway skyscraper, it was clear that, as analyst He Qinglian put it, “The Chinese have arrived.” Xinhua’s foray into Manhattan was followed by a website of the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, which set up shop in the Empire State Building.” At a time when Western media outlets are challenged by the internet and weakened by uncertain business models, China’s rise as a major player in the media landscape around the globe has become all the more worthy of attention. The Chinese government’s campaign to “grab the right to speak” from Western media outlets and independent Chinese voices, which it accuses of distorting news about China and sullying China’s image, has come with a rapid expansion of China’s English-language media operations, a concerted campaign to control overseas Chinese-language media, and ongoing efforts to block attempts by Western media to contend inside China. Xinhua News Agency journalist Xiong Min summed up the motivation for China’s new campaign in 2010. “The right to speak in the world is not distributed equally,” she wrote. “Eighty percent of the information is monopolized by Western media.”* It was time, she said, to end that monopoly by means of what China has called the Grand External Propaganda Campaign (XB). Since coming to power, President Xi Jinping has overseen the intensification of this external propaganda blitz, which was launched in 2007 by former Party general secretary Hu Jintao. As Xi told the November 2014 Foreign Affairs Work Conference in Beijing: “We should increase China’s soft power, give a good Chinese narrative, and better communicate China’s messages to the world.” This is the task CCP propagandists have now undertaken in an increasingly fulsome way. On February 19, 2016, Xi visited the headquarters of the People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency, and China Central Television, where he again stressed the importance of external propaganda work.® At the August 2018 National Meeting on Ideology and Propaganda, Xi stated: “To present good images, we should improve our international communication capability, tell China’s stories well, disseminate China’s voice, show an authentic HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020538