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81 From 1980, Beijing added to its stable of foreign-facing propaganda publications—such as Beijing Review, China Reconstructs, and China Pictorial—by starting or reopening more than twenty periodicals, including the English-language China Daily, the overseas edition of the People’s Daily, the overseas edition of Outlook (&), and the Voice of China (44748). The Party also resumed publishing material for overseas Chinese. During the Cultural Revolution, the number of magazines targeting overseas Chinese had shrunk to ten, whereas by the end of the 1980s, it had surpassed 130. Before 1982, the state-run Xinhua News Agency had focused almost solely on providing news to domestic Chinese clients. In 1983, however, it also began sending news to international clients. The China News Service, which had suspended operations during the Cultural Revolution, also resumed work, sending hundreds of stories a day to overseas Chinese-language media. Today the CNS employs more than two thousand people worldwide, working out of forty-six bureaus. The Party directed its media outlets in their overseas work to support socialism with Chinese characteristics, push the policies of reform and opening up, and oppose hegemonism, or, in other words, fight against Western ideological control. In the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China’s propaganda agencies redoubled their efforts to “grab the right to speak,” or gain “discourse power” (i#iB 4X). The worldwide torch-lighting ceremony touched off free-Tibet rallies and other human rights protests that angered Chinese authorities and some Chinese as well. An anti-CNN movement began in China, alleging that Western media outlets were distorting “China’s story.” This was the genesis for what has come to be known as the Grand Overseas Propaganda Campaign (AJB), first promoted by the administration of Party Chief Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. The International Herald Leader, a publication of the Xinhua News Agency, reported in 2009 that foreign propaganda work had been elevated by the Party to a “systematic, strategic position,” the goal of which was to “grab back the right to speak, and improve China’s international image.”’ Reports that had first surfaced in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post in 2009, that China had earmarked $7 billion for the campaign, were soon repeated by the Chinese media, most notably in the March 14 edition of Phoenix Weekly.® The Grand Overseas Propaganda Campaign has been grand, indeed, with Chinese sources reporting hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on a multitude of projects designed to bolster China’s image. The expansion of the Xinhua News Agency is but one example. From 120, the number of Xinhua bureaus around the world has now grown to more than 200° and its client base has expanded to more than 1,450, What is more, it now reports in seven languages and competes directly with all the major wire Section 6 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020540