Last June, the Philippine government ordered the closure of the boldly independent news site Rappler. In February 2021, a tough Senegalese government minister won a defamation lawsuit against Le Témoin. The same month in Malaysia, a court found Malaysiakini in contempt of court. of the Court for comments from readers on its online page criticizing the judiciary.
The media faces restrictions around the world. However, what those 3 media outlets also do not have is a record of exposure of the political, economic and media influence of the Chinese government in their respective societies.
By abolishing them for domestic political reasons, the national government is also weakening its own country’s ability to interfere through the world’s toughest authoritarian regime.
As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) prepares to meet at its 20th Congress starting Oct. 16, a new Freedom House report documents the component’s increasingly intense efforts to shape news policy in a varied cross-section of 30 countries. Countries are responding. Their main conclusion: a relaxed press is an indispensable component of a country’s resilience to influence the campaigns of foreign authoritarian regimes, but this defense is undermined by anti-democratic movements carried out by the target nation’s own government.
In 19 of the countries examined in our report, domestic attacks on the press and civil society have increased since 2019.
The CCP has continued its efforts to influence foreign media more aggressively and urgently since 2019, when it began facing waves of global condemnation for its atrocities in Xinjiang, its crackdown in Hong Kong, and its mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Beijing is the crusade to assign a distorted CCP symbol as a guilty foreign stakeholder.
Our report found that Beijing is resorting to covert and coercive tactics, such as diplomatic harassment, cyberbullying, the heavy deployment of fake social media accounts, and spreading CCP narratives through friendly local voices.
Independent journalists and civil society activists have played a vital role in fighting such tactics by losing their cool in China-related disinformation campaigns, potentially corrupt investment deals, and human rights abuses through the CCP. In doing so, they defied self-censorship pressures from the Chinese government, its proxies and officials in their own countries, which happened in 12 of the countries assessed in our report.
In Kenya, the Independent Media Council publicly rebuked the state-owned Kenya Broadcasting Corporation in 2019 for republishing Chinese state propaganda in Xinjiang. that had been manipulated for a percentage of false data or stimulated through bots.
In March 2022, the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines issued rules for reporting on China in reaction to the country’s growing influence in the region, emphasizing transparency and independence and avoiding racist language toward Chinese.
While democracies cannot take advantage of Beijing’s willingness to expand its influence globally, they can their own policies and responses. When democratic leaders undermine human rights coverage and weaken democratic norms in the country, they open their countries to potential exploitation through harsh authoritarian states like China. .
Our report documented several countries attacking their media in a way that weakens their democratic defenses opposed to CCP influence. India’s Hindu nationalist government has overseen the arrests of hounds and exerted monetary and editorial pressure on the media to limit critical reporting policy.
For now, media teams in India are still flexible enough to fend off the Chinese embassy’s efforts to shape its reporting on Taiwan, especially since relations between New Delhi and Beijing are bad lately. However, additional efforts to structurally weaken independent media may save it. reporting on the Chinese government’s influence efforts.
Meanwhile, in Nigeria, bloodhounds filed freedom of information requests to denounce the Nigerian government’s acceptance of billions of dollars in opaque loans from a Chinese state-owned bank. The CCP-style “Great Firewall” or introduces Chinese-style criminal sentences for critical social media posts.
Other democracies have also moved away from their human rights values in years.
In Britain, the government has proposed weakening protections for public interest reporting through the Official Secrets Act, scrapping and updating the Human Rights Act, and downgrading online encryption tools.
In the United States, two Supreme Court justices expressed interest in overturning the precedent of defamation coverage that has existed since 1964. The country’s executive and legislative branches have at times undertaken efforts that would weaken encryption technology. And the bloodhounds faced violence and arrest as he covered the 2020 protests after years of demonization by political leaders as “the enemy of the people. “
Beijing will exploit anti-democratic movements in democracies to justify its own human rights violations. Freedom House traced 16 years of democratic decline and how authoritarian regimes like the CCP expanded their influence in this vacuum globally.
This influence has manifested itself in tactics to shape news policy in a manner favorable to the CCP, with local media or governments censoring or restricting politics on Beijing’s behalf.
ESPN reportedly issued a note to reporters banning policy policy in China or Hong Kong as they discussed the fallout from a tweet through Houston Rockets Guyager General supporting Hong Kong protesters in 2019. The governments of Mozambique and Hong Kong Malaysia have a limited local news policy. critical of the Chinese authorities. Britain’s GQ magazine removed an article naming Chinese leader Xi Jinping as the third worst-dressed man of 2019 after his parent company allegedly found out and said it would cause “offense. “
Policymakers in democracies deserve to make corrections before it’s too late. They will need to apply internal democratic standards to protect human rights and build resilience to authoritarian activities.
They will have to end attacks on the media, civil society, and Americans exercising the right to free speech.
Lawmakers are scrapping the law criminalizing “fake news” and adopting stronger protections against defamation lawsuits. They ensure that regulations on foreign investment or investments are transparent and impartially enforced, while preventing political persecution of independent media and civil society teams with foreign ties.
Any measures to limit or counter the CCP’s malign influence will have to be proportionate, legal, and in a different way in line with foreign human rights standards.
While Rappler, The Witness and Malaysiakini have so far withstood attacks from their governments, they operate in a threatened space.
The CCP is actively adapting and applying what it has learned internally to suppress dissenting voices abroad.
Democratic societies have the means to resist this effort, but if they want to succeed, they will have to avoid damaging the very equipment and assets that are their biggest shields against China’s plans.
The perspectives expressed in this article are those of and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial position.