Building a Network for China’s Story, One Event at a Time
From a cultural event in Hangzhou to a media roundtable in Athens, two recent activities illustrate how China engages global media on multiple tracks.
Welcome back to Lingua Sinica!
This week we wanted to point readers to the important and growing resource represented by the Lingua Sinica website, which is fully searchable. The database is conceived as a factual resource on “media engagement activities” (MEAs) undertaken by the PRC globally, which we investigate and log without pre-framing them as “influence operations,” FIMI, or “propaganda.” In the process of unpacking these activities and their global partners — foreign companies and media outlets, PRC proxies, foreign missions, and so on — we can begin to see both the structures and the tactics that China employs to engage with the global media environment.
This week we want to point you to two activities logged in the database, both happening last week, one inside China and one in Europe. What do these activities tell us about China’s global media engagement?
Dalia Parete
Lingua Sinica Project Coordinator
Activity 1 — Inside China: Overseas Chinese Media Gather in Zhejiang Province May 19–20, 2026 · Lin’an, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province
Thirty overseas Chinese-language media outlets from 17 countries were brought to Zhejiang Province for an event centered on the culture of the Wu-Yue kingdom — an ancient state that ruled parts of present-day Zhejiang and Jiangsu during the Five Dynasties period (907–960 CE) — and how to promote it to international audiences. Participants discussed reaching overseas audiences through short-form drama, online games, and AI-generated content, with several framing their mission in terms of the Chinese Communist Party directive to “tell China’s story well” (講好中國故事). Eight representatives were formally appointed as “Wu-Yue Culture Overseas Promotion Officers.”
Did this event move the needle on global perceptions of China, or spread disinformation? Not necessarily. But it reveals something about how China approaches media engagement: with a long-term view, cultivating relationships through repeated cultural messaging, issuing apparently formal titles that seem to opt partners in, and defining shared content missions — building a network of overseas outlets oriented toward PRC objectives one event at a time.
What this activity illustrates:
Co-optation through cultural engagement inside China. Overseas media representatives are brought physically into China, given a cultural framing, a formal designation, and a content agenda. The subject is ancient history. The structure is about relationship-building with a clear policy direction.
Identifying players and proxies. Investigating the entities present reveals players whose connections to PRC overseas objectives go well beyond this single event. Euro Chinese Daily (歐洲僑報), the Bucharest-based outlet that reported the event, is, as Freedom House has documented and as its own participation confirms, a member of the Global Chinese Media Cooperation Forum, an international grouping of diaspora Chinese-language outlets overseen by China News Service (中國新聞社), the newswire that sits directly under the United Front Work Department of the CCP. Finance Vision Australia (財視澳洲), another named participant, is owned by Australia Longyi Group Pty Ltd (澳洲龍一集團), a Melbourne-registered company with branch operations in Shanghai whose friendship links include a United Front Work Department-supervised overseas Chinese federation. A third named participant, Dr. Metastar (鹿見寰宇), an Indonesian outlet launched in 2024, appears to function primarily as a vehicle for Chinese state media content — including from the CCP’s official People’s Daily (人民日報) — rather than as an independent news organization.
All three of these outlets can be viewed primarily as PRC communication vehicles, and beyond the May 19 event itself, the mapping of these entities fills in important pieces of a global puzzle, pointing the way to future monitoring of PRC media engagement activities. None of these outlets are acting illegally, and their participation in events of this kind may be entirely voluntary. But transparency about their institutional links and content orientation is essential for audiences, researchers, and policymakers seeking to understand the full landscape of Chinese-language media with official PRC ties operating globally
Activity 2 — In Europe: China–Greece Media Think Tank Dialogue Roundtable May 21, 2026 · Athens, Greece
It is difficult to measure or determine the impact of a single roundtable on the broader information environment. But this is also not how China strategically assesses events like this one. The goal is not immediate persuasion but the gradual accumulation of relationships, frameworks, and institutional footholds — foreign journalists, media bosses, politicians and others who have met their Chinese counterparts, shared a platform, and agreed in principle to future cooperation. In this case, concrete mechanisms were proposed: a joint China–Greece journalism prize (中希新聞獎) and a shared fact-checking body that, if realized, would establish longer-term engagement. Each event is a thread in a longer weave.
What this activity illustrates:
Establishing infrastructure first. The Chinese School of Classical Studies at Athens (中國古典文明研究院), or CSCSA, presents itself as an independent cultural institution, akin to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the British School at Athens. But its institutional make-up as a CASS-linked association registered to the Chinese Academy of History makes it more like the office of a PRC state institution in Europe. Establishing such a foothold enables repeated engagements that appear locally grounded but are institutionally anchored in Beijing.
Carrying domestic ideological and information control functions abroad. The co-host, the All-China Journalists Association (中華全國新聞工作者協會), or ACJA, administers mandatory journalist licensing and training in the “Marxist View of Journalism” (馬克思主義新聞觀) inside China. In Athens it proposed joint reporting projects, a shared fact-checking mechanism, and an annual China–Greece journalism prize. Given the association’s core institutional values, the arrangement risks importing, through the language of professional cooperation, China’s state-centered press and information values.
These events, just two among scores we are still processing, show China’s media engagement operating simultaneously on two tracks — drawing diaspora media inward while projecting PRC institutional presence outward. The patterns become increasingly apparent only through bottom-up research and background investigation, as individual data points accumulate into a larger picture.
Taken in isolation, who cares if Zhejiang is promoting the culture of an ancient kingdom to a group of overseas journalists? At the level of a single event, it seems to reveal very little. But map the attendees, trace their institutional connections, and what emerges with time is a larger picture of China’s systematic effort to cultivate a globally distributed network of media actors oriented toward PRC communication objectives.
This is what the Lingua Sinica database is designed to make visible over time. Please use the resource, give us feedback — and send us leads!