Media in Focus: 'Iron Brothers' for the China Story
Launched in Pakistan eight years ago, Huashang Weekly offers an up-close look at how China is telling its story overseas by propping up news outlets that amplify its voice.
As its Chinese name, which literally translates as “Chinese enterprise,” suggests, Pakistan’s Huashang Weekly (华商报), is a publication aimed at Chinese businesspeople and other PRC expatriates in the South Asian country. Established in 2016, it is the only bilingual Chinese-English weekly officially licensed for circulation in Pakistan — a long-time PRC ally often called China’s “iron brother.”
The offline and online weekly, which says it has a staff of both Chinese and Pakistani journalists, is helmed by editor-in-chief Zhu Jialei (朱家磊), who at the tender age of 26 was plucked out of Shanghai as a cub reporter to take charge of the newly formed publication. In accounts from official state media, Zhu is painted as a precocious adventurer, a “fresh recruit” who has “persevered in foreign lands.”
One profile has the hard-working editor struggling against Pakistani recalcitrance, noting that “the enthusiasm of local people for life is far greater than their passion for work,” while another notes with a hint of admiration that when he first arrived Zhu “knew nothing about running a newspaper overseas.”
But tangled up with Zhu’s colorful personal adventure story in Pakistan — did we mention he was hospitalized within a week of his arrival? — are threads that tie Huashang Weekly to China’s larger state strategy for overseas media influence.
Iron Brothers
The story of Huashang Weekly began in 2016, the year after the establishment of the “China-Pakistan Economic Corridor” (中巴经济走廊), a 15-year bilateral infrastructure initiative that pushed a wave of Chinese investors and laborers to the country. It made sense that the growing Chinese community would need a news and information outlet. And so, as one official account reported, Simon Geng (耿思萌), the former CEO of Huawei Pakistan, launched Huashang Weekly in July that year “under the support of the Chinese Embassy in Pakistan.”
Despite his prior association with Huawei Pakistan, no information is available about Geng’s role at the telecoms giant or in the Chinese community there before the founding of his weekly newspaper. Geng is currently connected to at least six companies in China, including Shanghai Infoshare B2B (上海简享电子商务有限公司), a consultancy created in March 2016 that is now corporate headquarters for a global network of related firms. These include the Islamabad-based consultancy Infoshare, which helps Chinese investors and businesses in Pakistan — and publishes Huashang Weekly.
As one official account reported, Simon Geng . . . launched Huashang Weekly “under the support of the Chinese Embassy in Pakistan.”
Another core member of the Infoshare and Huashang Weekly team is Derek Wang, deputy chief executive of the Islamabad consultancy, who set up shop in Pakistan in 2012. In 2017, Wang told CNN, "There's a lot of curiosity amongst private Chinese investors about the potential in Pakistani markets.” He added that Huashang Daily had started to “[erase] the language barrier… so these investors can have an understanding of what's happening in Pakistan."
Wang’s comment draws a clear line between Huashang Daily and the bread-and-butter consulting work of Infoshare on the ground in Pakistan, particularly as Chinese investment in the country soared between 2015 and 2017. A case could certainly be made that Chinese business people urgently needed an outlet that could help them navigate a tough emerging market. And Huashang Weekly seemed to develop rapidly as a publication that could fill this gap — in two languages, no less — offering a bridge between the Chinese and Pakistani business communities.
Within two years, Huashang Weekly was distributing around 10,000 copies each week in major cities like Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad. In October 2017, just as Chinese FDI in the country was peaking (see the graph above), Infoshare forged a “strategic partnership” with Pakistan’s Jang Group of Newspapers, providing a weekly 1-2 page supplement in Chinese for their English-language daily The News, which boasts a daily circulation of 200,000 copies.
On LinkedIn, Infoshare describes itself as “a B2B [business-to-business] company, focusing on bridging the gap between investors and opportunities around the globe, with a specific focus towards the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.” That focus is borne out on the pages of Huashang Weekly, which hosts a dedicated section on the 3,000 km infrastructure network project stretching from the snow-capped peaks at the PRC border down to the warm Arabian Sea.
But while the benefits for a consulting firm of having a newspaper under its umbrella are clear, a closer look at the content offered by Huashang Weekly complicates its role as a professional and credible information source. While the outlet claims to employ local as well as Chinese journalists, and says it provides “quick access to information about Pakistan,” its content skews heavily toward relaying the official narratives and perspectives of the Chinese state rather than providing the sort of original, on-the-ground reporting that might inform investors and businesses.
A closer look at the content offered by Huashang Weekly complicates its role as a professional and credible information source.
One important reason for this lies in the newspaper’s second major partnership, signed in 2019 with the official China News Service (CNS), which since 2018 has been operated by the United Front Work Department (UFWD) — the primary department within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tasked with influencing elites and organizations outside the country, and especially Chinese diaspora communities.
Deep Foundations
In September 2019, just one year after CNS was folded into the UFWD system, executives from the newswire visited the Huashang newsroom and signed a long-term cooperation agreement with the outlet. Visitors included Xia Chunping (夏春平), the deputy editor-in-chief of China News Service, who called Huashang Weekly a “bridge” between China and Pakistan that could serve the joint infrastructure corridor. Zhu Jialei, the weekly’s young editor-in-chief, said he hoped to “further deepen cooperation with the head office of CNS and relevant local branches.”
Today, the partnership with CNS has deepened to the extent that Huashang Weekly seems little more than a vehicle — a borrowed boat — for the state newswire’s external messaging about China and its unalloyed positives.
The vast majority of the content in Huashang Weekly, online and offline, comes not from its staff writers and translators, but directly from CNS and other sources — those “relevant local branches” Zhu spoke of — linked to the UFWD system. These branches include, for example, the Hong Kong China News Agency (HKCNA), whose coverage on this year’s Friendship Cities Conference appeared earlier this week on the Huashang Weekly website. HKCNA is controlled by the CCP’s Hong Kong and Macau Work Office, and maintains close ties with CNS.
This month, Huashang Weekly published a flurry of stories about the G20 Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where Chinese leader Xi Jinping met with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to deepen ties and hail a “new phase” in the relationship. Each one of these stories — focusing cheerily on mutual friendship and the “deep foundations for cooperation” — was attributed in its dateline to “Pakistan’s Huashang Weekly,” suggesting to readers that they were the work of newsroom staff. But each and every story was salted with references to CNS, making the real source clear to the eagle-eyed reader.
Oddly, on the Huashang Weekly website, each story in this flood of China News Service content comes with a soft red disclaimer at the tail end: “For the record, this information has not been strictly verified, and does not represent the views of this site, which assumes no legal responsibility.”
Who, then, is responsible for Huashang Weekly? Whose views are represented on the publication’s site? Like many news outlets operating across the world with the support of China’s diplomatic missions, Huashang Weekly is a complex intersection of private, commercial, and state interests — and a prime example of how the Chinese state works concertedly to map its DNA on Chinese communities everywhere to ensure that the views of no-one are truly represented beyond those of the leadership.
Whatever Infoshare’s real stake in this ostensibly community newspaper, it is clear that the CNS partnership with Huashang Weekly offers China a direct channel in Pakistan to “tell China’s story well” — even if the “iron brothers” disclaim all responsibility in the same breath.
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