The cadres have made China a manufacturing powerhouse, and now they want the "soft power" of global media influence. Rowan Callick looks at the prospect. Artwork by John Tiedemann.
Chalk one up for China in its new campaign - to become world leader not only in making just about every consumer product globally distributed, not only in its accumulation of foreign reserves kept quarantined from its own consumers, but also in the "soft power" game of international media influence.
Li - the fifth most powerful figure in the Communist Party hierarchy - instructed China's state media, after the horrific Sichuan earthquake last May, to focus on good news and especially on the accomplishments of the Party.
He has insisted on a "civilised" internet for China, arranging for the Beijing Association of Online Media to act as the distributor of cash from the government to reward - modestly - internet "volunteers" who inform on any web posts they deem politically or socially problematic. This is in addition to the 30-40,000 professional corps of net police.
At the end of 2008, Li told the country's media to step up construction of international news channels and ensure that China's media was widely received around the world.
Then in February this year, more detailed announcements began to emerge, revealing that the propaganda department will deploy $10bn to promote the country's image internationally by boosting the resources of the state news agency Xinhua, the Communist Party flagship People's Daily, and state-owned China Central Television (CCTV).
This push is coming as Western media focus on surviving the economic downturn, with many downsizing their operations. The financial crisis Leading China analyst Willy Lam, an adjunct professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, describes the campaign as an "aggressive projection of soft power". It follows China's observation of CNN, then the BBC and Al Jazeera, pursuing their institutional and national causes through worldwide TV stations in English.
Media observers are asking whether this development also has the capacity to change China's domestic media. If the new TV channels are to attract a significant international audience, China will need to open itself up in a new way. In turn, this has the potential to change media cultures within China.
The rush of new state money in to CCTV - which also carries extensive commercial advertising, like every public broadcaster in China - will enable it to multiply its channels from the present 13 to more than 200, all digital. And CCTV holds a monopoly of TV coverage of news deemed of national or international significance, with all stations around the country taking its main evening news bulletin.
The network has access to six satellites to enable 24-hour global coverage. Shortly before last August's Olympic Games in Beijing, it opened French and Spanish channels, with Russian and Arabic channels following later this year. The present English language channel, CCTV9, is broadcast widely within China and is delivered via satellite to a limited number of overseas partners for re-broadcast. But CCTV9 - where Australian journalist and former ABC weatherman Edwin Maher is the anchor newsreader - appears set to be superseded or relaunched.
The new international flagship will be a 24-hour English language news channel. The global ambitions of CCTV are encapsulated in its extraordinary 230m-high headquarters towering over Beijing's business district. At $1billion, it's the country's costliest single building apart from airport terminals. It is unique; not a tower but a continuous, Z-shaped loop without a single right-angle, designed by celebrity Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. It contains 100,000 tonnes of steel - the equivalent of 1.25 per cent of Australia's entire annual steel production. And it is the second-largest office building in the world, where 10,000 people will work.
But the TV station is hardly universally admired within China. In January, a group of writers and lawyers launched an internet-based campaign to encourage people to stop viewing it, with the slogan: "Say no to CCTV, say no to brainwashing". They said its news shows "focus only on the bright side" when reporting domestic events, while taking the opposite tack in international coverage.
One of the most prominent faces of CCTV is 32-year-old Rui Chenggang, whose nightly financial news bulletin is viewed by 13 million. His is a profile that China wants to present to the world: young, super-smart, photogenic, internationally attuned, fluent in English, media savvy and a convincing spokesman for China's surge to superpowerdom.
Like a scholar of old taking the gruelling exam to become a mandarin, he won his way against the odds to a small, elite foreign affairs university in Beijing. "I was set to become a diplomat, that was my dream," he says. Then he met Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who had recently retired as secretary-general of the UN. Rui asked who would he pick as the first new member of the Security Council, if it were successfully reconstructed. Boutros-Ghali answered swiftly: CNN. Rui changed career accordingly. He says: "So often China is misinterpreted and misunderstood.
"There's so much bias against China, particularly in the Western world." He adds that when President Hu Jintao spoke to the Australian parliament, he received a long-lasting, standing ovation. "In no other country has he had such a warm welcome."
He recalled having dinner with News Corporation chief executive Rupert Murdoch and asking him if he might consider spending $1bn on a new headquarters, as CCTV did. "He said never. He said that ‘the show we produce and the articles we print decide whether we live or die, not the building we operate out of.'"
Willy Lam says of China's global thrust: "As with major efforts in other arenas, this media development has been initiated by a marathon of speeches by Communist Party senior cadres.
Li Changchun told officials attending a national conference on propaganda and ideology that they must vigorously sing the praises of the achievements of the Party, socialism, the reform policy, and the great motherland ... for assiduous efforts to augment the soft power of Chinese culture, and to further elevate our national image."
The state news agency Xinhua plans to use its own new funds to expand its overseas bureaus from 100 to 186. And People's Daily will include a new English version of its subsidiary Global Times, a publication that has become a lightning rod for staunchly nationalist sentiments. This may set it in competition with the state-owned China Daily.
As Lam explains: "Particularly since most private and semi-government international news and cultural organisations are downsizing due to harsh economic realities, China's multi-billion-dollar propaganda push will catch eyeballs galore."
Dong Manyuan, a senior researcher at the Foreign Ministry think tank, the China Institute of International Studies, says Chinese soft power is more appealing than its Western rivals because it exudes peace and harmony. And Li Xiguang, a media expert at Tsinghua University in Beijing, says: "We must let the whole world hear the stories that Chinese citizens have to tell about their democracy, liberty, human rights and the rule of law."
But this will be difficult, since those who talk too openly about such issues tend to be incarcerated - as have the leading minds behind "Charter 08", a document signed by thousands of Chinese intellectuals that urges the Party to consider separating itself from the government and the army.
A Human Rights Watch report says that at least 26 journalists remain in jail in China today, due solely to their reporting.
Lam says: "Unless questions about censorship and brainwashing are answered satisfactorily, China's state media, no matter how well-endowed financially, can hardly win a global following, let alone help Beijing develop its soft power."
Rowan Callick is the Walkley-winning Asia-Pacific editor of The Australian, and was from 2006-2008 the paper's China correspondent
John Tiedemann is an artist with The Australian.
