https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16865/china-propaganda-us-media
In June, China Daily filed a disclosure with the Justice Department showing that, since November 2016, it had paid $19 million to U.S. media outlets, including $12 million to newspapers such as the Washington Post and New York Times.
China Daily’s ads — in a strategy known as “borrowing a boat to go out on the ocean” — come in the form of advertising supplements, inserts called China Watch… camouflaged to look like the other news content of the media outlets in which they appear.
The practice does not seem to have caused any sort of actual uproar in those media circles that engage in it… This reticence is odd… but because so many journalists and editors consider themselves as standing up against racism, ethnic and religious discrimination, and human rights abuses. Taking money from the Chinese Communist regime in exchange for spreading its propaganda would seem to indicate that this stance is simply empty posturing.
The Chinese government-controlled English language newspaper, China Daily, in 2020 paid a variety of US media outlets nearly $2 million for publishing propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), according to a disclosure that China Daily filed in late November with the US Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), according to Daily Caller.
China Daily has reportedly been registered as a foreign agent under FARA since 1983, which means it is required to report its activities and financial transactions to the Justice Department.
In June, China Daily filed a disclosure with the Justice Department showing that, since November 2016, it had paid $19 million to U.S. media outlets, including $12 million to newspapers such as the Washington Post and New York Times. Other newspapers included the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Seattle Times, Houston Chronicle and Foreign Policy.
China Daily’s ads come in the form of advertising supplements, inserts called “China Watch,” in a strategy known as “borrowing a boat to go out on the ocean.” According to Sarah Cook, Senior Research Analyst for East Asia, Freedom House, in 2017 testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission:
“This phrase refers to disseminating Chinese state-media content via the pages, frequencies, or screen-time of privately owned media outlets that have developed their own local audiences… In recent years, its robust expansion to English-language media has garnered much attention and public debate. One of the most prominent examples has been the emergence of China Watch — a paid insert sponsored by the state-run China Daily — that has appeared both in print and online in prominent U.S. papers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.”
This form of advertising is sometimes also known as advertorials, or native advertising: the stories are camouflaged to look like the other news content of the media outlets in which they appear.
