News as geopolitics: China, CGTN and the 2020 US presidential election

ABSTRACT

Recently, authoritarian states have invested heavily in state-sponsored international news. Some states have instrumentalised this news geopolitically, with Russian electoral interference especially prominent. In comparison, we know less about how China’s international news outlets cover – and try to influence – other countries’ politics. This article asks whether China used its state-sponsored media to influence the 2020 US election. It examines CGTN’s coverage of the election and the 2021 Capitol riots, across its website, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Tellingly, it finds no concerted effort to influence the outcome. CGTN’s coverage was mostly cautious and neutral. Contrastingly, its geopolitical coverage of the US and China was entirely one-sided, persistently excoriating the US while praising China. We identify three news values differentiating CGTN’s coverage: deference, relevance (to China), and national sovereignty. These news values reveal CGTN’s geopolitical function: to convey Chinese media’s apparent impartiality, while promoting China at its competitors’ expense.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• propaganda
• CGTN
• US
• election
• media

Since 2009 the Chinese government has committed significant resources to external communications (Hu and Ji 2012). This ‘going out’ policy is intended to counter foreign misrepresentations of China, challenge western narrative dominance, and ‘tell China’s story well’ (Brady 2015; DiResta et al. 2020). The Communist Party of China (CPC) sees its increased international media presence as integral to achieving China’s broader economic and geopolitical aims. This includes enhancing its ‘international discourse power’ so that it matches the country’s ‘comprehensive national power’ (Bandurski 2021; Yang 2018). China’s commitment is part of a recent pattern of states investing heavily in international media output as instruments of public diplomacy and soft power (Hinck, Cooley, and Kluver 2020; Rawnsley 2015). However, China’s estimated US$10 billion annual budget is far greater than any other state’s investment in the last decade (Dukalskis 2021; Hartig 2020).

Democracies, especially the US, have viewed China’s increased commitment to external communication as geopolitically motivated and – similar to Russia’s ‘active measures’ – intended to undermine their democratic systems (Hamilton and Ohlberg 2020; Kliman et al. 2020; Rid 2020). They have therefore sought to limit the activities of China’s international media organisations. In 2020 the US designated 15 Chinese media outlets as foreign missions, and in 2021 the UK regulator Ofcom revoked the broadcast license of China’s leading international state broadcaster, China Global Television Network – CGTN (Al Jazeera 2020; CGTN 2020; Ofcom 2021). Chinese news outlets have also been accused of spreading disinformation about COVID-19, including claims that it was a bioweapon spread by the US (IFJ 2021; Xinhua 2021). China counters that such accusations reflect an outdated ‘Cold War mentality’, ‘ideological bias’, and that the West portrays Chinese media unfairly (CGTN 2020).

Despite democratic concern about China’s international media output, there are significant gaps in our understanding of its content, aims and effects. To date, research on China’s external communication has mainly focused on strategy, infrastructure and distribution (Brady 2015; Madrid-Morales 2021; Rawnsley 2015; Thussu, De Burgh, and Shi 2017). We know, for example, that Chinese state-sponsored media disseminate news on numerous platforms, but we do not know how far they tailor content to different platforms and audiences. Prior research has identified a tension in CGTN’s domestic reporting between providing neutral, factual coverage and propagating the CPC party line (Fearon and Rodrigues 2019). We know less about how far CGTN balances these forms of news in coverage of major international events involving China’s geopolitical competitors.

China may have massively increased its investment in international media, but it is less clear whether it is using these media outlets to influence elections among its geopolitical competitors. During the Cold War, Levin suggests that either the US or the Soviet Union intervened in approximately one in nine democratic elections worldwide (Levin 2016). Evidence of Chinese efforts to influence elections during the Cold War is less clear, though researchers have found that the CCP has provided financing and other forms of support to its preferred winners in a range of elections since the Cold War (Mohan and Wall 2019). More recently, Russia’s well-documented attempts to influence the 2016 US election (Ramsay and Robertshaw 2018; US Senate Intelligence Committee 2020) have raised questions about whether China would look to use similar methods. Evidence does indicate that China tried to interfere in Taiwan’s elections in 2018 and 2020 (Fairman 2020). Moreover, researchers have argued that there has been a ‘Russification’ of China’s influence activities, indicating that it has begun to try to subvert other societies rather than simply ‘telling China’s story well’ (Charon and Jeangene Vilmer 2021, 15). Still, whether China has begun to use its international media outlets to influence its geopolitical competitors’ elections requires further investigation.

This article addresses part of this research gap by analysing CGTN output during and after the US 2020 election campaign. A high-profile political event amongst liberal democracies, the US election provides an ideal opportunity to examine how far Chinese international media are instrumentalised by the CPC to further China’s geopolitical aims against democratic competitors.

The article asks three research questions:

• RQ1: Did CGTN seek to undermine or influence the process or outcome of the US 2020 election?

• RQ2: To what extent did CGTN frame the US political system in a balanced and neutral way during and after the US election?

• RQ3: To what extent are CGTN’s news values distinct from other state-sponsored international news outlets?

These questions are examined through a content and framing analysis of CGTN output on their website, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube during two periods. First, a six-week period bracketing the 3rd November election, and second, during the Capitol riots on 6th January 2021 and over the week following.

Our research advances the literature in several ways. The question of whether China attempted to influence the US election is of pressing importance to contemporary media and communication and to the integrity of democracies worldwide. By examining CGTN’s election coverage, we provide new insights into if, and how, Chinese state-sponsored media are used to influence other countries’ democratic processes. This includes examination of whether CGTN encouraged US voters to support one candidate or discourage them from supporting the other; whether the outlet actively promoted claims of electoral fraud or illegitimacy; or whether it sought to influence the process or outcome in other ways, for example by enhancing polarisation.

Furthermore, conducting analysis across four of CGTN’s communication platforms, the article provides broader analysis of CGTN’s content than studies to date. This enables us to provide deeper insights into the outlet’s tactics and intent, and how different its methods are to other authoritarian states’ international media, such as Russia’s outlet, RT. Through these insights the article enhances our understanding of a crucial but under-researched global issue: the different ways authoritarian states are using international news media to enhance their geopolitical influence.

Research design and methods

Our research design focuses on CGTN as the leading outward face of China’s international opinion-forming efforts. It operates alongside the agency news model of Xinhua, and the radio broadcasting of China Radio International. CGTN has more than 700 international correspondents; broadcasts news to 160 countries and regions worldwide, and has more than 150 million followers on social media (CGTN 2021). Organisationally, CGTN sits within the China Media Group (CMG) alongside China National and International Radio, and is controlled by the CPC’s Central Propaganda Department (Jiang 2018). It is expected to work directly on behalf of the Party, holding its ‘family name’, as Xi Jinping said in 2016 (Pinghui 2016). Since re-launching CGTN in 2016 as its main international broadcaster, the CPC has placed it at the centre of its efforts to use international state media outlets to ‘spread China’s voice well’ to foreign audiences (Associated Press 2016). This makes CGTN an appropriate service to study how far Chinese international media outlets serve China’s geopolitical interests.

We study CGTN’s coverage using quantitative and qualitative content analysis across four platforms: its website, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, incorporating the five weeks before the 2020 US election (3rd November) and the week afterwards. For CGTN’s website, we collected all articles referencing the US, discarding those of no clear relevance to US politics, leaving 515 articles. We used Tweet Archivist to gather all CGTN’s tweets during this period (n = 5268), manually coding these to identify those concerning US politics (n = 1296, 24.6%). To increase validity, two researchers coded in parallel, agreeing an initial set of principles which were then refined over time. In the final 1000 tweets assessed for inter-coder reliability, there was 98.6% agreement. For Facebook, we employed CrowdTangle to collect CGTN posts on US politics (n = 235), and for YouTube we searched all CGTN videos, identifying 178 relevant to our study (for our framing methodology, see RQ2).

To supplement this, we collected CGTN’s news articles and videos on the US Capitol riots, beginning with the riot itself (6th January 2021) and the week afterwards (n = 49 articles). To contextualise this US coverage across the entire time period, we collected all of CGTN’s tweets on any topic between 29th September and 13th January for comparison purposes (n = 14,005). For each platform we analysed how the content covered the US electoral process, the US political system generally, and how CGTN compared the US to China.

RQ1: Did CGTN seek to undermine or influence the process or outcome of the US 2020 election?

Since the end of the Cold War, an increasing number of states have funded international news media, including Qatar (Al Jazeera), France (France 24), Turkey (TRT World) and Russia (Russia Today or RT). More recently, intelligence reports and academic research have found that some states have instrumentalised these state-sponsored international news outlets in order to influence other countries’ politics, including their elections (Ramsay and Robertshaw 2018; US Senate Intelligence Committee 2020). US Intelligence Agencies named RT, for example, as ‘The Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet’ that sought to influence the 2016 US election in favour of Donald Trump (National Intelligence Council 2017, 3). New research indicates RT’s partisanship persisted in 2020 (Moore and Colley 2022).

With growing awareness of the threat of Russian electoral interference, analysts have speculated about whether China would attempt to do the same. Particularly since, in 2020, US intelligence agencies, advocacy groups and news reports claimed that China had learnt from Russian international influence campaigns and was using similar tactics to shape narratives around COVID-19 (Brandt and Schafer 2020; Wong, Rosenberg, and Barnes 2020). An example cited was a video produced by CGTN Arabic and published on YouTube, suggesting the originator of the pandemic was from ‘outside China’ and that they passed on the virus during an international sports competition held in Wuhan (CGTN Arabic 2020). Research has also identified a potential precedent for Chinese electoral interference, with evidence of their extensive efforts to influence Taiwan’s 2018 and 2020 elections (Fairman 2020). Both Russia and China, one leading Washington DC think tank asserted, ‘seek to impair democracy’s functioning and instil doubt in democracy as a system of governance where such tactics advance their geopolitical interests’ (Kliman et al. 2020). These assumptions have led to speculation that China, like Russia, might seek to undermine or influence the process or outcome of the 2020 US election (BBC 2020).

Yet, contrary to these concerns, our analysis finds that in its US domestic news reporting CGTN did not seek to influence the outcome of the US 2020 election or undermine the democratic process. At the same time, CGTN did operate in accordance with the CPC’s geopolitical objectives, presenting China unremittingly positively while denigrating the US.

CGTN’s US election news reporting

In the 385 news articles and videos on US politics that CGTN’s website published in the five weeks prior to the election (excluding editorials), none were explicitly partisan towards Trump or Biden. There were more news reports on Trump, with the incumbent referenced in 36% (137) of article headlines, compared to Biden in 23% (88). However, most of these simply reported on Trump’s actions (‘Trump signs stopgap spending bill to avert government shutdown’), his statements (‘Trump calls for two face-to-face debates with Biden before election’) or his position in the polls. When CGTN published criticisms of Trump, these were not made by CGTN itself but by US experts or publications (such as Anthony Fauci, or the Washington Post). CGTN also sought US citizens’ perspectives, speaking to voters from multiple states (including Florida, Texas, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin), from diverse demographics (over-65s, suburban women, African-American, and Latinos) from industry sectors (coal), and at polling stations (Philadelphia, Florida). Balanced and non-partisan, these were generally informative accounts of how US citizens perceived the election.¹

Regarding claims of electoral fraud or illegitimacy, we found that CGTN did not seek to undermine the validity of the US electoral process. Instead it sought to explain it, including reassurances that there were systems to protect against fraud and interference. It even published on Facebook a US intelligence services video telling people they were making every effort to ensure electoral integrity (CGTN, 7 October). The video includes the FBI Director saying: ‘We’re also coordinating with the private sector, both technology and social media companies, to make sure that their platforms are not used by foreign adversaries to spread disinformation and propaganda’. In a telling contrast, as Russian outlets were reporting on opposing rallies and civil unrest in Denver on 11 October, CGTN America published a video package from a Denver Polling Station showing the robustness of the vote counting procedures and its impartial assessors (‘How the U.S. city Denver manages to run the election correctly’, 11 October). In the five weeks prior to election day, CGTN published 137 Facebook posts about US politics, six of which referred to postal votes or the voting process. All six sought to reassure people about its robustness.

CGTN also emphasised the election’s integrity in its treatment of claims of electoral fraud. While the US right wing press and outlets such as RT had covered the Trump campaign’s fraud allegations for many weeks before the election, CGTN largely ignored these claims. It did report them occasionally after the election, but emphasised the lack of evidence (‘U.S. President Trump claimed without basis Wednesday in an early morning speech that he had won the election and a “major fraud” had been committed on the American public’) [our emphasis]. On Twitter, @cgtnofficial referred to US electoral fraud in just 22 tweets between 29 September 2020 and 12 January 2021 (0.2% of the total - see Table 1). All of these were posted after election day and 13 (59%) referred to the claims as ‘unsubstantiated’, ‘baseless’, or without evidence. Soon after the result was announced, CGTN began referring to ‘Presumptive President-elect Joe Biden’ and referred to Trump’s claims that the election was stolen as ‘unsubstantiated’. The publication of this content goes against assumptions that CGTN would adopt an approach similar to Russia’s RT, which amplified claims of vote fraud and questioned the validity of postal voting. It is also contrary to predictions that China would seek to delegitimise the electoral process.

Neither did CGTN actively seek to polarise the US electorate. In its news articles and videos, its style was subdued and conservative. For example, it avoided using tribal terms characteristic of the ‘culture wars’ currently associated with US politics (see Table 1). In 14,005 tweets across 15 weeks published by @CGTNOfficial related to US politics, there was no reference to ‘woke’, ‘leftists’, or ‘cancel culture’. Based on a word frequency search of the content of CGTN’s news articles, CGTN only used the term ‘woke’ once in the 259,663 word corpus (Table 2). CGTN did not use ‘liberal’ as a pejorative term, or in reference to the mainstream media.

Table 1. Frequency of topics present in @CGTNOfficial tweets.

CGTNOfficial Tweets from 29 September 2020 to 12 January 2021
Total Tweets: 14,005
References to:	Tweets
Trump	827
Biden	560
COVID-19	2548
China	3222
Fraud (US politics)	22
Hunter Biden	3
Civil war (US politics)	0
Woke	0
Cancel/led (US politics)	0
Leftist (US politics)	0

CGTN’s cautious approach contrasts with RT, which mimicked right-wing US outlets like Fox News (Oates et al. 2020) in using polarising language, with provocative articles like ‘Woke Tech goes full Biden as Expensify warns 10 MILLION customers that a vote for Trump may mean “CIVIL WAR”’ (RT, 23 October). While channels including Fox News and RT devoted dozens of articles to Hunter Biden conspiracy theories that emerged in the campaign (Moore and Colley 2020), they were the subject of only three CGTN articles before the election, and these chiefly sought to discredit the claims. None of CGTN’s tweets mentioned Hunter Biden before the election. Similarly, while CGTN described incidents of US civil unrest, it rarely speculated on the prospect of escalation to civil war, as RT did. The prospect was mentioned in only two CGTN articles before the election (and four afterwards), and these were comments by foreign op-ed writers and academics, not CGTN directly. Overall, therefore, CGTN conspicuously avoided promoting civil unrest or tension between voters (Table 2).

Table 2. Number of CGTN news website articles referencing key topics on US politics.

Number of CGTN news website articles whose content references key topics about US politics from 29th September to 10th November
Total Articles: 515
References to:	Articles
Trump	404
Biden	278
COVID-19	247
China	156
Fraud (US politics)	37
Hunter Biden	9
Civil War (US politics)	6
Woke	1
Cancel/led (US politics)	0
Leftist (US politics)	4

Based on its output across four digital channels, CGTN’s approach to US 2020 election news would therefore best be described as restrained, party-politically neutral, and reassuring about the electoral process. It did not actively seek to support or undermine either candidate or party, interfere with the electoral process, or delegitimise the result. In this way, CGTN reflected the Chinese government’s official position that the election ‘is the United States’ domestic affair and China takes no side on it’ (CGTN, 5 November). Even if China preferred one candidate over another, about which there has been extensive speculation (Sudworth 2020), CGTN was not used explicitly for partisan persuasion during the election.

Yet, although CGTN did not seek to influence how or whether voters voted, its news reports did seek to influence political attitudes in other ways. Most notably, as will be shown subsequently, it sought to present the US as a failing nation in decline, and China as a successful nation on the rise.

RQ2: To what extent did CGTN frame the US political system in a balanced and neutral way during and after the US election?

Although most of CGTN’s reporting on US politics during and after the election campaign was dry and factual, reports and editorials that compared the US with China were much less so. These articles were often highly opinionated and dogmatic, in contrast to CGTN’s coverage of US domestic news. To investigate this further, we conducted a framing analysis of the sub-set of CGTN articles that compared the US and China.² To do this we identified through a word frequency search the news articles in our US election sample that referenced China (156 of 515, 30.3%). We then coded a sub-set of 93 articles (18% of 515) that contained explicit comparisons between the US and China. Informed by the research of D’Angelo and Kuypers (2010), we analysed these qualitatively, because we were aware from preliminary analysis that many CGTN articles raise criticisms of China in order to ‘correct’ them. Because of this, automated tools such as sentiment analysis would be likely to overrepresent negative coverage of China, without uncovering the context in which this was used.

We first analysed these articles inductively to identify as many frames as we could that described the US and China. This yielded 20 frames. Since the sample of articles was manageable, both authors read each article and associated video content, and coded them in parallel. Noting significant similarity between certain frames, through discussion we then collapsed these into six primary frames (see Table 3). For instance, descriptions of the US as ‘mismanaging COVID-19’, ‘mishandling its economy’, or ‘ruling based on disinformation’, we collapsed into the code ‘poorly governed’. We coded articles claiming that the US was covering issues like Xinjiang, the Belt and Road Initiative and other aspects of Chinese foreign policy incorrectly, as ‘Misrepresenting China’. Having identified the six primary frames, the authors then coded the articles in parallel based on these. Of the 328 frames identified during the analysis, there was 93.5% similarity between the coders, suggesting an acceptable level of intercoder reliability.

Table 3. Political frames comparing US and China in CGTN articles.

Representing China The US misrepresents China; China represents itself fairly

Global Stability The US is a destabilising power; China is a stable power

Domestic Governance The US is poorly governed; China is well-governed

Political System The US political system is failing; China’s political system is succeeding

Hypocrisy The US is a hypocrite; China is an honest partner

Democracy The US is undemocratic; China is democratic

Part of the reason for the high level of agreement between coders was because the articles were so clear and unanimous in framing the US negatively and China positively. There was a persistent binary contrast with China running throughout the articles and within each frame we identified. (see Table 3).

 Table 4 shows how frequently each frame appeared in CGTN’s comparative articles. To reiterate, these articles were primarily about US politics. Because of this, the US side of the binary appeared more frequently, and the comparison with China was sometimes implicit. Strikingly, the binary was entirely uni-directional in every article that compared the two countries. In other words, we did not find a single criticism of China, or a positive framing of the US.

Table 4. Frequency of each frame in CGTN articles comparing the US and China.

US framing	% articles in which frame appears*	China framing	% articles in which frame appears
Misrepresenting China	45%	Representing China accurately	30%
Destabilising Power	41%	Stable Power	25%
Poorly governed	32%	Well governed	15%
Failing System	30%	Successful system	26%
Hypocrite	14%	Honest partner	24%
Undemocratic	11%	Democratic	1%

*Percentages add up to over 100% as multiple frames appeared in some articles.

Representing China

The most frequent frame (45%) is that the US government or media misrepresent China. This is understandable given the original rationale for establishing CGTN was to challenge misperceptions of China supposedly spread by globally-dominant western media (Brady 2015). Structurally, these articles would typically raise a criticism of China and then counter it. The main claim CGTN aims to correct is that China is a threat to other countries or the international order. Multiple articles emphasise that China is not seeking global leadership or hegemony, but instead ‘trying to build partnerships for a shared future and prosperity’ (CGTN, 2 November).

To counter claims that China is a threat, many articles simply reproduce the text or video of CPC government statements without critical analysis or response. A CGTN article on 8 January, for example, presented the CPC’s line on Taiwan as an undisputed fact (rather than CPC policy). ‘There is only one China in the world’, the article states, ‘and the Taiwan region is an inalienable part of China's territory. The government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legitimate government representing the whole China’. In other articles, CGTN deflects criticism of China by claiming the US is really the ‘greatest threat to global strategic security, stability’ (CGTN, 10 October; 28 October).

In numerous articles, the rebuttal of criticism of China is explicit and direct. CGTN reproduces verbatim CPC government rebuttals of accusations of ‘cultural genocide’ in Xinjiang, reporting them as ‘groundless accusations’ and ‘slander’, ‘fabricated … by anti-China forces’ (CGTN, 28 October). Indeed, coinciding with its US election coverage, these articles were combined with a somewhat crude CGTN regional branding campaign employing the Twitter hashtag #AmazingXinjiang. These tweets linked to multiple videos and features framing Xinjiang as a stunning tourist destination that is eradicating poverty (CGTN, 30 September; 5 October).

Global stability

The second most frequent frame is that the US is ‘destabilizing the world’ (CGTN, 13 October) through its foreign interventions, its arms sales, and its pursuit of global hegemony (41% of articles). The US, in this framing, is ‘the destroyer of international order’ (5 October). By contrast, the articles frame China as the world’s key source of stability, growth and prosperity (25% of articles). This inverts a common Western interpretation of international relations in which liberal democracies ensure the stability of the ‘liberal international order’, and China and Russia are ‘revisionists’ trying to destabilise it (Zhao 2018).

The rationale given for the US’s actions varies. One explanation is what Chinese government press statements have referred to as ‘ideological bias’ (CGTN, 8 October): that the US (wrongly) seeks hegemony, and it misunderstands that multipolarity is the ‘natural order of the world’ (CGTN, 5 October). This corresponds to the CPC line on US foreign policy, and it contrasts with China’s claim that it does not pursue international dominance, but its rightful place in a multipolar order (Eisenman and Heginbotham 2019). A further way CGTN op-eds explain US behaviour is as part of a ‘strategy for global war’ which aims to keep others weak and to sustain its ‘military-industrial complex’ (CGTN, 14 October; 8 November). By this reasoning, ‘the U.S. has historically prevented stability wherever it saw the potential rise of a regional power’ by ‘cultivating disorder’, out of which it can profit economically (CGTN, 5 October).

In contrast, CGTN frames China as the key to global stability and prosperity; the world’s ‘champion of economic recovery’ and its best hope for the future (CGTN, 27 October). Op-eds repeat CPC policy slogans, such as Xi Jinping’s stated aim of creating a ‘community of shared future for mankind’; that China is not attempting to be the ‘next global leader’, and that it simply wants to ‘build partnerships’ and ‘win-win cooperation’ (CGTN, 2 November).

Domestic governance

Another frequent CGTN claim (32%) is that the US is poorly governed, as demonstrated by its failure to respond adequately to COVID-19. In contrast, China’s COVID-19 response supposedly illustrates its superior governance model. This aspect of China’s news coverage bears similarities to its 2016 election coverage which, according to Hinck, Cooley, and Kluver (2020, 42), juxtaposed ‘the failings of US democratic governance’ with effective Chinese governance and resurgent strength’.

This framing is characterised in two ways. CGTN news reports juxtapose the US and China’s COVID-19 rates, while editorials explain that far greater US rates are because of the Trump administration’s ineptitude (‘Trump’s attacks on Fauci illustrate his abysmal response to COVID-19’, 20 October; ‘China’s post-COVID-19 recovery contrasts with U.S.’ COVID-19 calamity’, 16 October). This argument received more ammunition when Trump himself contracted COVID-19, leading to the suggestion that ‘the White House is itself vulnerable to its own incompetence’ (CGTN, 4 October).

CGTN also uses COVID-19 to emphasise the comparative strength of China’s economic recovery. Due to its ‘broad system of state controls’, it apparently achieved a recovery that would be a ‘fantasy in other parts of the world’, showing it to be ‘far more capable than the US’ and ‘more influential than ever’ (27 October, 2 November). After Biden’s victory looked likely, multiple CGTN articles used this argument to suggest that only with China’s help could the US recover its international image after the maladministration of the Trump regime (CGTN, 5 November, 11 November).

Political system

30% of these articles frame the US political system as failing. Editorials describe a ‘broken America’ and a ‘fading superpower’ (CGTN, 5 November). Trump receives much of the blame, with CGTN stating that ‘no-one has done more to erode America’s power and hegemony’ (CGTN, 4 October). Moreover, having lost the election, he ‘leaves behind a shattered nation’ (CGTN, 8 November). One article generalises that while ‘The United States promotes itself as a “bastion of democracy” even Americans admit the world’s “most developed democracy” is a failed state’ (CGTN, 28 October). Beyond Trump, however, CGTN op-eds argue that the US political system is inherently flawed. This is purportedly due to its ‘hyper-individualistic culture, administrative dysfunction, and never-ending partisan power struggle’; implicitly contrasting China’s one-party rule and its self-image as a collectivist society (CGTN, 16 October).

Compared to the US system, China’s is framed as popular and successful. According to one op-ed, ‘China’s expected success this decade is attributable to its leadership’s effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic’, its ‘philosophy that “a rising tide lifts all boats”, and the sustainability of its aforementioned trade and investment model’ (CGTN, 16 October). Similarly, ‘while this past year’s demonising of China has been extreme, it shined a light on the truth of how remarkably successful China is’ (CGTN, 2 November).

Hypocrisy

In 14% of articles the US is framed as a hypocrite, promoting practices in which it fails itself. Many of these repeated a long-term criticism by China and Russia that US foreign policy claims to promote democracy and human rights, but in fact seeks to profit from war and weaken other countries (CGTN, 11 November). This makes the US an untrustworthy ally. Instead, China is portrayed as an honest and reliable partner, with ‘a history of being peaceful and cooperative’ (CGTN, 27 October). According to a CGTN editorial, ‘all nations are treated as equals by China with no strings attached out of solidarity’, and because of this ‘China’s win-win model contrasts with the U.S. one on every level’ (CGTN, 10 October).

The hypocrisy argument came through even more strongly during the Capitol riots on 6th January. For CGTN writers, the US was claiming to be the world’s leading democracy while its current president sought to overturn an election widely accepted as legitimate (CGTN, 8 January). CGTN published numerous editorials about the contradiction, including a rare attempt at humour by posting an ironic cartoon on Facebook. This pictured a generic ‘Uncle Sam’ caricature asking ‘Where should we export democracy to next?’, to which the reply was ‘Shouldn’t we save some for ourselves?’ (CGTN, 11 January).

CGTN also used the Capitol riots to accuse the US of double standards regarding anti-government protests in Hong Kong in 2019 – and in this way CGTN’s coverage appeared to serve a domestic purpose too. On YouTube, CGTN posted a heavily edited video entitled ‘Doublespeak Exposed’. The video presents House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a hypocrite for stating that the Capitol rioters were ‘domestic terrorists’, whereas in a previous statement she hailed the Hong Kong protesters for being ‘pro-democracy’. It then juxtaposes footage of the storming of the Capitol building with video footage of violence by Hong Kong protesters, presenting the two as directly equivalent. Yet, it provides no political context or background to help the viewer judge whether either was justified or proportionate. The implication therefore being that protest against ruling authorities should be treated as generally illegitimate, regardless of the cause.

Looking closer, a notable distinction is that while the video includes a soundbite of Capitol protesters explaining their cause – that they were ‘protesting for our freedom right now’, the video includes no comparable soundbites for the Hong Kong protesters to explain their cause. All it shows of them is de-contextualised acts of violence – small groups of protesters throwing rocks, starting fires, and an individual knife attack. This gives the impression of a protest based on mindless violence rather than a valid political cause.

Democracy

Ten articles (11%) framed the US as fundamentally undemocratic, in the sense that its government represents the few not the many. CGTN’s argument is based on three premises. First, that US society is ‘founded on systemic racism, which is still intact in American society as evidenced by the ideology of the Trump administration’ (CGTN, 31 October). Second, that it is profoundly unequal economically. Articles highlight that the 50 richest people in the US have the combined wealth of 50% of the population (CGTN, 11 October).

Third, and most significantly, the US is not a democracy; it is a plutocracy. Unlike China, which supposedly is ruled by the people and for the people, US ‘democracy’ is a ‘rich man’s game’ in which elites rule on behalf of themselves (CGTN, 23 October). A CGTN Facebook video termed Partisan Politics Tears US Apart describes the US as a ‘so-called democracy’, that may theoretically be ‘designed for the people’ but really is’ operated at the people’s cost’ (CGTN, 28 October). The real powers in the US are allegedly Wall Street finance and the ‘military industrial complex’. These capitalists have ‘war as their business model’, and not the interests of the American people (CGTN, 28 October). The result is a ‘government of the 1 per cent, by the 1 per cent, for the 1 per cent’ (CGTN, 4 November).

Summary

Overall, what is striking about CGTN’s comparisons of the US and China is how one-sided they are, particularly given CGTN’s more measured and relatively neutral domestic reporting of the US election. CGTN commentators stridently criticise the US, but never criticise China. A number of the criticisms are factually accurate, if selective – the US is an unequal society; its official COVID-19 figures were far higher than China’s in 2020, and it experienced civil unrest during and after the 2020 election. But the criticisms only flow in one direction. There is no effort to provide balance. China is treated as beyond reproach. Despite painstaking manual analysis of over 250,000 words in the sample and hours of CGTN video footage, we could not find a single word criticising China or the CPC. This strongly illustrates CGTN’s apparent mission to promote China as strongly as possible and denigrate the US as strongly as possible. However, because the US in late-2020 was experiencing political dysfunction, civil unrest and was suffering a far worse COVID-19 outbreak than China, CGTN could report these things factually and still achieve this aspect of its mission.

RQ3: To what extent are CGTN’s news values distinct from other state-sponsored international news outlets?

Non-western and authoritarian media systems have been under-researched compared to their democratic counterparts (Becker 2004, 143; Yin 2008). When considering them, we tend to rely on dated theorisations that were particular to their historic circumstances (Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm 1963) or on extensions of western democratic theories (Hallin and Mancini 2011). Conceived of in this way, CGTN could simply be viewed as ‘an instrument of the state and the Party’, ‘closely integrated with other instruments of state power and Party influence’ and ‘used almost exclusively as [an] instrument of propaganda and agitation’ (Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm 1963, 121).

Yet, as this article has shown, this does not sufficiently explain CGTN’s role or output. In its US election reporting, CGTN did not seek to influence the vote. Its news did not amplify claims of fraud or illegitimacy, or try to agitate the US electorate. This contrasted starkly to RT, for example, which sought to do all these things (Moore and Colley 2020). However, in its coverage of US–China relations, and in its editorials, CGTN went to great lengths to contrast the US and China. It presented the US as poorly governed, plutocratic, racist and a destabilising international influence, and China as well governed, benign, stable, and as a rising superpower.

This raises the question of how CGTN conceives of its aims and purpose, and how its self-conceptualisation determines how it selects and frames international news. To answer this question, one can use testimony from those at the news outlets themselves (Simons, Nolan, and Wright 2017; Varrall 2020). Speaking to 52 journalists from state-funded outlets, for example, Wright, Scott, and Bunce (2020) found that different organisations used similar narratives to legitimise their work. Journalists from Al Jazeera English, Voice of America, BBC World Service, and CGTN argued that their news was not narrowly defined state propaganda, but in contrast, RT’s coverage was (Wright, Scott, and Bunce 2020). Yet just because journalists claim that they are not producing state propaganda does not mean they are not doing so. Journalists are often constrained in what they can say by their institutions, especially in authoritarian states. Every CGTN article is reviewed by a Party member before publication, and the outlet is overseen by the CPC’s Central Propaganda Department. Its journalists have likely internalised the boundaries within which they can publish (Simons, Nolan, and Wright 2017).

Alternatively, news values can be derived inductively from news output. Analysing published output can help explain both ‘news treatment and news selection’, grounding arguments in empirical evidence (Harcup and O’Neill 2017). Studying CGTN’s news output across four distribution channels and building from Harcup and O’Neill’s typology, we identified three key news values that shape how CGTN selects and frames news. These are not comprehensive: rather, they are values that most clearly distinguish CGTN from other international news organisations and established news value frameworks. These are: deference, relevance (to China), and national sovereignty.

CGTN has a deference for authority that leads it to ‘index’ its news (Bennett 1990) from leading public figures and present their speech and actions unfiltered. This is demonstrated across all its international output, not just that focused on China. It will simply report that Donald Trump has contracted COVID-19, or that he has held a rally, or that he has refused to participate in a debate. It will quote from his, or Joe Biden’s, tweets or public statements. This indicates a conservative approach to news – one of ‘safety first’, where political news is chiefly based on ‘he said/she said’ or ‘he did/she did’. It also correlates with CGTN’s domestic political reporting, where it distributes CPC news without editorial filter, framing or comment. This is very different from RT, which will frequently source ground-up content, such as phone footage of civil unrest.³ RT will also heavily editorialise authority figures’ speech and actions.⁴

The second prominent news value in CGTN’s coverage is relevance. Relevance is commonplace in typologies of news values (Harcup and O’Neill 2017), but it appears to operate in a particular way in CGTN’s news selection and framing. Regarding selection, a key determinant of CGTN’s news agenda is based on its relevance to China. For comparison, research shows that RT only devotes 5% of its output to reporting Russia (Carter and Carter 2021). Whereas, over our full data collection period, 23% (3222 of 14,005) of CGTN's tweets referenced China. China was brought into discussion frequently, even in articles on unrelated topics (such as the US election). Across our sample of coverage of US politics, 30.3% of news articles mentioned China (156 of 515); 22.7% (1198 of 5268) of CGTN’s tweets mentioned China, and 18.1% (93 of 515) of CGTN’s US politics articles make direct comparisons between the US and China. Even when issues appear tangential to China, CGTN will frame them as relevant. Thus, CGTN framed the controversy about Trump’s tax return as showing ‘the shallowness of “America first” and anti-China policy’, even though the link between his company’s tax affairs and his administration’s foreign policy is tenuous at best (22 October).

Moreover, when CGTN covers other countries’ politics, it prefers subjects that reflect well on China. CGTN would regularly report US COVID-19 rates or its associated economic decline, and compare this with China’s public health response and economic recovery. On the same day as @CGTNOfficial tweeted that COVID-19 is ‘leading to a surge in poverty’ in the US, it invited audiences to join CGTN in an event celebrating China’s ‘“Last Mile” to eradicating poverty by 2020 … #ZeroPoverty2020’ (16 October).

A second dimension of the relevance news value concerns how CGTN assesses the pertinence of content to its intended audiences (Harcup and O’Neill 2017). Systematic research on CGTN’s audiences either does not yet exist or is not publicly available. Still, our analysis suggests that three audiences are particularly relevant for CGTN’s content promoting China’s foreign policy. These are not exhaustive, however.

First, that so many articles seek to correct Western interpretations of China’s actions suggest that English-speaking Chinese audiences abroad represent a primary audience, since these are the audiences most exposed to Western media narratives that China wants to ‘correct’. Second, that CGTN publishes multiple articles calling for specific countries to alter their foreign policies suggests that foreign opinion formers, diplomats or policymakers may be key targets. An op-ed on Japan explains that Biden would be a poor bet for Japan and instead ‘it would be wiser for the Suga administration to establish a mutually respectful and beneficial relationship with China’ (CGTN, 13 November). Another op-ed on India suggests a close relationship with the US would be unwise and that the ‘right choice’ is ‘the warming of ties between India and China’ instead (CGTN, 28 October). This fits with Madrid-Morales’s (2021) argument that a key way China seeks influence with foreign audiences is through ‘inter-media agenda-setting’, whereby one news outlet attempts to influence ‘the salience of themes or the way certain issues are discussed in smaller or less-established news organisations’ (McCombs 2004). The logic would be that if CGTN’s perspective is taken up by media outlets abroad, it could possibly influence public opinion and/or policy agendas there in favour of China.

Third, since so much of CGTN’s coverage indexes CPC statements verbatim, it is probable that the CPC itself is a key audience. This reflects CGTN’s need to demonstrate that its journalists ‘adhere to the correct political direction’ in order to ‘serve the overall interests of the party and the state’ (Hartig 2020, 13). This is consistent with rare public criticism from experts within China about its ‘Party-centered media culture’ that ‘often in practice emphasise[s] “political discipline” and maintaining official lines over flexible and strategic thinking – so that the real audience reflexively becomes the CPC itself’ (China Media Project 2021).

The third key news value, and one that follows directly from relevance, is national sovereignty. This involves two related elements: nationalism and Chinese sovereignty. CGTN prioritises nationalism – promoting the Chinese nation-state – over other news values such as impartiality and balance. As we have shown, news reports about relations between the US and China are framed entirely from the Chinese perspective – usually by simply transcribing the words of an official spokesperson (often sourced from Xinhua). Every editorial column published about the US and China is highly critical of the US and unfailingly complimentary about China. CGTN tries to emphasise that the views are the writer’s, not its own, using disclaimers on Facebook and its website that an op-ed ‘reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN’. However, since the content of these op-eds is entirely positive towards China and entirely critical of the US, CGTN’s editorial stance is clear and consistent, whatever the disclaimers.

This acutely one-sided promotion of any issue that relates to China translates into journalism that is essentially nation branding (Aronczyk 2013). Yet, CGTN’s nation branding strategy is different from the ‘counter-hegemonic’ approach taken by RT (Miazhevich 2018). Unlike RT, CGTN’s news output is not deliberately contrarian, self-consciously disruptive, polarising or party-political. Rather, CGTN’s approach is better described as ‘post-hegemonic’, presenting the US as a waning hegemon whose global role is being supplanted by other nations, most notably China. Those who question China’s aims or successes (as expressed by the CPC) are heavily criticised and their motives questioned. In such cases, CGTN abandons its measured tone, with its editors even accepting name-calling in its op-eds. One op-ed suggests that ‘there’s probably no one more vindictive than [US Defence] Secretary Pompeo, a self-avowed liar, cheater and thief’ (CGTN, 9 November).

The second element of the national sovereignty news value concerns CGTN’s efforts to seek respect for China’s sovereignty, while emphasising that China has no desire to undermine the sovereignty of others. This helps explain our finding that CGTN steadfastly avoided taking sides during the US presidential election. Neutral coverage of other countries’ electoral processes signals the CPC’s stated commitment not to interfere in other states’ internal affairs (which it contrasts with American interventionism). By signalling respect for other countries’ sovereignty, China expects reciprocal respect for its own. This domestic non-interference stops when commenting on other states’ foreign policies, though. For, as we have established, while CGTN steadfastly avoided taking an explicit stance on the US election, it was happy to denigrate the US’s international behaviour at every opportunity.

Overall, these news values prioritise conformity, reflexivity and the national interest. They conspicuously do not prioritise independence or critical scrutiny of those in authority, values that are core to liberal definitions of journalism (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2001). Rather, CGTN’s output shows how its journalists work ‘within the boundaries defined by the party state’ (Simons, Nolan, and Wright 2017). Despite this, CGTN, and indeed the CPC, still assert the equivalence and even superiority of Chinese international media outlets to their Western counterparts. According to CGTN’s op-eds, Chinese media agencies are ‘entitled to the same standard of respect and professionalism’ as Western outlets (CGTN, 24 October). CGTN apparently provides an ‘independent forum for different opinions and discussions’ that ‘builds bridges’ between countries, compared to ‘harmful’ and ‘prejudiced’ Western media (CGTN, 25 October). Supposedly Chinese media ‘never try to become tools for defining Chinese identity against American identity’ (CGTN, 25 October) – a claim firmly contradicted by our findings.

The assertion of equivalence can be seen in China Media Group's defence of CGTN journalist Nathan King in the aftermath of the Capitol riots on 6th January. King and his crew were attacked by the rioters, who derided them as ‘fake news media’, and they had their equipment smashed. CMG released a statement praising King for his ‘his professional and outstanding performance on reporting the January 6 U.S. Capitol assault’ (CGTN, 20 January). ‘We hope all the staff’, the statement continued, ‘can keep pursuing perfection in their work, reporting truth and justice, advocating for the beauty of civilization, and establishing a media outlet with strong guidance, coverage and influence’. Tellingly, the statement emphasises the importance of ‘strong guidance’ and exerting ‘influence’, but it omits aims such as ‘independence’, ‘transparency’ and ‘critical scrutiny’. There is no mention of ‘speaking truth to power’, or the avoidance of propaganda. This indicates a distinctive interpretation of journalistic professionalism that conflicts with the liberal model (Simons, Nolan, and Wright 2017).

To conclude, this article has used content and framing analysis of CGTN during and after the 2020 US election campaign to assess the aims, perspectives and values of China’s leading international news outlet. It finds that CGTN did not seek to influence the outcome of the election, providing a largely neutral, balanced perspective. However, its coverage of international politics was profoundly imbalanced. It presented China unerringly positively as supportive, stable, successful and beyond criticism, while castigating the US as destabilising, dysfunctional, and disorderly. This framing corresponds directly to the CPC’s intended image of China as a benevolent, non-interfering partner in a post-hegemonic world forging a ‘community of shared future for mankind’ (CGTN, 10 October).

Yet, it is not entirely clear whether CGTN’s perspective is due to direct instrumentalisation by the CPC or whether CGTN’s journalists simply choose to follow the Party line. What we can see is that CGTN’s coverage is shaped by the three news values of deference, relevance and national sovereignty, through which CGTN’s coverage channels the CPC’s perspective. In this respect, CGTN represents ‘news as geopolitics’: its news serves the geopolitical objectives of the Chinese state to gain influence and ‘discourse power’ relative to liberal democracies and Western media outlets. More research is now needed into whether other international state news outlets operate according to similar or distinct news values. Even more importantly, research is needed into how CGTN’s coverage is received by audiences worldwide, to assess whether CGTN’s approach is helping to achieve the influence China seeks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Colley

Thomas Colley is a Visiting Research Fellow in War Studies at King's College London.

Martin Moore

Martin Moore is a Senior Lecturer in Political Communication Education and Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power, King's College London.

Notes

1 For example see CGTN, ‘How voters from coal fields react to the U.S. presidential election’. 22 October, https://bit.ly/3uT5mk4.

2 Per Entman (1993, 52), framing for our purposes involves ‘select[ing] some aspects of a perceived reality and mak[ing] them more salient in a communicating text’.

3 See RT, ‘Portland police declare riot after mob topple Lincoln & Roosevelt statues during “Indigenous Peoples Day of Rage” (PHOTOS, VIDEOS)’ 12 October 2020, https://www.rt.com/usa/503206-portland-statues-lincoln-roosevelt-riot.

4 See RT, ‘“Who put the kids in cages, Joe?” Biden admits to “mistakes” as Trump goes after Obama-era immigration policies’, 23 October 2020, https://bit.ly/3btQS26.