Opinion | How China’s Propaganda Influences the West

The Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda machine has had a busy year. Two weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin declared that their countries’ friendship has “no limits.” Chinese state media has since been working overtime to parrot the Kremlin’s lies about the conflict. Less well known—and especially troubling—is how successful they have been in spreading their disinformation in the U.S.

Thanks to a decadeslong effort by the Chinese Communist Party, millions of Chinese-speaking American citizens rely on Beijing’s mouthpieces as their primary sources of news. SinoVision, a Chinese-language TV broadcaster, and Qiaobao, one of the largest Chinese-language newspapers in the U.S., are subsidiaries of the Asian Culture and Media Group, an arm of the Chinese government. Staff at both places cut their teeth at the state-owned China News Service and are often dispatched to the U.S. for propaganda purposes. Once there, most of their stories on China, Sino-American relations, Taiwan, Hong Kong and related subjects are reproduced from state-owned media such as Xinhua and the People’s Daily.