Reporting for China: Cosmopolitan Attitudes and the “Chinese Perspective” among Chinese Correspondents Abroad

Western scholars’ and policy analysts’ attention to the expansion of China’s media abroad has focused on the state’s strategy of soft power behind the global spread of institutions such as Xinhua and China Central Television, on the propagandistic image of China that these institutions seek to project in their foreign-language programming, and on the potential damage to media freedom in Africa and elsewhere. No attention has been paid to the reverse: how the emergence of a global network of Chinese correspondents impacts dominant Chinese views of the world and China’s place in it. The ethnographic research project on which this article is based reverses this lens, seeking to understand how Chinese journalists who report for PRC media from abroad see their work, what stories about the world they want to tell Chinese audiences about the world and how their choices are shaped by state policies, institutional pressures and individual preferences. Its preliminary conclusion is that while the lifestyles of the new generation of correspondents are increasingly cosmopolitan, this does not necessarily translate into more innovative or reflexive reporting.