China is spending billions on its foreign-language media

ON THE 26th floor of an iconic glass skyscraper, nicknamed the “Trousers”, in Beijing’s main business district, half a dozen casually dressed 20-somethings gather in a rainbow-coloured lounge, chatting away on ergonomic chairs. The office has the vibe of a hip tech startup. In fact, it is the headquarters of the country’s foreign-language television service, which rebranded itself in 2016 as China Global Television Network (CGTN). The young staff are Chinese who have studied abroad and are proficient in one of the network’s five languages—English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Russian. CGTN is at the forefront of China’s increasingly vigorous and lavishly funded efforts to spread its message abroad. Xi Jinping, the president, has told the station to “tell China stories well”.

CGTN—a consolidation of the foreign-language operations of CCTV, the state broadcaster—is secretive about its budget but open about its ambitions to compete with global broadcasters such as CNN and the BBC. In November it plans to open a new broadcasting centre in Chiswick, a wealthy suburb of London. It will complement the two others the station inherited from CCTV in Washington and Nairobi, each of which has around 150 reporters. BuzzFeed News, citing an e-mail sent by a local recruiter, reported this week that the new centre is planning to hire more than 350 London-based journalists over the next 18 months. Salaries on offer are “well over” average for journalists in the city, the news site said, quoting someone headhunted for a job. (CGTN’s choice of name may help, too: when they were called CCTV, China’s overseas television operations suffered from association with surveillance equipment.)