From the United States to Taiwan to Australia, nations the world over are becoming increasingly vigilant about the activities of Chinese state media organizations abroad. The Chinese government has perhaps unsurprisingly responded to these eminently reasonable developments with completely unreasonable countermeasures.

For example, the United States government recently limited the number of “journalists” who can work for such PRC state media organizations as Xinhua, CGTN, and China Daily in the United States. In response, the Chinese government expelled journalists from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

In Australia, we recently learned that investigators had raided the homes of employees of Xinhua and China Radio International as part of an investigation into foreign interference in the offices of New South Wales MP Shaoquett Moselmane. In response, the Chinese government arbitrarily detained Australian citizen Cheng Lei, an employee of CGTN, and threatened Bill Birtles of the ABC and Mike Smith of the Australian Financial Review with exit bans.

The CCP’s countermeasures, in both cases leaving international journalists in China unfairly facing the Party’s ire, have predictably generated misplaced relativizing and tortured hand-wringing in the public sphere. I would like to use this column to bring a decisive end to these bad takes, arguing that it is well past time for the free world to take proactive steps against CCP state media.

First, let’s discuss the relativizing. In this line of argument, both sides are targeting “journalists,” so both sides are in the wrong and need to take a step back.

This line of criticism is all too easy to rebut, as it presents a fundamentally false equivalence. Employees of outlets like Xinhua, China Daily, Global Times, or Wen Wei Po are not journalists!

They don’t break news, they don’t produce investigative reports. Employees of these outlets who show journalistic potential display this quality not because of but rather despite their position. In most cases, state media personnel serve as mouthpieces for the Party, giving its predetermined conclusions a thin illusion of journalistic integrity.

I speak from personal experience here. I do a lot of interviews with media the world over. For people unfamiliar with this process, here is how it usually works: a journalist contacts me via email, and we agree on a time to talk on the phone. I respond to questions for about thirty minutes to an hour, and when the story comes out, the journalist will send me a link to the story.

There has been only one notable exception to this experience: my interactions with Beijing owned rag Wen Wei Po.

When I was visiting Hong Kong in December of 2018, Wen Wei Po decided to do a story about me. They did not, however, reach out to me via email to find a time to talk.

Instead, Wen Wei Po somehow managed to find out which hotel I was staying in (I can only assume either via my entry form at the border or by hacking my phone), and proceeded to camp out in my lobby and stalk me all around the city for a week, from Mongkok to Tung Chung. When I attempted to walk toward these “journalists” to ask why they were following me, they ran away like scared little mice, only to reappear behind me a few minutes later. These were not normal media operations: this was a curious mix of spying and state sponsored harassment.

This is what Beijing’s media in Hong Kong and around the world do: collecting intelligence and intimidating opponents of the regime. The CCP isn’t spending millions of dollars to send hundreds of personnel around the world to write a bunch of useless propaganda that no one reads. The CCP is spending that money to send hundreds of personnel around the world to collect intelligence and stalk critics of the regime under the comparatively innocent guise of writing a bunch of useless propaganda that no one reads.

So, toward the ideal of rectifying names, let’s please stop calling employees of Chinese state media organizations “journalists.” It is not only dishonest but also offensive to refer to state agents as “journalists” while real journalists at Apple Daily and other outlets face unrelenting pressures simply for reporting the truths that state media attempts to hide.

Second, let’s turn to the hand-wringing. This line of criticism goes roughly as follows: countries that care about human rights and freedom of the press need to leave Chinese media alone, regardless of what Beijing does. We, after all, cannot beat China at its own game. In a race to the bottom, China will always win.

This seems reasonable enough at first glance, yet ignores the larger questions. How are the governments taking reasonable, rule of law-based steps against the operations of PRC state media responsible for the CCP’s irrational and illegal retaliations? If a thuggish regime reacts unreasonably to reasonable steps, are we then to simply refrain from taking these reasonable steps? Isn’t such an argument the definition of victim blaming, essentially begging for more abuse precisely because it all too obviously works?

Yes, yes, our interlocutors tell us, but this is not a question of placing blame. It’s a question of recognizing reality and responding strategically to that reality. The CCP is going to be unreasonable, so let’s take the high ground do our best to avoid provoking them. This again seems reasonable enough at first glance, but completely ignores how fundamentally non-strategic it is to take a hands-off approach to CCP misbehavior, as countries around the world have done for the past few decades.

Is it “strategic” to continue to accept a situation in which only a handful of American journalists are able to work under immense pressure and constant monitoring in China, while outlets like Xinhua and China Daily can send literally hundreds of “journalists” to roam freely around the United States collecting intelligence? Would it be strategic, when there is evidence that PRC media personnel are involved in political interference operations in Australia, to look the other way and basically grant them immunity simply because Beijing is going to throw a fit if we do anything about it?

Calls for such a pseudo-strategic approach to China relations are simply calling for more of the same: an approach that is no longer tenable. We cannot build our China policy on concerns about how Beijing is going to respond to our policy, because it is never going to respond reasonably: rather than a race to the bottom, that’s a race to defeat, doing exactly what the CCP wants.

In conclusion, there is a genuine difference between PRC state media employees and actual journalists. There is also a significant difference between a rule of law system investigating the activities of PRC journalists and China’s well-known lawless crackdowns on international journalists working in China. There is an undeniable difference between law-based interrogation and hostage diplomacy that even the most fervent relativists cannot obscure, despite their efforts.

The tendency to engage in false equivalence and find rationalizations for the CCP’s fundamentally irrational behavior achieves nothing other than maintaining the distressing status quo, providing excuses for a dictatorship whose childish bursts of outrage at not getting its way must no longer be indulged.

(Kevin Carrico is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University)

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