However, Pakistan also shows higher levels of PRC influence in its media environment
August 2024
Background: The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) state news outlets—think CGTN, Xinhua, and others—regularly enter into content-sharing agreements with non-PRC news outlets throughout the world, including in South Asia. These content-sharing agreements are a vital way for the PRC to spread its propaganda and disinformation narratives alongside regular news items, given that “normal,” by-the-book news reporting from PRC state media lends its outlets a veneer of legitimacy that can lull readers into consuming all PRC-sourced content uncritically. News outlets in financially strapped or otherwise under-resourced geographies are likely to find content-sharing deals with PRC-backed outlets particularly enticing, as Chinese news agencies can offer a well-resourced range of content that touches upon all regions of the globe. Reliance upon these content-sharing agreements can make local news outlets—either wittingly or unwittingly—vectors of Beijing’s information operations.
What we did: M3 analyzed the volume of PRC-sourced content in English-language news media throughout South Asia for all of 2023 and for the first half of 2024. Specific media environments analyzed included those of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and the Maldives.
What we found: The absolute levels of PRC-sourced content remain low in the region, but the Sri Lankan and Nepali information environments contain the highest levels of PRC-sourced content, surpassing the region’s average saturation level for such content. Pakistan’s information environment also presents more PRC-sourced content relative to most of its South Asian neighbors, but the content there still falls just below the overall regional average.
- Levels of PRC-sourced content were low overall. The highest percentage tracked was Sri Lanka for 2024, at 0.72% of total English-language news content (1,145 articles out of 158,794 total) for the first half of 2024.
- Average levels of PRC-sourced content held relatively steady across the region from 2023 through 2024, suggesting most content-sharing agreements remained active. However, Sri Lanka saw a slight increase from 0.59% in 2023 to 0.72% for the first half of 2024, and the Maldives experienced a drop from 0.05% in 2023 to no detected PRC-sourced content for the first half of 2024.
- The Maldivian outlet Sun Online, which had been the only detected outlet using PRC-sourced content in 2023, ceased sharing such content in March 2023.
- Smaller states Sri Lanka and Nepal exhibited the highest levels of PRC-sourced content relative to other South Asian states. Both countries exceeded the overall regional average for levels of PRC-sourced content in 2023 and 2024, likely in part because their news environments were under-resourced and therefore more reliant on PRC-sourced content compared to more developed news sectors in larger states such as India. However, other explanatory factors particular to each country’s circumstances—such as the nature of their bilateral relationships with China—are also probable, preventing the formulation of any hard-and-fast rule in decoding the extent of PRC-sourced content in a given country’s media landscape.
News outlet Sri Lanka Island News shares a Xinhua article rebutting accusations of Chinese espionage.
- Of Sri Lanka news outlets, Sri Lanka Island News (approximately 7% of its articles) and Sri Lankan News.Net (approximately 4% of its articles) were among the most likely to share PRC-sourced content. However, neither of these outlets have widespread followings in Sri Lanka, according to internet traffic data.
- Sri Lanka’s financial crisis and near-collapse from 2019 onward likely made its media industry particularly vulnerable and therefore reliant on content provided freely by PRC state news outlets.
- Of Nepali outlets, News Abhiyan (approximately 2% of its articles), The Rising Nepal (approximately 0.7% of its articles), and Nepal News (approximately 0.6% of its articles) were among the most likely to share PRC-sourced content. Yet as in the case of Sri Lanka above, these sites do not appear to have significant readership among Nepalis.
- The Pakistani media environment shows levels of PRC-sourced content that are just under South Asia’s overall average but still higher than those of most of the region’s states. Levels of PRC-sourced content in Pakistan (0.11% of articles) were slightly higher than they were in India (0.06% of articles) and Bangladesh (0.06% of articles) during the period analyzed.
News outlet Pakistan Telegraph shares a Xinhua article rejecting the notion
that Beijing is engaging in unfair economic practices.
- These higher levels are likely due to the economic inroads the PRC has made in Pakistan over the past 10 years. Beijing has become a key financier for Islamabad including via the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, and both governments have a shared geopolitical rival in New Delhi.
- Of Pakistani outlets, Pakistan Telegraph (approximately 6% of its articles) was by far the most likely to share PRC-sourced content, but its light internet traffic and the greater popularity of other Pakistani news outlets suggest that the Telegraph’s influence on Pakistani netizens is low.
- The Maldives and Bhutan had the lowest levels of PRC-sourced content, suggesting that smaller states can also be resilient. However, the extremely small size of both countries likely means that if even one outlet begins sharing PRC-sourced content on a regular basis, the degree of PRC media saturation could rise quickly.
- The case of the Maldivian Sun Online is representative of this fact but in the inverse, because when the media outlet stopped publishing PRC-sourced articles in March 2023, levels of PRC-sourced content in the Maldives dropped to zero.
- The lack of PRC-sourced content in Bhutan’s media environment during 2023 and 2024 is likely due not only to the country’s small size but also to the fact that it has no formal relations with the PRC, though this may change as it negotiates a boundary dispute with Beijing.
Takeaways: Relatively higher degrees of PRC-sourced content in Sri Lanka and Nepal indicate that these news environments do not have the same financial resources and infrastructure for independent media as do larger media markets such as India, Bangladesh, and even Pakistan. Yet small states can also show some resiliency to PRC media influence, as seen in the Maldives and Bhutan—likely because their news markets are so small that only a handful of outlets operate in them, and none have so far relied much on content from the PRC. The somewhat higher degree of PRC saturation in Pakistan’s news market, meanwhile, is likely due to the PRC’s growing investments in Pakistan over the past decade, which likely introduced media-sharing deals as the countries aligned politically and economically. Beijing’s success in the region overall appears limited for the time being, however, as outlets with higher degrees of PRC-sourced content were not among the most heavily trafficked news sites in their respective countries.
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