Exposé: Communist China’s Propaganda Infiltration of Italian Media Revealed
Since becoming the first country of the G7 nations to sign onto China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2019, Italy has seen the communist nation infiltrate its mainstream media, including Italy’s news wire service, a national business newspaper, and a tabloid owned by the family of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
“Wherever the readers are, wherever the viewers are, that is where propaganda reports must extend their tentacles.” — Xi Jinping, February 2016
Ahead of a state visit from Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in 2019, the head of the State Council Information Office (China’s foreign propaganda department) Jiang Jianguo told a group of top Italian media figures that the signing of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – China’s plan for world economic dominance – would bring with it “new opportunities for media exchanges and pragmatic co-operation between China and Italy.”
This new co-operation with Chinese propagandists was heralded in with an Italian-language video series of “Xi Jinping’s Classical Quotes” broadcast on Italy’s Mediaset and on Cinitalia, a Chinese-language magazine and multimedia outlet developed for the Italian market by the state-owned China Media Group.
Three months before Xi Jinping’s trip to Italy, a national newspaper owned by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, Il Giornale, began publishing articles written under the name Cinitalia. The paper continues to publish Cinitalia propaganda articles to this day without revealing to its readership that they are in fact carefully scripted articles churned out by a Chinese government organization rather than genuine news. The page makes no indication of Communist Party involvement in the texts.
A magazine published by Cinitalia openly admits that it produces its Italian content in association with the Chinese Embassy in Italy.
On May 9th, Il Giornale published a Cintialia article that suggested that reports confirming China’s genocide of the Uyghur people and other Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang – so far recognised by the British, Canadian, and Dutch parliaments and the U.S. State Department – are “media manipulation of events” crafted to use “human rights concerns” to further America’s foreign policy agenda.
It is currently estimated that there are approximately two million Uyghurs currently in concentration camps in the region, where they have been reportedly subject to forced sterilisation, organ harvesting, torture, brainwashing, gang rape, and murder. The Chinese government firmly denies this but has refused to allow independent observers access to inspect the so-called “vocational training” camps in Xinjiang.
A January article published in the same Berlusconi paper titled “Walking Around Wuhan” hails the local and national government’s draconian policies for allegedly bringing the city back to normality. The Chinese propaganda article fails to mention that all currently available evidence suggests the coronavirus pandemic began in Wuhan, a claim which the CCP has rejected. Chinese officials have officially taken the stance that the virus originated in the United States, though others have suggested that the virus first originated in Italy. No scientific evidence supports these theories at press time.
More recent Chinese propaganda articles run by Il Giornale include: “Pandemics are won by collaborating without borders“, “Global Health Forum, Xi’s 5 tips for protecting human health“, and “Science, technology, innovation: Xi designs the China of the future“.
The owner of Il Giornale, Silvio Berlusconi, the controversial former Prime Minister of Italy, has been critical of the Chinese regime in the past. However, amid financial troubles in 2017, he sold the AC Milan football club to a group of Chinese investors for 740 million euros ($788m).
“We should improve foreign-oriented communication through trying methods with new concepts, domains and expressions that are understood by both China and the rest of the world, telling the true story of our country and making our voice heard.”
— Xi Jinping’s message to Chinese journalists, November 8th 2020
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https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/06/07/communist-chinas-propaganda-infiltration-of-italian-media-revealed/