Contact is taking a holiday!

Chris Buckley and Jane Perlez, The New York Times, 14 December 2015

BEIJING — The Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda boss, Liu Qibao, has extolled the success of Alibaba, the giant Internet company, as the kind of uplifting story that offsets the country’s reputation abroad as corrupt and authoritarian.

“We have many iconic brands and archetypal individuals with many stories that people love to hear,” Mr. Liu told a conference of officials in January. Alibaba and similar success stories, he said, should be seen as “shining calling cards for the image of contemporary China.”

The Alibaba Group, and party propaganda overseers in Beijing, are about to take that premise a step further, going beyond using the narrative of one of China’s most lucrative businesses to improve China’s reputation — and instead using its cash and digital skills. On Friday, the company announced that it would attempt to directly reshape global news coverage of China, which it says is too negative, by buying the media assets of the SCMP Group, including The South China Morning Post, a careworn English-language broadsheet in Hong Kong.

In Beijing, those who worry about China’s reputation abroad were elated by Alibaba taking the helm of a storied newspaper fallen on hard times and pledging to use it to enhance China’s reputation.

“This is a good thing,” said Wang Wen, a researcher at Renmin University in Beijing and a former editor at Global Times, a popular Chinese tabloid that often criticizes the Western media. “This is an attempt by the country’s social power to alter the country’s image,” he added, referring to private corporations and others outside the direct control of the state.

Alibaba has agreed to pay $266 million in the deal, a small outlay for the company, which has annual revenue of $12 billion. But the political reverberations could range far beyond the sale price. The questions are how much pressure the Chinese government will place on Alibaba to pursue the party’s longstanding quest for more sympathetic coverage overseas, how Alibaba will respond, and what it might get in return.

Winning a much larger global readership online for The South China Morning Post will entail attracting readers with scoops and protecting its credibility as more than a government-blessed public relations vehicle, several news industry insiders said. But party censors under President Xi Jinping have been increasingly intolerant of critical reports in the domestic news media.

“If they’re seen as a mouthpiece, then they’re not going to be seen as a newspaper that people want to be seen reading,” said Mark Simon, a senior executive at Next Media Group in Hong Kong, whose Apple Daily is a populist Chinese-language paper disdained by party officials.

Alibaba says it wants its latest acquisition to offer “fair and accurate” reporting that will improve global understanding of China. That, it argues, will bring value for Alibaba’s investors, because negative reports about China in the Western news media are hurting the company’s shares, which are listed in New York.

But businesses such as Alibaba that throw their spending power behind the government’s message can also win points with policy makers, said Chen Ping, a mainland-born media investor and businessman in Hong Kong. “Doing this will enhance his standing in the eyes of the Communist Party,” Mr. Chen said of Jack Ma, the shrewd founder of Alibaba, who is the chairman of the company.

China’s government has long been testy about its image in the West. In recent years, it has tried to influence coverage by blocking websites and restricting visas for journalists of news outlets deemed too negative, and also by spending heavily on the international expansion of state-run outlets like China Central Television and China Daily.

The most recent tactic has been recruiting Chinese corporate support, said Mareike Ohlberg, a researcher on Chinese propaganda policy in Heidelberg, Germany. Similarly, Chinese corporations investing aggressively abroad are seeking favorable coverage for China as they work to overcome regulatory hurdles they see as rooted in biased reporting on China and suspicion of its rising economic clout.

Alibaba’s purchase comes as the Chinese government has staked out more ambitious positions abroad, from hosting the summit meeting of the Group of 20 leading economies next year, to establishing a new international development bank, to extending its military power, all subjects for which the government covets positive spin.

Supporters of the Chinese government said Mr. Ma could attract foreign readers by offering a counterweight to Western news media. Alibaba plans to drop the paper’s online paywall, allowing the world to read its stories for free.

Unlike many Western media outlets, it would provide news from China that was “not written from an ideological point of view of what China should be,” said George Yeo, a senior executive under Robert Kuok, the Malaysian billionaire who has sold the paper to Alibaba.

The South China Morning Post still carries cachet in Hong Kong, where it has long been the leading homegrown English-language newspaper. It is read by investors in the city interested in China, and it has produced scoops on corruption scandals and policy shifts.

But it is a frayed institution with a depleted newsroom and a tendency toward anemic, uncontroversial articles on China. In the first half of 2015, it had an average circulation of about 102,000 print and digital copies, according to the Hong Kong Audit Bureau of Circulations, and visits to its website have fallen, putting out of reach its goal of 30 million page views a month, said a former editor at the newspaper who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his ties in the media industry.

Already, some Chinese commentators have likened Mr. Ma to Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, who purchased The Washington Post in 2013 and is widely credited with revitalizing the paper by giving reporters more resources and a longer journalistic leash. Mr. Ma may be able to give The South China Morning Post more resources, but skeptics say it is likely to come with a shorter leash.

“Jack Ma is saying we’re going to tell China’s story more positively, and the stories we won’t see is what is critical — stories questioning government policy, inquiring into the powerful, and in Hong Kong examining business,” said Ken Doctor, an American news industry analyst, adding that it was unclear whether Mr. Ma understood that the power of a news outlet resided in its newsroom.

Alibaba has said it will ensure the paper’s journalistic integrity and refrain from interfering its day-to-day operations. Even without micromanagement, Mr. Ma and his colleagues could exert a powerful pull on the direction of The South China Morning Post, said David Schlesinger, a former senior editor of the Reuters news agency who now runs Tripod Advisors, a company based in Hong Kong that advises on news media issues. “That depends on who they hire, what instructions they get, how do they fund it, and what happens to their journalists who want to write a story that is either personally or politically uncomfortable for Jack Ma,” he said.

Since it returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, Hong Kong has preserved its own legal system and freedoms of expression that are unthinkable in mainland China. But many journalists say the exercise of those freedoms has become increasingly compromised, often by self-censorship.

A journalist at The South China Morning Post, who requested anonymity in fear of being punished for speaking out, said that even before the sale to Alibaba there was a pattern of editors at the paper rejecting, shrinking or underplaying stories that might irk Beijing.

“I think this is really the last straw on the camel’s back,” the journalist said about the sale to Alibaba.

“On the one hand, they want to have this facade of this credible, independent newspaper, but on the other hand they’ve got this agenda of pleasing the Communist Party,” the journalist said. “The two simply cannot go hand in hand.”

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