Longtime Editor of Chinese Propaganda Newspaper Global Times ‘Retires’

A news vendor places a copy of the Global Times for display on her newsstand in Beijing on
FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images
John Hayward

Hu Xijin, longtime editor of China’s state-run Global Times, announced his sudden retirement on Thursday.

Foreign media analysts and China-watchers speculated the communist regime forced Hu from the editorial perch he occupied for 15 years, possibly because Chinese Communist Party leadership was unsatisfied with his efforts to spin the persecution of tennis star Peng Shuai.

Like other agents of the Communist Party, but unlike ordinary Chinese citizens, Hu was allowed to have an account on Twitter, which he used assiduously to post the tyrannical regime’s propaganda and spotlight Western media stories that cast America and her allies in a negative light.

Hu posted a farewell tweet – plus a similar message on China’s state-approved, heavily censored microblogging site Weibo – a full day after local Chinese media reported his departure, and two days after his previous tweet, unusually long silence from the Global Times editor:

Contrary to Hu’s sentiments, it remains inexplicable that Twitter allows agents of the Chinese Communist government to use its services when the Chinese people are not allowed to access the platform. Hu nominally has almost half a million followers on Twitter (it is impossible to determine how many are shell accounts, bots, or paid Chinese state operatives).

The China Media Project (CMP), a Hong Kong-based watchdog group, read some tea leaves from Chinese publications on Thursday and speculated the 62-year-old Hu was forced out because communist leaders were displeased with his “highly visible international remarks in recent days,” especially his futile attempts to spin Western media after Peng Shuai’s disappearance:

A report yesterday in Hong Kong’s Tsingtao Daily News, shared by several other media, announced Hu’s pending retirement and said that the central leadership was keen to “strengthen [the paper’s] political guidance” 

This language seemed to suggest there might be concerns at the top about Hu, or the Global Times, as loose cannons firing against the discipline coming from above. Could something in his recent spate of posts about tennis star Peng Shuai – which sometimes seemed a clumsy operation run from a back office at the Global Times – have fallen afoul of powerful figures in the Party?

Through yesterday, however, there was no reliable confirmation of any change to Hu’s status at the helm of the pugnacious national tabloid – and Hu had, in any case, faced similar rumors in the past, including a report in Singapore’s Lianhe Zaobao back in June reporting that Wu Qimin, deputy head of the international desk at the paper’s parent People’s Daily, was being prepared for Hu’s post.

“Although the full situation is yet unclear, something worth emphasizing again, it might be that CCP leaders feel the Global Times is due for more ‘Party spirit’ and a bit less Hu Xijin spirit, even though Hu has in many ways been an exemplary servant of Party-state,” CMP concluded after reviewing some possible successors for Hu, plus rumors of a restructuring plan for the Global Times that would install a communist political officer above the editor.

Hu would have good reason to feel slighted if he was bounced out for failing to toe the Party line. He has been an indefatigable Communist Party propagandist, working tirelessly to put Beijing’s spin on every major story published by American media, which he consumed voraciously. He is widely credited with nursing the Global Times from obscurity to one of the most widely-read Chinese publications in foreign markets.

Still, Hu’s zeal is no match for the top candidate to become Communist Party political officer at the Global Times, a flesh-covered robot named Fan Zhengwei who speaks entirely in quotations from the writings of dictator Xi Jinping.

Reuters eulogized Hu’s career on Thursday, and also implied the Peng Shuai situation might have played some role in his downfall:

While not an official government spokesman, Hu has been one of the loudest pro-China voices on Twitter, which is blocked in the country, defending the party line on subjects from handling COVID-19 to disputes with Australia and the United States.

His Twitter comments and regular newspaper column “Hu Says” have reflected what is widely perceived to be increasingly strident Chinese nationalism, and he is frequently quoted in foreign media.

This perception as the de facto voice of Beijing has been bolstered by his citing of well-placed sources on issues about which the government has maintained official silence, such as recently the fate of Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai.

This would suggest the Communist Party gave Hu some “leaks” from “inside sources” to massage worldwide anger of its abuse of Peng, and was not pleased with how he made use of the information.

The UK Guardian noted that Hu is seen as a “controversial figure who divides opinion” in China, and allegations exist that he had extramarital affairs with two of his female colleagues. Hu claimed these accusations were a blackmail attempt by one of his deputy editors. With all the attention focused on China’s #MeToo movement after Peng Shuai claimed former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli raped her, the Communist Party might have decided Hu’s scandals were an embarrassment.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Guardian published a lengthy profile of Hu on Tuesday that began with a review of his clumsy attempts to manage the Peng story:

On 19 November, he tweeted to his 450,000 followers that he had confirmed through his own sources – he didn’t say who they were – that Peng was alive and well. Over the next two days, he posted videos of Peng at a restaurant and signing autographs in Beijing.

To many observers, this seemingly stage-managed footage, disseminated by organs of the Chinese state, was not reassuring. On 21 November, the International Olympic Committee spoke with Peng on a video call and declared that she was “doing fine”. When this intervention still failed to convince many that Peng was safe, Hu took the opportunity to hammer home one of the central themes of his three-decade career in journalism: when it comes to China, the western media sees only what it wants to see. “They only believe the story about China that they imagine,” he tweeted. “I’m surprised that they didn’t say the lady who showed up these two days is a fake Peng Shuai, a double.” Those who continued to question Peng’s safety, Hu wrote, were trying to “demonize China’s system”.

The New York Times could not resist slipping a partisan dig at Fox News into its acknowledgment of Hu’s retirement, raising the possibility that Hu threw in the towel because he felt the leftward crash-dive of American media made his work as a Communist propagandist redundant:

The New York Times is amid a growing scandal after Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) questioned why the newspaper chose not to publish information that would have incriminated Chinese dictator Xi Jinping personally in the ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people in East Turkistan.

The Guardian noted that the New York Times mentioned Hu 46 times over the past two years, and he was widely quoted by many other American, British, and Australian outlets. This Western media exposure was partly due to Hu’s position as a uniquely outspoken and feisty mouthpiece for the Chinese government – a “troll king” who lobbed crude insults and belligerent threats at foreign governments, like referring to the U.K. as China’s “bitch” or dismissing Australia as “gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe.”

This raises the possibility that Hu is out because the Communist Party might be planning a shift in diplomatic posture, so much as Party elders might have enjoyed Hu’s Troll King act until now, they decided it was time to bring down the curtain. As Hu’s own farewell message suggested, he might keep on trolling, but not as the editor-in-chief of a Chinese state newspaper.

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