Hungarian public broadcaster agrees to air hardline Chinese propaganda

In Budapest last week, the CEO of the Hungarian public broadcaster MTVA, Dániel Papp, who has been proven to falsify news, and head of the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda department and chairman of the Chinese state media company China Media Group (CMG) Shen Haixiong, shared a stage and agreed on mutual cooperation. Even in light of the last few bizarre years, this was not something I would have put on my 2024 bingo card. According to a statement issued on the occasion, MTVA and CMG started cooperating last year, but it was this year, during Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit that the agreement about Chinese documentaries being broadcast on Hungarian public television was reached. The wording of the announcement about what exactly these documentaries would be was rather succinct, but the caption behind the publicity photo of the official handshake indicated what would be broadcast:

Foreign language versions of Classic Quotes by Xi Jinping

Although CMG singed the collaboration with the Hungarian public broadcaster, the program has not yet been shown there. It was, however, broadcast on ATV Spirit on 11 May which is where I was able to watch it. This is made more interesting by the fact that ATV Spirit is not part of MTVA.

What is also interesting is that the foreign-language version of Xi Jinping's thoughts with classic quotes is not a documentary in the classic sense of the word, but is the kind of programme that is shown on commercial TV stations in the afternoon, disguised as a magazine but really trying to sell, say, laxatives.

Only here, the product is not laxatives, but the Chinese Communist Party.

The foreign-language versions of Classic Quotes by Xi Jinping are seven minutes long in total, but the headline warns that this is only the first part, there will be more coming. Essemtially, the entire seven-minute programme is solely and exclusively devoted to the horrendously expensive investment and development project built to transport drinking water from the south of China to Beijing, a distance of some 1,500 kilometers. The dam and the canal were completed in the late 2010s, and there are doubts as to how useful it actually is, what impact it will have on the environment, and whether it was even worth spending tens of billions of dollars on it all.

Naturally, there is no doubt mentioned in the propaganda film. Instead, it shows glorious drone footage of the dam, while an anonymous Chinese reporter and former Belgian ambassador Patrick Nijs listen to experts talk about how fantastic this investment is. Nijs' wife is Chinese and works as a consultant in the country, but she has also been featured in a propaganda film before, in which she talked about how her aubergines had withered in the drought, but she was happy nonetheless.

Among other things, Nijs and the reporter chat with Party Secretary Ling Jihua, "a representative of Quzhou, a subsidiary of the company responsible for the central section of the water diversion from south to north". They also pour themselves a few decilitres of water at the Danjiangkou reservoir and drink it, according to the programme. Of course, we don't know if they actually drink it, because when they take a sip, their glasses are suspiciously opaque, but afterwards the presenter explains that it "tastes just like any bottled water".

The programme then takes a sharp turn towards discussing migration, which the narrator says is "one of the most difficult problems to solve in the world". Here, however, the aspect discussed is very different from what Hungarians have become accustomed to hearing from government propaganda:

more than 360,000 people needed to be relocated because of the construction of the water diversion system.

Of course, according to the report, this wasn't bad for anyone, as the relocated villagers now live in a Truman Show-style housing estate, grow kiwis (with the education and permits "provided by the government", they add) and almost all have their own cars now, which means they are living much better than in their original homes, "the leader of Zhouzhuang Village in Xichuan County" says. In any case, the footage shows only one car in the street, far in the background.

That concludes the report section of the programme, after which it's time for the deciphering, since we are supposed to be discussing the Chinese president's thoughts after all. The presenter asks Nijs how he interprets Xi Jinping's phrase: "opening ports and bays is easy". Naturally, he interprets it positively. Nijs then proceeds to explain that everyone in the West wants to be the boss, and if you want to achieve something there, you have to compete for the leadership. But China doesn't work like that. The party cells are everywhere and everyone is working for a common goal: the good of the people. "This is the magic of China," Belgium's former ambassador to China concludes.

And if the viewer still wasn't sure they're watching some pretty hard-hitting state propaganda, the main message of the seven-minute report is still to come in the form of a long quote from Xi Jinping. The Chinese president’s thought is shared as part of a glorious montage of birds flying in front of the Royal Palace, the Great Wall of China, combined with red flags flapping in slow motion, swelling music, and a caption in a deliberately contrasting colour:

“As long as the fundamental principles are upheld, all work will fall in place. We must uphold and strengthen the centralized, unified leadership of the Party’s Central Committee. We will improve the leadership systems by which the Party exercises overall leadership and coordinates the efforts of all sides. This will ensure that the Party’s solidarity and unity are maintained.”

It's hard to find the words after all that, and the anonymous producers of the Classic Thoughts by Xi Jinping in Foreign Languages must be aware of that too, as the show ends abruptly without any credits or additional information. Only the logos of the production companies are visible, with the biggest one being the logo of the state propaganda centre, CMG.

The programme is available on Youtube as well, but for now without Hungarian subtitles (English subtitles are available though – TN):

The Youtube version, however, has other things that are missing from the Hungarian TV version. The programme doesn't end so abruptly, but is followed by a few foreign talking heads.

In the one minute that's left out of the Hungarian version, it is presumably foreigners living in China who speak about how the country works and what the basic principles are. For example, they talk about a well-marked road to follow, or mention that "The land belongs to the one who cultivates it" – with a Spanish-speaking young man explaining that this means well-established collective work.

I used the term "presumably" because at one point the camera is in a large North American city where a young man talks about how the way the country responded to the Covid epidemic and focused on keeping its people safe really captured his attention.

Then we return to the Spanish-speakers, where a man speaking into the flashy microphone of state-funded CGTN explains how the state of China has lifted millions out of poverty and how it has grown exponentially in recent decades.