Last week, a delegation from one of Europe’s oldest universities toured a center in northeast China dedicated to the preservation of the Siberian tiger and Amur leopard. The tour concluded with a strategic cooperation agreement between the university and a local state-run media group to “jointly promote the development of Sino-Spanish humanities and international communication” between the two countries.
The deal, and the odd circumstances of its conclusion, are a classic example of how China has in recent years sought to advance state narratives abroad and tip the scales of what it calls “discourse power.” The strategy, meant to raise positive perceptions of China in the world, relies on encouraging provinces and cities to reach out globally, a phenomenon that at CMP we have called “Centralization+.”
But seeing how this connects to tigers and leopards, which are regarded in China’s northeastern Jilin province as both a natural treasure and a cultural brand — and how a European university became caught up in what is essentially a ruse over cultural exchange — will require a bit of context.
As for the basics of the deal, on April 23, Jishi Media (吉视传媒), Jilin Province’s only state-owned listed cultural enterprise, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the University of Salamanca pledging to jointly produce a documentary on ecological themes, build “international communication capacity” — which in a Chinese official context refers concretely to China’s external communication — and deepen exchanges in journalism, culture, and AI. You Zhiqiang (由志强), Jishi Media’s Party secretary and chairman, signed for the Chinese side, while Salamanca rector Juan Corchado signed for the Spanish. The ceremony was witnessed by the propaganda office of the Jilin Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the China Public Relations Association (中国公共关系协会), or CPRA.
The CPRA, an ostensible non-profit association, is a prime example of how the cloaking of Party-state ties is a key strategic aspect of China’s international outreach. In fact, the association is directly run by the Central Propaganda Department, the body under the CCP in charge of ideology, media control, and international messaging. One of its key objectives is to “strengthen international exchanges and continuously expand the international influence of China’s public relations work.”
The upshot is that while the University of Salamanca and its officials may have believed they were completing a media and cultural exchange deal with credible Chinese partners, they were in fact sitting across the table from several different arms of China’s Party-state propaganda structure, all sharing the singular agenda of promoting Chinese narratives back in Spain and across Europe.
That China’s chief interest in this deal is more positive communication about the country globally is clear not just from last week’s signing, but from previous agreements between Spanish entities and Jishi Media. In April 2025, the state-run company signed a memorandum of understanding with the Fundación Conocer China (西班牙知华讲堂基金会), a Madrid-based foundation dedicated to deepening Spanish understanding of China, pledging to develop materials “helpful for Spain to understand 21st century Chinese reality.” This is a subtle reference to China’s state position on external communication, which holds that the country is treated unfairly in global public opinion — owing largely to Western media dominance — and needs to counter-balance this state of affairs with a robust approach, including media partnerships of the kind tracked at CMP’s Lingua Sinica.
Another key aspect of the Salamanca-Jilin story is the involvement of the Northeast Tiger Leopard Cultural International Communication Center (东北虎豹文化国际传播中心). Founded in January 2025 by Jishi Media and the Northeast Tiger Leopard National Park Administration, the center is Jilin Province’s fourth provincial-level international communication center — and a textbook example of the strategy documented in CMP’s Centralization+ report, which describes how China has since 2018 built a nationwide network of such centers under provincial propaganda department oversight to advance Party messaging goals abroad.
The deal last week illustrates the ways that potential partners around the world, including in Europe, can be vulnerable to outreach from media groups and other actors that are simply shifting faces of the Chinese Party-state with a single agenda — to advance China’s official narrative.
The university’s own announcement described the agreement as establishing “a roadmap for the development of joint projects in the field of media communication, especially in areas linked to digital innovation, content production and specialized training.” That language, entirely about the supposed intellectual value of the exchange, gives no hint whatsoever of the Party-state apparatus that lies behind the deal, or its own agenda.
The idea of China’s Central Propaganda Department and the Jilin propaganda office offering substantive exchange on “media communication” to a leading European university is absurd on its face. The whole deal sits uneasily with the core purpose of educational institutions, whose interest is in openness and the free exchange of ideas.
Explore the Lingua Sinica Database
To learn more about China’s media engagements in Spain — selected below — check out the Lingua Sinica database. Note that the LS database now allows search by date, with a full calendar function. We encourage readers to explore the database of PRC engagements by selecting for countries, engagement types and dates under the map (don’t forget to click “Filter”). We have also implemented a full-site search function in the banner of the site. Enjoy!
August 8, 2025
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November 24, 2024