starting in 1990, the State Council’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Office gave $800,000

86 starting in 1990, the State Council’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Office gave $800,000 a year to SinoVision, ultimately increasing its subsidy to between $2 million and $3 million a year. Wang made this charge in a 2011 letter to the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office alleging widespread corruption at the station.*° Allegations of corruption and governmental subsidies have not been corroborated. What is clear, however, is that, like Qiaobao, SinoVision’s content echoes China’s official media. The vast majority of its stories about China, Sino-American relations, Taiwan, Hong kong, and other important issues for the PRC government are taken directly from official Chinese media outlets or websites, including CCTV, Xinhua, and the People’s Daily. In an essay, Qiaobao’s Eastern Group president, You Jiang, defended his paper’s support of the PRC’s agenda by saying that it stemmed not from Beijing’s direction, but from demands from pro-Chinese immigrants in the United States.” Forays by PRC organizations to assert direct control over Chinese-language media in the United States sparked a battle with publications owned by private interests from Taiwan and Hong Kong that did not share the PRC’s ideological bent. PRC officials openly acknowledged the political nature of this battle, and in a 2007 interview, Guo Zhaojin, the president of the state-owned China News Service, noted that if China could gain control of Chinese-language publications in the United States, China would be better able to influence the overseas Chinese community, have a say in American politics, and “protect the national image.” Guo further observed that more than one- quarter of America’s minorities relied on foreign-language media to obtain their news, Foreign-language media, said Guo, was a “giant hiding in plain sight.””8 Beijing seems to be winning the battle with Chinese-language outlets expressing views that dissent from Beijing’s. Over the course of the last twenty years, a series of once- independent Chinese-language media have fallen under Beijing’s control. The Sing Tao Newspaper Group was established in Hong Kong in 1938. In the mid-1990s, its original owner”? was forced to divest of interests in the paper, and it was soon taken over by a pro-PRC businessman,*° who, starting in 1998, became a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, which functions as part of the broader united front organization network. Sing Tao’s coverage of China is clearly now aligned with that of state-run media from Beijing. In fact, in May 2001, the year he purchased Sing Tao, the owner established a joint venture with the Xinhua News Agency to create an information-service company known as Xinhua Online. Media HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020545