IT WOULD be nice to think the launch of the Global Times, China's new English-language newspaper, signals a chance for progress in the Chinese press, so often scorned for its lack of freedom.
The new daily will compete directly with China Daily, an official English voice of the Chinese government since 1981.
And since competition tends to breed innovation, the thinking goes, maybe the Global Times will push the limits of what is acceptable in China and help lead the country closer to the press freedoms most of the rest of the world enjoys.
Alas, this will not be so. In the year I spent working at China Daily, I got a pretty good sense of how state media operates — it is unchanging, unquestioning, and fiercely loyal to the Communist Party line.
There is a general belief in the West that the Chinese government towers over newspapers such as China Daily wielding a giant "CENSORED" stick and stamping out any rumblings of dissent or opinions it deems inharmonious to official ideals.
But this is not really the case. Most of the censorship at state-run papers like China Daily is self-inflicted.
In my experience, staff writers and editors are fully on board with the opinion that the main function of China's English-language media is to project a positive image of China to the world.
"There are so many negative stories in Western media," I have been told on multiple occasions, "it is our job to give China's side."
Fair enough, I say. There is a tendency in the West to make broad assumptions about China based largely on popular media constructions. Some have merit, others are too simplistic and off-base.
Constant cries of "Western bias" can grow tiresome, but it is not unreasonable to want to present a more positive image of one's country — which is exactly what the Global Times has set out to do.
As an English-language offshoot of the People's Daily, a newspaper known for its feisty nationalism, the Global Times aims to "(Afford) international readers the opportunity to discover and understand China" by "presenting news from a Chinese perspective", as it said in an inaugural editorial on Monday.
In other words, it will be unabashedly pro-China, pro-Party, and virtually indistinguishable from the papers that came before it.
The only question is: Why? Newspapers today are not exactly a growth industry.
The Global Times is supposedly another tool in the government's "soft power" drive to improve its reputation abroad, but that's only if they can get people to read it. It's well known that China Daily's readership is largely confined to expats in China and locals who are trying to learn English.
With plenty of far more credible, non-state news sources reporting from China, readers abroad have no compelling reason to look at Global Times other than to check if it's any different from what's available on Xinhua or China Daily. Once readers realise it's more of the same, they'll just roll their eyes and move on to a less compromised news source.
But it's unfair to judge Chinese newspapers by the standards of Western media. Chinese papers serve a very specific purpose that bears little resemblance to media elsewhere.
If China's government would realise that their steadfast restriction of the press is partly to blame for the alleged biases from abroad, then perhaps they wouldn't need multiple media mouthpieces to defend themselves.