EU: When articles by EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell are translated into Chinese and posted online, the articles often disappear within minutes as a result of government censorship.
However, a recent post raised a notable exception.
In a blog post from June, Borrell claimed that Russian efforts to attribute skyrocketing inflation to Western sanctions were succeeding and that the European Union was losing a "narrative battle" about the food crisis.
"You know, every time I tried to translate Borel into Chinese, I was censored within twenty minutes. And this time, a senior EU diplomat in Beijing pointed out that Chinese could translate Borel. and self-publishing it.
Borrell's claim was not original. He has been warning about Europe's inability to sell itself to other parts of the world as effectively as autocratic states such as China and Russia since taking office in 2019.
He thinks the EU is having trouble convincing many regions of the world that it has issues ranging from food inflation and COVID-19 vaccines to infrastructure, human rights and even fundamental models of governance. But these liberal regimes have more to offer than that.
On the Food Crisis blog, the case of Beijing censors - or, more accurately, their absence - helped confirm another suspicion that was brewing in Brussels and other western capitals.
Suspicions have risen that Russian and Chinese news outlets are working together to spread anti-Western messages around the world, often with great success, during the six months when Russia was at war in Ukraine and the summer of crisis in Taiwan. Strait is.
According to an EU source, "Over the past two years, for example, there has been an alignment between Russian and Chinese outlets in propaganda stories related to human rights violations in Afghanistan and Xinjiang, for example.
According to EU officials researching these trends, Chinese state-controlled media have been blaming the US, NATO and the West in general.
They mention how "very important" Chinese channels are of Western sanctions against Russia. He said China is "actively disseminating and amplifying pro-Kremlin propaganda stories" on a variety of topics, including the existence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine and claims of a US biolab there.
The European Union remained largely silent during the Taiwan Straits crisis, while Chinese diplomats and Russian media outlets flooded the region with material supporting similar positions. The crisis was brought on by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island in August, prompting an unprecedented military response from Beijing.
In response to the crisis, messages supporting China were displayed on the Moscow TV tower, the official said.
According to Etienne Sola, a Chinese and Russian information patterns analyst based in Brussels for the US German Marshall Fund (GMF), Russian state media mentioned Taiwan more often than Ukraine in the 48 hours following the visit.
To the dismay of the European Union, these arguments have become deeply ingrained in some developing countries.
Western officials were taken by surprise when Senegalese President and African Union President Mackie Sall asked Brussels to ease its sanctions against Russia to curb food insecurity.
Both the Russian agricultural export ban and sanctions against third countries for importing Russian seeds are not enforced by the European Union.
Officials believed that Sal was duplicating Kremlin talking points, which he claims were amplified online after a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi by an army of Chinese diplomats.
China's General Consul in Belfast, Zhang Meifang, has become the most influential Chinese state Twitter account this year, according to data from a social media tracker maintained by the GMF.
Since the beginning of 2022, Zhang has frequently posted pro-Russian, anti-Western messages often related to the conflict in Ukraine, tweeting or retweeting hundreds of times daily.
Zhang tweeted a photo last month with the caption, "Conflict resolution... bad for business! The US was the top global arms exporter between 2017 and 2021, shipping more than nine times China's arms exports." The US, NATO and Ukraine.
Such arguments are persuasive in many parts of the Global South, where the 20th-century military adventurism of the United States and the colonial past of Europe still sting.
Hans Kribbe, co-founder of the Brussels consulting firm Shearwater, claimed that "we have a tendency to present ourselves as the sole defender of universal truths and values ​​of human rights, international law and democratic norms."
According to Kribbe, who served as a government adviser to Putin until 2015, "in a nutshell, we think of ourselves as the final arbiter, the final judge of right and wrong - a bit like the pope."
This "playing pope" is viewed as "arrogant, hypocritical, and obnoxious" in many parts of the world, according to Kribbe, who made this claim at a forum in Santander in late August. This is especially true when the West claims that Russia is "breaking sacred norms by invading another country."
"Well, no, because you frequently defy these rules yourself when it's convenient. Is it really that sacred, or is it only sacred when your own interests are at stake, as in Libya or Iraq, for instance?" he asked.
The truth is that significant portions of the non-Western world more readily identified with autocratic China, so dealing with this counter-narrative is difficult.
The EU's Borrell stated in a piece published on Monday of last week that "the effects of old anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist resentments remain powerful."
According to him, during the pandemic, "they were reinforced by the perception that developed countries were seen as trying to hoard vaccines and as not doing all they could to help the Global South to deal with Covid-19."
It is obvious that much work needs to be done to persuade individuals and governments in the Global South.
The fact that many people, even within the bloc, find it difficult to understand what Europe actually does contributes to the narrative issue.
Diplomats gripe about being asked to take the lead on poorly thought-out economic and soft power initiatives.
The European Chips Act was referred to as "bulls**t" by a diplomat tasked with promoting it to foreign governments that might assist the EU in developing its own semiconductor network.
"Are our strengths really in that area? How are subsidies being used to compete with China and draw in foreign investment?
Others claimed they had outright refused to support various connectivity and infrastructure plans that had come and gone over the years because they knew they would be ineffective.
The EU's connectivity strategy, introduced last year, "was an empty vessel being forcefully dragged across all delegations," according to a former diplomat.
The most recent of these initiatives is the Global Gateway, which was widely publicised last December by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as a €300 billion (US$298 billion) rival to China's Belt and Road Initiative but has yet to reveal even a single project.
Although the concept was "encouraging," Kribbe the consultant felt that there was "very little narrative" about what the initiative actually entailed.
This initiative, he said, "needs to be wrapped into a better story and sales pitch, which is what the Chinese are doing much better than us. However, I think it is important that this initiative exists.
From the start, there have been questions about the amount of funding available and whether the EU can really compete with the Chinese infrastructure drive that has drew large portions of the developing world into Beijing's sphere of influence.
Former Argentinean foreign minister Susana Malcorra claimed that for Europe to reassert itself in a region where China had flourished, it would face a difficult battle in Latin America.
"Latin America urges Europe to take more initiative. Latin America was left on its own by Europe a decade ago, she claimed.
If the EU wanted to compete with China on both narrative and influence in the region, according to Malcorra, it had to put its years of short-termism behind it.
"If Europe is serious, which it must be in light of the current geopolitical situation, then we need to take a longer-term perspective. China has been engaging in this for a long time.
China requests constructive de-escalation talks rather than a cap on the price of Russian oil.
