As the Democrats were holding their opening debate in Miami on Wednesday evening, the man whose job they want to take next year was on his way to this weekend’s G20 gathering in Osaka, or as he put it himself, in precisely the split-screen image the White House wanted to portray, “I’m on Air Force One, off to save the Free World!”

The President’s departure came after another interesting call-in to Fox Business News.

Whatever else happens at the G20 – and whoever else the President talks to – a lot is riding on the meeting between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, even if some expectations may not be high. Much has changed since the two leaders last met in Buenos Aires in December and uncertainty as to next steps has only deepened amid growing tensions over trade. The meeting takes place amid continuing signs of caution surrounding the Chinese economy, as well as concern over unpredictability in the Middle East, with relations between the US and Iran apparently worsening with each tweet.

But the “sideline summit”– which could end up overshadowing the main G20 gathering – is also happening at an interesting time in terms of the image and global perception of the two leaders and their countries. President Trump last week officially “launched” his bid for re-election next November (although technically he has been a candidate since establishing the formal mechanism for his campaign on the day he took office). It seems a still-polarized America is set for “more of the same” in a strategic re-run of what brought Trump to power in 2016. Part of that persona, we know by now, involves painting as “enemies” sections of the US media which do not cover him favourably, while projecting strength on trade – even if there might still be some confusion over exactly how tariffs work.

For President Xi, the meeting comes on the heels not just of the symbolic 30th anniversary of Tiananmen Square but massive present-day street protests in Hong Kong – the biggest in the territory since the handover from Britain in 1997. The huge demonstrations and their nightly broadcast around the world eventually led to the indefinite suspension of a controversial extradition measure and growing pressure for the resignation of the regional chief executive Carrie Lam. The speed of the government’s climbdown was perhaps surprising – in 2014, pro-democracy protesters occupied the streets for almost three months, ultimately winning no concessions.

Chinese media blamed foreign “meddling” for the “lawlessness” of the Hong Kong protests, but the sheer scale must have given authorities pause for thought. And the incident indicates problems China might have in connecting with – and controlling – younger citizens as it tightens its grip on dissent and civil society; a process that has been developing progressively since Xi came to power in 2013. It’s probably hardly surprising that the pace of growth and increased sophistication of the nation’s social credit system recently led city authorities in Beijing to announce that they would be able to “judge” each of the capital’s residents “based on their behaviour” by the end of next year.

President Trump’s path to a second term over the coming year may yet see mass demonstrations as big as the Womens’ Marches that marked his inauguration weekend, but while Trump can usually rely on Fox News and other friendly, if more peripheral, outlets such as the One America News Network to amplify his message to his domestic base, he regularly resorts to inflammatory attacks on the “mainstream” media, branding them “enemies of the people” and using the effective catch-all label of “fake news” to not only dismiss coverage he doesn’t like, but undermine the very function and credibility of a free press by reinforcing a lack of trust among his supporters.

On the other side of a similar coin, the very idea of media independence is one of the so-called “seven unmentionables”– values that Xi has decreed are to be opposed by the Communist Party. The others are human rights, constitutional democracy, pro-market liberalism, criticism of the party’s past, and civil participation. The institutional effectiveness of state-run media inside China, therefore, means that tactics for managing the government’s message can largely concentrate on what the outside world might see and hear.

Hence, as the Hong Kong protests intensified, Chinese censors stepped up their policing of social media and access to western news sites – a strategy often referred to as the “Great Firewall of China”.  Ironically, when The Guardian and The Washington Post were added to the firewall and Chinese citizens were blocked from access to them during the Tiananmen anniversary, President Trump had the same day attacked the Post for something – it doesn’t even matter exactly what – before tweeting: “I know it is not at all ‘Presidential’ to hit back at the Corrupt Media, or people who work for the Corrupt Media, when they make false statements about me or the Trump Administration. Problem is, if you don’t hit back, people believe the Fake News is true. So we’ll hit back!”

It might be hard to imagine President Xi saying anything similar. At least not so anyone might hear.

Soft power

So while both leaders have their own ways of dealing with the media at home, image perception and controlling the story have become increasingly important in the court of public opinion; and it’s here where China has been making great strides. Beijing sees an effective policy of outreach among global media markets as an important vehicle for the exercise of Chinese soft power – to foreign governments and the 50million-strong Chinese diaspora alike – in order to publicise and praise its diplomatic and trade-related activities abroad and promote, in President Xi’s words, “a good Chinese narrative and better communicate China’s message to the world.”

According to the US Council on Foreign Relations, the state-run news agency Xinhua is on course to have 200 bureaus by next year; China Radio International “broadcasts 392 hours of programming a day in 38 languages from 27 overseas bureaus” (an extensive Reuters investigation in 2015 looked at the covert influence of the radio network “from Finland to Nepal to Australia, and from Philadelphia to San Francisco”); while the English-language editions of newspapers China Daily and Global Times have a combined circulation of about 1.2 million worldwide.

A study earlier this year by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) found that China was pursuing a “new world media order.”  Cédric Alviani, East Asia Bureau Director of RSF told Time magazine that: “What is at stake is not only the Chinese authorities trying to spread their own propaganda…what is at stake is journalism as we know it.”

But it is perhaps in television – the technology that came of age and cemented its influence in the west roughly at the same time as the aftermath of the Communist revolution – where China’s greatest potential for influence lies. The state broadcaster, the somewhat ominously-named CCTV (China Central Television), was rebranded in 2016 as China Global Television Network (CGTN) and has since embarked on an ambitious expansion programme, broadcasting in English, Arabic, French, Russian and Spanish, and has reporting teams in 70 countries. It recently set up a European hub in London. CGTN’s expansion has also been rapid in Africa as Beijing’s trading relationships with countries in the continent have grown in importance – one of its biggest hubs outside China is in Nairobi. The channel has almost 80 million followers on Facebook, as many as the BBC and CNN combined (although take social media numbers with the usual caveats).

A Guardian investigation last year looked at the implications of the rapid expansion of Beijing’s global media empire and concluded that, “For China, the media has become both the battlefield on which this “global information war” is being waged, and the weapon of attack.” Louisa Lim and Julia Bergin write: “This is not just a battle for clicks. It is above all an ideological and political struggle, with China determined to increase its “discourse power” to combat what it sees as decades of unchallenged western media imperialism.”

By contrast, when President Trump arrived in Britain on his recent state visit, he commented that there was a need for a state-run “global news organization.” It’s probably unlikely he was talking about Voice of America – and his motivation, one suspects, was less to compete with the likes of CGTN, or even the Russian broadcaster RT, but more to undermine CNN International – just another of his “enemies.”