“The relationship between China and the rest of the world is undergoing historic changes. China needs to know better about the world and the world needs to know better about China.”

This is President Xi Jinping’s message to China’s leading media organizations. Top of the agenda is how to better tell stories about China’s development, explain China’s path, and have a major voice in global affairs and international issues.

Rowan Callick, China editor of The Australian newspaper, speaks highly of Chinese media’s increasing influence around the world, but cautioned in an interview with CGTN's Dialogue that winning over public opinion of a global audience is never an easy task.

“Chinese media has a lot of competence and resources, has a lot of terrific, well-educated and trained people working there. It’s important Chinese media is given more trust, journalists are given more room to find their own stories and their own voices. And I think that’s really a crucial factor in building credibility at home. And then that credibility at home can spread abroad as well.”

Professor Shi Anbin from Tsinghua University told Dialogue that a lesson from the election of Donald Trump in the US and Britain's vote to leave the European Union is that the gap between the media and the working class is widening.

“If we draw lessons from last year’s US presidential election, also Brexit, you can see the mainstream media actually lost contact with the grassroots of the society. Most working-class people don’t read mainstream at all. One thing I think, the change in China is that Chinese mainstream media now try to concentrate their contact with people in the countryside, in rural areas, in interior China, so they send a lot of reporters to interview stories there.”

Both Callick and Shi think media integration should be encouraged and Chinese media should use new technology to create brands with global influence.