After China unveiled grand plans for laying a modern-day Silk Road two and half years ago, domestic news outlets leaped on the bandwagon to cheer President Xi Jinping’s signature platform for economic diplomacy.
Among them is Wujie Media, touted by its government backers as an authoritative platform for promoting the “Belt and Road” initiative—a plan for developing infrastructure networks to better connect China’s economy with the rest of Asia and Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
Just months after Wujie launched Wujie News, the journalism venture published a mysterious letter calling on Mr. Xi to resign, triggering an apparent government probe that could threaten the company’s very existence.
Wujie is partly owned by the government of China’s far western Xinjiang region, which straddles the ancient Silk Road, and its founding was part of a wave of publicity by Beijing for its economic diplomacy. In the last two years, Chinese officials hosted forums to discuss Belt and Road media strategies, while state news outlets provided dedicated coverage.
The official Xinhua News Agency, for instance, launched last year the “Xinhua Silk Road” service, which supplies news, data and analysis on Belt and Road-related developments. The Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily, meanwhile inked a pact with 33 regional media partners to collaborate in their coverage of China’s regional development plans.
Wujie, whose name means “no borders,” entered this milieu in late 2014, branding itself as a new-media platform focused on reaching domestic and international audiences with mobile technology. According to corporate records, its shareholders comprise a media company controlled by the Xinjiang government and SEEC Media Group, the Beijing-based publisher of the respected Caijing business magazine.
Wujie’s ambitions later attracted attention from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., China’s largest e-commerce company, which has sought to deepen its reach into news and entertainment media.
In April 2015, weeks after the Chinese government released a Belt and Road action plan that included calls for using “new media tools” to shape positive publicity, Chinese media reported that Alibaba was among three partners collaborating on Wujie.
Wujie News was then launched in September, branded as a venture between Alibaba, SEEC Media and Tianshan, the Xinjiang government’s news portal. The three entities in January signed an agreement to collaborate on Wujie Media, according to state media reports and government notices. Wujie News’s website says it runs on Alibaba’s cloud-computing service, known as Aliyun.
In February, Wujie News unveiled an Urdu-language mobile app for users in Pakistan, a diplomatic partner of Beijing’s and a recipient of Chinese infrastructure investments.
At the launch event, an official from the Cyberspace Administration of China, the main Internet regulator, said Wujie Media “has become an authoritative platform for disseminating and exchanging information on the Belt and Road initiative,” according to a Tianshan report. Wujie aimed to launch more apps serving other Asian countries along the historical Silk Road, Tianshan said.
Those plans are now in doubt, after Wujie’s news website published on March 4 a letter calling for Mr. Xi’s resignation. While the letter was quickly removed, Wujie has appeared to come under investigation, and at least four of its managers and editors have gone missing in recent days, according to friends and associates.
Asked about Wujie, an Alibaba spokesman said Alibaba isn’t an investor in Wujie and has “no relationship with them whatsoever.” He said the January memorandum “is non-legally binding and nothing in the agreement has been implemented.”
Within Wujie, many among its more than 100 employees worry that their company may soon be shut down, according to a Wujie employee and two people familiar with the situation.
Tianshan, the Xinjiang government, and SEEC Media didn’t respond to requests for comment. Phone calls and emails to Wujie went unanswered. A China Real Time reporter who visited Wujie’s offices last week was turned away. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/03/29/future-of-chinas-wujie-media-in-doubt-after-letter-calling-on-xi-to-quit/
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