The 2025 Belt and Road Journalists Forum in China was an opportunity for Black Agenda Report to join an international group of journalists working to promote meaningful dialogue on world issues. The following report was written by BAR reporter Margaret Kimberly, first published at BAR’s website.

The invitation extended to Black Agenda Report to participate in the 2025 Belt and Road Journalists Forum, held in the cities of Nanchang, Jingdezhen and Ganzhou in Jiangxi province China, was a testament to our 19-year history of providing “news, commentary and analysis from a Black left perspective.”

Our work is appreciated nationally and internationally, and this columnist attended the Forum along with 100 media representatives from around the world. The Forum is a venue for journalists from Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) nations, but Black Agenda Report was also included, the only outlet participating from the United States.

While the people of the U.S. are subjected to an endless stream of dangerous anti-China war propaganda, the Forum provided participants with the historical and cultural context needed to understand China’s history through the lens of the Jiangxi province region.

The city Jingdezhen has been an important center in the creation of ceramics, the porcelain that came to be known as china, for 1,000 years and from which it was traded internationally on the original Silk Road.

The People’s Liberation Army was founded in Jiangxi, and in 1934 the Long March of the Communist Party of China (CPC) began in Jiangxi. The Long March was a strategic retreat from the Kuomintang forces, and it allowed the CPC to live to fight on for many years, through the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, known in this country as World War II, and to eventually establish the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

While the corporate media inundate the public with tall tales of spy balloons and claims that China is making nefarious purchases of U.S. farmland, that nation forges ahead in spite of futile U.S. efforts to diminish its economic prowess.

Donald Trump’s ever changing tariff policies resulted in China imposing tariffs of its own and buying soy beans from Brazil and beef from Australia when those commodities had long been a part of agricultural trade between the two countries.

Joe Biden’s attempt to stop China’s access to computer chip production resulted in new innovations like DeepSeek, which created a model for artificial intelligence that surpassed ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost.

China’s rise as an economic power has thrown the United States into panic and counterproductive decision-making. Artificial intelligence is not the only example of futile efforts to keep China down. The first Trump administration imposed high tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, such as BYD, which stands for Build Your Dream. BYD cars are the biggest sellers in China and can be seen alongside U.S. cars on the streets of Beijing and Nanchang. But it was Joe Biden who imposed 100% tariffs on this popular brand and handed off this prohibition to Donald Trump’s second administration.

In the meantime, U.S. consumers are deprived of a product they would want, and Detroit automakers have nothing to offer except state-protected mediocrity. Trump’s wild indecision on tariffs is an indicator that the U.S. is lost as it tries to do what it cannot, make China a subservient power.

What the forum presented

The Forum theme “Promoting Civilizations Dialogue and Global Modernization with Power of Journalists” is one that should be of interest to every person calling themselves a journalist. There cannot be information sharing without dialogue, but in the U.S., true journalism, providing investigation and analysis, was always at the mercy of the powerful and has now completely devolved into little more than being a public relations arm for the state and for the ruling class. Corporate news gathering at present rarely yields very much that the people need to know, and coverage of China is emblematic of that downward trend.

In 2023, when a Chinese weather balloon was blown off course, the Biden administration declared it to be a spy balloon, and predictably all of the leading broadcast and print media dutifully followed along and used the same language which emanated from the white house press office. While Joe Biden bragged about shooting the balloon down, there was little follow-up reporting on the finding that the balloon was just what China said it was, a weather balloon that went off course.

Unlike corporate media outlets, Black Agenda Report and other independent media outlets understand that China is, in fact, an ancient civilization, and like all other nations, a sovereign one with rights under international law that ought to be respected. Bullying with tariff threats and a plethora of accusations of wrongdoing should not be taken seriously and must be seen as part of a larger but failed effort to maintain U.S. hegemony.

The Forum presented a series of seminars and roundtable discussions on topics such as presenting cross-cultural narratives, the challenges of authentic news gathering in the age of artificial intelligence and regional focuses on Europe and Latin America. Discussions were supplemented by tours to historic and cultural sites in Jiangxi.

Participants came away with greater appreciation of China as a nation and of their own work, which can be used to benefit the people of the world or which can also be a tool of parties whose goal is to keep the people in a state of misinformation. Unfortunately, this dynamic applies to most U.S. reporting, which is useful only in keeping the public in a state of hostility towards China, viewing it as an “adversary” which must be bested at every turn.

The reality is far different, and even those who see themselves as living up to journalistic ethics can become taken in by false narratives when they are repeated often enough. In-person visits are a necessity in preventing the repetition of harmful tropes that are used to manipulate opinion when factual reporting is needed and should be the standard for the profession.

Black Agenda Report has always been dedicated to analyzing the world from an anti-imperialist perspective, an objective that demands not just good information gathering but also exposure to nations like China, whose history requires study and analysis, and whose present-day trajectory requires rejection of what most so-called journalists present, the repetition of fake news.

This site strives to be one that is respected nationally and internationally. Participation in the Belt and Road Journalists Forum is an indication that our work is held in high regard. It does not matter if large corporate outlets do not produce the same news that Black Agenda Report presents. In fact, that difference is proof of our standing as journalists.

Margaret Kimberley is the author of “Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents.” You can support her work on Patreon and also find it on the Twitter, Bluesky and Telegram platforms. She can be reached via email at [email protected].