Connections between China and News Break, a top news aggregation app in the United States, have been exposed.
News Break began in 2015, when Jeff Zheng founded Particle Media Inc. in Delaware.
Jeff Zheng is also the founder of Chinese news app Yidian Zixun.
Before the investigation was published, the Yidian’s website listed the establishment of Particle Media as a milestone in the company’s growth, with the following description:
“In April 2015, Yidian Zixun established Particle Media, an affiliate company in Silicon Valley, to launch its global strategic deployment, and the English version of Yidian Zixun, News Break, was recommended by the U.S. App store twice in a row and has become a popular news aggregation application in the United States.”
According to The Wire China, News Break said the statement on Yidian’s website was inaccurate and that its legal department would send a letter asking that it be removed.
News Break, Yidian Zixun, and Jeff Zheng
According to publicly available information, News Break is owned by Particle Media. It was established by Zheng in April 2015, and is the English version of Yidian Zixun, which was also founded by Jeff Zheng.According to his LinkedIn page, Zheng obtained a doctorate degree in computer science at the University at Buffalo after he gained a masters’s in science degree at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He gained his bachelor’s of science degree from Tsinghua University in China.
He joined Yahoo in 2006 and became the founding head of Yahoo! Labs China in 2011.
News Break and Phoenix TV
From October 2014 to December 2016, Phoenix New Media acquired a 44.2 percent stake in Particle Media, a portion with a fair value of $135.3 million, reported one of China’s major web portals, sina.com.It later sold out part of its share, but still held 3.63 percent of Particle Media as of 2019.
Phoenix New Media’s parent company is Phoenix TV. Its CEO, Liu Shuang, was formerly the COO of Phoenix TV and a special assistant to Phoenix TV founder and former Chairman Liu Changle.
According to this file, Particle Media was registered in the Cayman Islands on July 22, 2013, as an exempted company, and on July 30, 2013, one week after its registration, Particle (HK) Ltd. was registered in Hong Kong to complete the shareholding transaction between Particle Media and Phoenix New Media.
According to The Wire China, Zheng founded Particle Media Inc. in Delaware, with its company headquarters in Mountain View.
News Break now denies having ties to Phoenix or Yidian Zixun, but acknowledges that its early backers were companies partially owned by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from at least 2015 to 2019.
At that time, News Group and Today’s Asia both held 45 percent of Phoenix TV, while China Wise International held 10 percent. Liu Changle was appointed as the Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer.
Phoenix TV, Liu Changle, and the CCP
Phoenix TV has long since been known as a mouthpiece of the CCP. Its news reporting has always been consistent with the stance of the Party.Liu once said, “CCTV is the big brother, we are the little brother.”
Born in Shanghai on Nov. 5, 1951, Liu moved to Beijing in 1953 with his father Liu Xiangyi, who was a senior CCP official. In 1964, he moved to Lanzhou and worked at the Lanzhou Pharmaceutical Factory after graduating from high school in 1970.
Six months later, he joined the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the CCP, and served as an officer in the political propaganda department of PLA’s 40th Group Army in Liaoning Province.
In 1980, he graduated from the Beijing Broadcasting Institute, which later became the Communication University of China.
In June 2006, China Mobile Communications took a 19.9 percent stake in Phoenix TV, and Liu’s Today’s Asia became Phoenix’s largest shareholder with a 37.54 percent stake.
After China Mobile’s investment in Phoenix TV, Liu obtained absolute control over Phoenix TV.
Phoenix New Media called this acquisition a major breakthrough, which finally ended the dual leadership of Phoenix TV.
Jeff Zheng and Yidian Zixun Help the CCP Control Internet Information
During his tenure as CEO of Yidian Zixun, Zheng brought in Phoenix New Media as a shareholder and quickly turned it into an official voice of the CCP.The article says this would turn Yidain Zixun into “an all-around publishing platform of the Internet Information Office focused on spreading the spirit of Xi Jinping’s speeches and strategic ideas.”
Yidian Zixun established in-depth partnerships with many local governments, including 116 new official media outlets in Xinjiang.
News Break is the English Version of Yidian Zixun
The Phoenix website published an article titled “Yidian Zixun Enters the US, Founder Goes to Supervise the Battle” on April 30, 2015.The article stated, “Recently, Yidian Zixun announced the latest progress of its internationalization strategy: the founder will go to the United States to supervise the English market, and has recruited more than a dozen senior engineers and scientists in Silicon Valley, and will launch the English version [of Yidian Zixun] at the end of the second quarter.
“According to an official statement by Yidian Zixun, the establishment of its U.S. company is a key step in the globalization of Yidian Zixun, which will use the world’s first ‘interest-based engine’ to enter the U.S. market and take advantage of the founding team’s resources and contacts in the United States to replicate Yidian Zixun’s successful model and become a truly innovative Chinese Internet company with global technological influence. ”
News Break Uses ‘Interest-Based Engine’ to Push News to 45 Million Americans
In a 2017 interview with Chinese media, Zheng said that News Break uses “recommendation plus search plus subscription plus intelligent interaction” to achieve its goal.Content is recommended according to the user’s browsing preferences, so that everybody is given different content. News Break gathers information from users’ searches, subscriptions, and online interactions to recommend relevant channels and content for users to subscribe to.
Zheng called this an “interest-based engine.”
In Zheng’s eyes, content demand can be divided into time-sensitive and non-time-sensitive categories. Non-time-sensitive content can be further subdivided into three categories based on three kinds of user reactions: click and share, click without sharing, or bookmarking, and click without sharing but bookmarking.
“The last category of content that users like to read and are willing to bookmark, but are unwilling to share, or are not appropriate for sharing, is closely related to personal long tail needs and has greater personal value,” he said. “For News Break, the last category of content is its main focus.”
Optimizing the “long tail” news has also been a strength of Yidian Zixun.
“In the year and a half since its launch, News Break has achieved very high retention rates of 55 percent ... making it the number one product of its kind in the U.S. market, ” Zheng said during the interview.
It claims to have 45 million monthly active users and 24 million installs through the App Store and Google Play in 2020.
News Break didn’t respond to questions from The Epoch Times regarding its relationship with Yidian Zixun and Phoenix TV.