AFP/Beijing

At a press conference yesterday on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress featuring China’s central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan and other top officials, the moderator called on Louise Kenney, who said she was a reporter from ‘Australia’s Global CAMG’.

Rather than address uncomfortable issues such as China’s slowing growth, vast shadow banking sector, or corruption, she asked about government policy on allowing more foreign companies to enter the country’s agricultural insurance market.

In response another foreign reporter shouted out in Chinese: “Call on a real foreign journalist, not a fake one,” to applause and laughter from the room.

Foreign reporters are rarely called on to ask questions at the annual rubber-stamp parliament, where most “press conferences” are little more than scripted exchanges between Chinese state media reporters and officials who appear well-prepared to answer their soft-hitting queries.

Even when mainstream foreign media organisations ask questions, they are discussed with officials beforehand.

Kenney was also called to ask a question at a finance minister’s press conference last week, when she asked about couples who divorce in order to avoid paying taxes on their second home.

It is the second time in three years that Chinese authorities’ use of foreigners at major political gatherings has drawn controversy, with the reporters chosen to ask questions employed by the same ultimately Chinese-owned company.

Global CAMG Media Group has an office in Melbourne but is majority-owned from Beijing and has close ties to Chinese state-run media. Its website lists a main address and telephone number in Beijing.

An employee at its office in Beijing confirmed to AFP that Kenney works for the company but said that she is based in Australia, not China.

State-run broadcaster China Radio International (CRI) - which is listed on CAMG’s website as among its partner organisations - currently features a video interview with Kenney and another foreign “star reporter” on its website.

CRI also this week ran a long photo essay documenting the pair’s activities at the NPC.

Another CAMG employee, Andrea Yu, raised eyebrows at the five-yearly Communist Party Congress in 2012 - when she was called upon by moderators at least four separate times.

Yu later acknowledged in an interview with Australian Broadcasting Corp that the company’s majority shareholding is from China.

“I am aware that I can’t ask the hard questions that I may personally be interested in asking because of who I’m representing,” she said.