China’s state broadcaster, CCTV, has an American division tasked with bringing Chinese news to the world. And yet, in a clip tweeted Tuesday by CCTV America, two anchors deliver a 2.5-minute segment on a major story, the Panama Papers, without addressing the China-specific news related to the apparent disclosures of financial dealings and other activities linked to a Panamanian law firm.

Hours later, the clip disappeared from YouTube.

The segment titled “Data leak reveals off-shore account for rich and powerful,” played up the global scope of the leak, but fell short of naming any of the Chinese figures identified in initial reports.

It’s an omission that says much about how the story is playing here – that is, selectively or not all. And it hints at how sensitive Beijing is when it comes to news coverage, even overseas.

The Panama Papers are awkward for Beijing. The findings – the result of a year-long collaboration between a German newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and more than 100 media outlets – claim to expose “a cast of characters who use offshore companies to facilitate bribery, arms deals, tax evasion and drug trafficking.”

The report does not make specific allegations of wrongdoing, but raises questions about the need for hard-to-trace offshore accounts. Yet even that riles Chinese authorities. The ICIJ’s initial report mentioned Deng Jiagui, the brother-in-law of China’s current president, Xi Jinping and Li Xiaolin, the tycoon daughter of China’s former premier, Li Peng.

On Tuesday, the BBC went public with two more names: Zhang Gaoli and Liu Yunshan, both members of China’s elite standing committee.

Reporting on the 11.5 million leaked documents, which include emails, spreadsheets and corporate records from law firm Mossack Fonseca, is being published in batches. A full account may be days or weeks away. The Washington Post has not seen all of the source material and cannot independently verify what the documents are said to reveal.

The Post has not seen evidence of illegal activity by the Chinese nationals named. And, as the ICIJ reporting rightly points out, there are legal uses for shell companies.

The Communist Party does not like to discuss the business dealings of its leaders. In 2012, investigations into the family wealth of former Premier Wen Jiabao and current President Xi Jinping by the New York Times and Bloomberg, respectively, resulted in some journalists from both outlets being denied visas.

A 2014 report on the offshore holdings of some 22,000 people in Hong Kong and China was dismissed by a government spokesperson – then scrubbed from China’s web.

News of the ICIJ’s reporting landed in China on a national holiday. As such, the country’s censors initially seemed slow to pounce.

On Monday, stories about the Chinese figures named in the report briefly circulated on WeChat, a wildly popular messaging app, and popped up on social media platforms.

Several Chinese websites went with the story, reporting on disclosures related to Vladimir Putin and soccer star Lionel Messi without touching on any of the documents linked to powerful Chinese.

As the day progressed – and the story grew – the censors swung into action. Censorship directives leaked to China Digital Times (CDT) a U.S.-based website, urged Chinese media to “find and delete reprinted reports on the Panama Papers.”

“Do not follow up on related content, no exceptions. If material from foreign media attack China is found on any Website, it will be dealt with severely,” it said.

On Tuesday, “Panama” was one of the Chinese web’s hottest search terms, according to FreeWeibo, a website that tracks searches and censored content. It was also one of the most censored: terms like “Panama documents” and “Panama offshore” were mostly blocked.

The Global Times, a Party-linked newspaper with a nationalist bent, published an editorial claiming a unnamed “powerful force” was behind the leak, and that the aim was to smear opponents of “the West,” namely Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

“The Western media has taken control of the interpretation each time there has been such a document dump,” the editorial said.

“Information that is negative to the U.S. can always be minimized, while exposure of non-Western leaders, such as Putin, can get extra spin.”

offshore-china