China’s Message Machine

Abstract

The People's Republic of China (PRC) is aiming to reshape the global information sphere with a "worldwide propaganda campaign of astonishing scope and ambition." 1 The roots of this campaign can be traced back at least as far as 2007, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began talking about "soft power" 2 at its Seventeenth Party Congress, held that year. Serious funding went into the effort in 2009, when the CCP under Hu Jintao devoted a sum then worth about US$7 billion to revamping the PRC's system for crafting and disseminating external propaganda. 3 Since then, money has continued to flow, underwriting PRC information operations that have been growing more sophisticated and complex under Hu�s successor Xi Jinping. Since he came to power in 2012, Beijing has become more aggressive in presenting itself to the world and pushing its message in ways that go well beyond traditional notions of communist propaganda. While veteran PRC-watchers have known this for some time, it took the coronavirus crisis to make plain to wider circles the depth, variety, and extent of Beijing's external-propaganda efforts. Pictures of jetliners unloading Chinese medical equipment, time-lapse videos of rapid hospital construction in Wuhan, and conspiracy theories pushed by Chinese diplomats flooded websites, including Twitter and Facebook, that are banned in the PRC. The first half of 2020 saw debates about whether China was "winning" or "losing" the battle of covid-19 narratives. Although evidence for the effectiveness of PRC propaganda remains scarce, there is a targeted, adaptable strategy behind the messaging, and we should assume a willingness to learn from mistakes and incidents of overreach. Since PRC propaganda is not going away and will likely be

Chinese Crisis Communication in the Early Stage of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Discourse Analysis of People's Daily News Articles in Response to Threatening International News Coverage

“…Our analysis furthermore confirms prior findings that the People's Daily and other Chinese state-owned media predominantly report on successes at home and shortcomings of selected foreign countries, and only report domestic shortcomings that have already been solved or can be blamed on others (cf. Brazys and Dukalskis, 2020;Liu and Yang, 2015). As was the case in prior crises, including the 2003 SARS outbreak, the CCP first attempted to censor information, but soon shifted to a mode of crisis communication, proactively setting the agenda and, where necessary, refuting threatening foreign news coverage.…”

“…Whereas crisis communication mainly concentrates on information control in a domestic context, the concept of perception management is useful to understand the mechanism by which China seeks to communicate with foreign audiences. The US Department of Defense defines perception management as:Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviours and official actions favorable to the originator's objectives (US DoD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, 2003, cited in Combelles Siegel, 2005: 118).…”

“…Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviours and official actions favorable to the originator's objectives (US DoD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, 2003, cited in Combelles Siegel, 2005: 118).…”

“…Relatedly, Shi et al (2012: 111) attest that the CCP consistently attempts to shape popular opinion about the US, particularly regarding US foreign policy, through its propaganda apparatus. Moving beyond the People's Daily, Brazys and Dukalskis (2020) analysed 1.8 million foreign-language articles from the Xinhua News Agency. They find that the average tone was mostly negative in English, French, and Spanish, but rather positive in Korean and Japanese.…”

Between Uniformity and Polarization: Women’s Empowerment in the Public Press of GCC States

“…Second, this article contributes to the growing literature on the state-media nexus in nondemocracies. While scholarship on public spheres and media in autocracies is growing (Brazys and Dukalskis 2020; Dukalskis 2017), it has yet to relate its insights to research conducted on public discourses about women and women/media interactions in nondemocracies (Al-Malki et al 2012; George 2020; Karolak and Guta 2020; Sakr 2008). Our analysis is a move in this direction, providing the first comprehensive study of English-language news coverage of women's empowerment in the GCC states.…”