Rethinking China’s global ‘propaganda’ blitz

Abstract

China’s global communication activities are mainly perceived as sinister propaganda to mislead international audiences, and related discussions exemplify Western unease about China’s global communication efforts. While not trivializing these efforts, this article objects to some of the assessments and argues in favour of a critical but open-minded engagement with China’s global communication activities. Such an approach should pay attention to potential audiences and should closely scrutinize the real-life circumstances of China’s communicative practices and put them into perspective for its audiences. The article highlights these aspects by analysing the screening of a video in New York City’s Times Square in Summer 2016 and one version of the China Daily supplement, China Watch.

China’s digital diplomacy on Twitter: The multiple reactions to the Belt and Road Initiative

“…Complementarily, domestic aims also matter in China’s soft power conceptualisation, such as building national cohesion or showing to national audiences the foreign support of China’s model (Edney, 2012; Mingjiang, 2008; Zhao, 2015). Despite these efforts, several authors have described the significant weaknesses of China’s public diplomacy (Creemers, 2015; d’Hooghe, 2005; Hartig, 2016, 2020; Wang, 2011a; Zhao, 2013), namely, the fact that its state-led or state-controlled efforts are perceived as propaganda or are ignored by foreign audiences in liberal-democracies, the lack of trust caused by the hiding of information during crises, such as with SARS, or that its initiatives lack the relational dimension central to soft power, among others.…”

“…These are important media to investigate, since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cannot deploy the same type of information control tactics that it uses behind the Great Firewall (Rawnsley, 2015; Roberts, 2018), offering affordances to users to support or question China’s narratives. Thus, its analysis may contribute to the more nuanced readings of China’s public diplomacy efforts (Hartig, 2020), in this case on social media.…”