“Telling China's Story Well” Through Higher Education Along the New Silk Road

Abstract

Over recent decades, the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Chinese academics have worked assiduously to increase the competitiveness of their academic institutions. Given the PRC's character as a one-party state, its domestic and international engagements must be understood in the context of the party's ambition of safeguarding and projecting its power, including by “telling China's story well.” Most research on China's efforts to “tell its story well” through higher education focuses on Australia and the US, while little empirical knowledge exists beyond. This article investigates the party-state's academic engagements, and especially supposed “sharp power” ambitions, in Germany and Kazakhstan as two other important economic partners of China. Through qualitative discourse analysis of primary documents, survey data, and semi-structured interviews, I highlight similarities and differences in China's approach and argue that the party-state focuses its sharp power activities in higher education on liberal democracies rather than autocracies.