Joshua Kurlantzick on Beijing’s global propaganda successes and failures

I recently talked to Joshua Kurlantzick about his book Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World, which was published by Oxford University Press’s trade division in December 2022 in North America and in March/April 2023 in the United Kingdom and the rest of the world. Joshua is a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He was previously a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Before that, he was a fellow at the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy and a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy. Before that, he was a journalist in Southeast Asia.

Joshua is an expert on Southeast Asian politics and economics and China’s relations with Southeast Asia, including Chinese investment, aid, and diplomacy. In our discussion, Joshua shared several reasons for why China is pursuing a more aggressive media strategy during the Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 era. We also discussed how China’s media efforts are received in different parts of the world — with Joshua pointing out that non-democratic countries in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia tend to be more receptive of the messaging. In addition, he explained the difference between soft and sharp power, with examples from the United Front Department. We ended the conversation with Joshua giving his opinion on the future of TikTok and the regulation of social media platforms in general.

Chris Marquis: So first, can you tell me the core message of your book in a few sentences?

Joshua Kurlantzick: The core message is that over the last 10 years in the Xi era, building on previous efforts, China has gone beyond its traditional efforts to wield influence within the countries in its near neighborhood, like Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia. It has embarked on a global effort to wield influence within other countries’ society and politics, which is not something that had really been done at this level since the Mao era.

And it has done so through a series of tools. One is a massively expanded state media to gain control of most of the Chinese-language media in countries around the world. Two, gaining control over what I call the “information pipes.” Both the physical “pipes” — the actual undersea cables that carry information or the 5G wireless networks — as well as the more abstract pipes — social media platforms that carry information. And then the third is what I call in the book more old-fashioned influence. Some of it is a type of influence that has been around probably since time started: influence on university campuses to encourage self-censorship about China, wielding influence over Chinese diaspora communities. What is the most old-fashioned aspect is simply wielding influence over politicians: paying politicians, paying political organizations, possibly inserting Chinese agents into politics, espionage really in politics, etc.

The second core message of the book is captured in the subtitle: the subtitle basically says that Beijing has had uneven success and that it’s wrong to think that China is some influence monolith, although that is what you would hear a lot in the U.S. Congress, and from a lot of members of the U.K. Parliament. It is accurate that China has attempted to wield a lot of influence. But many of the influence efforts so far have really been mixed, and some of them have been outright failures. So, I try to strike a cautious note in assessing where it is right now in its influence efforts.

Chris Marquis: Very, very interesting. So, my next question is why now in the Xi era? As you mentioned, since Mao died the intervening leaders were not as proactive in their international influence operations.

Josh Kurlantzick: I think there’re some obvious reasons why in the post Mao era that wasn’t really possible. China was in chaos, and for a long period of time China still was fairly weak on the global stage. And they still were sticking to the stated message – it was never completely true, but it’s completely farcical now – that they didn’t intervene in other countries. They were still sticking to Deng’s “Just bide your time” and build up China’s own economy and society.

I wrote an earlier book released in 2007 called Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power is Transforming the World. That was about China’s soft power efforts, and how China was becoming more popular in Southeast Asia and other regions, and the initial beginnings of what we see now in terms of China’s ability to wield hard power, military power, economic coercion, etc. But even at that time China was still very much sticking to the idea that it didn’t interfere in other countries’ affairs. And it was able to be more successful with soft power, because it was a lot less threatening. At that time, even though people had come up with the idea that China had a model of authoritarian capitalism and managed governance that was supposedly successful, the Chinese leaders and officials would not say that they did. They just said every country should follow their own system.

So, then a series of things happened. One, democracy has had a bad last 15 years, and that to some people in the Chinese leadership, as well as around the world, has made other alternatives, not just China’s authoritarian capitalism, but all sorts of different alternatives, including outright military rule, authoritarian populism etc. seem possibly more attractive. And China under Xi has become willing to embrace the idea that it does indeed have a model for some other countries, which is the first time a Chinese leader has so openly stated this. China also has simply become so much more powerful on the world stage, economically, militarily etc., and has the money to spend, and the ability to spend on all these influence efforts.

Because China is so much more powerful in the world stage now, it needs to wield influence inside other countries. I don’t know if it needs to, but it’s just sort of a fact of being a great power. The United States, it’s the same thing. In more recent years, it’s not as bad as China. But certainly you can go back to the Cold War and see some horrible things done by Washington. It’s hardly blameless.

And then the fourth thing, obviously, is that Xi Jinping is by far the most powerful leader since Mao, the most powerful and nationalistic. He has transformed the culture within China, and the culture of how China approaches foreign affairs. He’s transforming the culture within China in so many sectors to put the party back in control in an ideological way. He has a much, much more openly assertive type of approach in these influence efforts, and also in his own speeches and formal diplomacy which I don’t get into in the books. And he has basically stepped up to explicitly challenge leading democracies, including the US — and challenging the very idea of democracy itself. So all those things have come together.

Chris Marquis: I would also like hear a little bit more the strategies and audiences, and how those may differ around the world. On the one hand, I know with the Belt and Road Initiative and in less developed countries, China is trying to get the governments and populace behind infrastructure spending and it’s more of a soft power media offensive. How is that different from what they are doing in developed democracies, like the US and Europe?

Josh Kurlantzick: Belt and Road has been a mixed bag. On the one hand, I think no one was really lending that much for infrastructure to a lot of these countries, and people do view China warmly because of that. If you actually even look at recent polling of Southeast Asia, done by the Lowy Institute, China has now surpassed the US in terms of warm views in most countries in South Asia, except Singapore and the Philippines. Certainly the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) in Africa generated warmth. But in Latin America, there are some problems with BRI, which are elucidated in really good studies by AidData and the College of William & Mary. For example, China would get paid back first if the country face serious financial problems and with higher interest rates than normal. Which is not a good look. So, it’s been a mixed bag.

On the other hand, China also has become a huge source of emergency lending to developing countries that need bailouts, a much greater lender than the United States. There have been some examples where people in some countries are unhappy with the level of debt from BRI, or how it was managed, or the fact that at times China was trying to seize physical structures as collateral, which they’ve now realized is a terrible idea. That’s just guaranteed to anger people.

But to your general question and more on the media front as well, in countries that are friendlier to China, what they have tried to do in Africa and Latin America and in Central Europe, before the Ukraine war, where China was quite popular. (It’s not popular at all in Central Europe or in Eastern Europe now simply because it supported Putin.) But in countries where China is more popular, the media efforts focus more on getting Xinhua into the local news outlets through content sharing agreements. so that Xinhua copy is picked up and read by people. I talk in the book about how Xinhua is really China’s only great state media success and they are also trying to get China Global Television Network (CGTN), China Radio international to boost their viewership and readership and listenership numbers through efforts to cover local news and to promote China.

I actually don’t think CGTN has been very effective. That’s part of my point in the book. They have had some modest effect, but their viewership numbers around the world are very bad. They actually hired a ton of quality foreign journalists for a while to work for CGTN in London and the US and Africa and other places, and most of them quit because it just didn’t work. Originally I think Xi Jinping thought CGTN could be like Al Jazeera, a place that was a source of credible information about everything other than the country where it was based. And that was possible for Al Jazeera, because the country where it’s based, it’s a pretty small country that most of the time no one really pays attention to.

It wasn’t really possible to have that model with China, because there’s so many issues in the world that could be related to China. So, if journalists were going to be forced to censor themselves at CGTN about every issue related to China, it just wasn’t going to work, and that’s what happened and it just turn it to be in charge of propaganda. So I don’t think CGTN has been very effective.

But in tons of countries, prominent local news outlets, including very well respected ones, have signed content, sharing deals with Xinhua, which has a news wire cheaper than Reuters, Bloomberg or AP. And it’s provided free to some countries. This Xinhua copy then shows up in news, in stories, in acclaimed news outlets all over the world, not yet really much in Europe or North America, although they have signed a content sharing deals in Italy and Germany. But in a lot of developing countries, the most respected news outlets are using Xinhua copy. And China is smuggling copy into stories, and then it’s credited as Xinhua at the bottom of stories where people don’t really look, or it might not be credited at all, or it might be credited as “agencies”. So in that way they are both undermining independent media as well as promoting pro-Beijing coverage.

In developed countries, a lot of the media efforts are actually more negative and they tend to focus more on the problems of the countries. And these stories then get circulated on social media by Chinese diplomats and other pro-Beijing figures designed to show the failings of democracy, which they have increasingly done. They were much more reluctant to do that a few years ago. But in recent years, much like Russia, they have become more willing to not just promote China, but to specifically tear down democracy and suggest democracy as a system itself is failing.

ChrisMarquis: Is there any evidence that in non-democratic countries, in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, that this negative messaging is gaining traction and perhaps also giving support to China’s model?

Josh Kurlantzick: China’s model has gained traction in a number of countries in Africa and Southeast Asia, and in less democratic countries — the model of authoritarian capitalist plus the model of a walled garden/controlled Internet plus the model of a surveillance society.

The China’s Internet model has been picked up by Russia, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam. Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Ethiopia, etc. as well some of the aspects of how China’s economy runs. I think some of that denigration of democracy has resonated. I don’t think it has resonated that much in countries in those regions that are strong and stable democracies. It’s also coming at the same time as there’s a global dissatisfaction with democracy reflected especially among younger people, younger generations of people in whole countries ranging from Brazil to Israel, to the United States.

The message is coming at a time where in Africa too, there are some feelings that democracy hasn’t produced anything. But partly as a result, what you’ve had in a number of countries in Africa is a return to military or semi-military rule, where the military takes over and says they can do a better job than democracy, or in countries like Indonesia or Brazil or Mexico outside of Africa. A democratically elected leader invites the military to come in and take control of domestic policy, because people are so dissatisfied with democratic governance and think the military will solve things. And in fact, Trump himself was flirting with some of these things when he was President, or if he’s President again, would possibly want to try to involve the military in policy making though that is supposed to be illegal. .

Chris Marquis: One important aspect of your book was contrasting soft power and sharp power, with the latter more about distorting, manipulating, and undermining democracy. Can you discuss this contrast and give some examples?

Josh Kurlantzick: Sharp power – it’s not soft power, which is done openly. Outlets that are open, like CGTN or Voice of America are soft power, or soft power could come from the appeal of things, not state-directed, that make a country attractive to other places. Britain is actually a perfect example of this. Britain’s actual economic and hard power in the world has declined, probably more than any other country in the last 100 years.

But at the same time Britain has enormous reserves of soft power. People find Britain attractive and that allows Britain to continue to punch above this weight in global affairs. It attracts students and people and money to Britain, and that soft power comes from non-governmental things like having, by far, the most popular, most watched football or soccer league in the world. It comes from having a really prominent movie and television industry.

And sharp power is efforts to clandestinely and covertly influence countries. It’s not open like soft power. And some of the things that China has done with sharp power is that they have used intelligence agents and diplomats to try to funnel money to university campuses and think tanks in in certain ways. I should say right now that the Council on Foreign Relations does not take any money from any government, no foreign governments, and not from the US Government either.

So that’s one way and that paid off for them for a while in Australia. In Australia and other places they use pressure on diplomats and intelligence operative from what’s called the United Front which is an organization that historically dealt with the Chinese diaspora, but has been expanded under Xi Jinping. They pressure students at universities, either Chinese nationals or students of Chinese descent to create an environment of censorship around issues related to China. That’s been quite successful in Australia and Canada, United States and other places where a lot of Chinese student groups now reflexively self-censor, and that it impacts the classroom as well and in terms of sharp power that goes beyond that, because it has a kind of knock-on effect.

They actually have taken a step beyond that recently, and actually use the idea of “wokeness” to push their agenda. Chinese student groups on campus who are pro-Beijing will complain that any comments or public displays, or anything that are critical of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) hurt them as Chinese people, and therefore are wrong and harmful to them. University presidents and deans were terrified, and many have responded really poorly. They immediately get all freaked out, and they have a failure to separate the CCP and the Chinese people. They don’t even seem to understand that there’s huge numbers of Chinese people around the world who hate the CCP. Many of them fled China because of the CCP.

Chris Marquis: I’ve definitely seen that before, although not in the UK, but when I was at Cornell in the US. What’s your sense about what a country should do to combat this subtle and more hidden types of influence? And we haven’t even gotten into China’s most influential social media platform, TikTok. What’s your sense of what the US should do about TikTok?

Josh Kurlantzick: So Joe Biden and the Democratic party in the United States are heavily, heavily, heavily dependent on young people, and youth turnout was critical in 2020 for them, and it was critical in the 2022 midterms. TikTok recognizes this because they’re running ads with influencers, I think basically implying that Joe Biden might take away your TikTok.

I really don’t think Joe Biden wants to ban TikTok for the political reason. He needs every single 18- to 40-year-old vote possible. But for whatever the TikTok CEO says on Capitol Hill or everywhere else, TikTok is controlled by Bytedance. And at Bytedance a seat on the board is held by the Chinese Government, and that seat is the most powerful seat there, and there is evidence that data has been exfiltrated back to China, as well as evidence of censorship on TikTok of issues about China.

There’re also huge problems with American based social media platforms. I’m not really for the banning of TikTok. I think it’s a step too far. Although I think it’s certainly now possible. I didn’t think it was going to happen, but I think it is possible now. But I’m not for the banning of it, unless there’s no other alternative.

I think that the administration needs to try to work with China to come up with a solution. China is not going to divest TikTok in the United States to a U.S. company. They’ve made it clear that they’re not going to do that, and I understand that because then every other developed democracy is going to ask for the same thing like sell TikTok in Germany to some German company, or TikTok in Britain to some UK company. I think Biden needs to make a second effort to try to work with TikTok to make sure that users’ data stays in the US, and is protected.

In addition, I think there needs to just be generally one solution on top of that – stronger privacy protections for American users of all social media. In Europe, that doesn’t include just TikTok, but everything has stronger privacy protections. They should they keep TikTok off Federal government phones and military phones and stuff like that. But I don’t think they should ban TikTok right now. Besides the political ramifications for the Democratic party. It just makes the US look a little bit like China.

A bigger issue is countries need to invest heavily in digital literacy programs starting from kindergarten or pre-kindergarten. There are some places that have done that successfully – Finland, Italy, Taiwan. And that will help people from a young age start to learn about what’s real and what’s fake on the Internet Including state created fake media. It has obviously a broader effect of helping people learn.

There needs to be more money invested in research about exactly how China is evolving its online strategies, particularly how it’s working with Russia and copying some of Russia’s strategies. There’s some research on this, from Citizen Lab, which is based at the University of Toronto, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which is based in Australia. But there should be a lot more. The greater the research that’s out there, the more likely the debate will become more nuanced.

Chris Marquis: Those are all thoughtful and useful recommendations, not just for the current TikTok situation, but also more generally. But I also I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface of your book and hopefully will spur people to pick up a copy. Thanks so much Joshua for the fascinating and important discussion.

Joshua Kurlantzick: Thank you.

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