In a global public opinion climate marked by polarized views of China, one common tactic employed by the Party-state apparatus to dispel potential criticism is encouraging foreigners to come see China in person. Numerous articles and events over the past month have exhibited these external propaganda efforts in the realm of professional, tourist, and academic visits, along with people-to-people exchanges.
In the professional domain, one classic example is junkets to Xinjiang for foreign journalists, aimed at producing flattering accounts of the state of human rights in the region that can then be amplified by Chinese state media. An academic article published last month by Richard Dwomoh on the topic of China’s media training programs for Ghanaian journalists found that “Beijing is mainly using the media trainings as a ploy to achieve other strategic Chinese goals than building the professional know-hows of the Ghanaian journalists,” and that “Beijing’s use of soft power during the media trainings is deemed as helping to improve the participants’ general perception of China.” Highlighting another example on Friday for China Media Project, Alex Colville wrote about how China’s provincial and city-level international communication centers are desperately seeking foreign talent to boost external propaganda:
Through 2024, China’s international communication centers (ICCs) have mushroomed at the local and provincial level all over China, tasked with innovating and disseminating propaganda for foreign audiences. According to our research, they now number over 70.
Such numbers could give the impression that the initiative has been a success. But a recent report from Young Journalists Magazine (青年记者杂志), drawing on interviews with ICC staff, points to problems in the system. These include a shortage of talent — both overseas hires who can better tailor the message to what foreign audiences would want to hear, and Chinese trained overseas with native-level language skills.
Even cosmopolitan Shanghai has struggled to fill positions for its ICC, where staff blamed costs and unnamed difficult “policies” surrounding foreigners. “After the epidemic,” an employee told the Young Journalist, “there has been a huge loss in overseas talents, and everyone’s difficulties are similar.” This could be a serious problem for the centers going forward. The report goes on to mention that many ICCs lack an understanding of foreign perspectives, and may tell stories that interest locals but are utterly irrelevant to international audiences. Finding ways to connect with the outside world, especially through foreigners or foreign-educated Chinese, could well help this problem along. [Source]
A similar dynamic occurs in the realm of tourism. In Xinjiang, for example, increased government spending on tourism has been used to promote Chinese government narratives about the region, in contrast to Western ones. Last month, China extended visa-free entry for 15 days to citizens from South Korea and eight additional European countries, a measure aimed in large part at increasing tourism and thereby supporting the Chinese economy. However, a report published this week by New China Research, the National High-Level Think Tank of Xinhua News Agency, outlined how China’s new inbound tourism initiatives can also yield soft-power gains. The report states that Chinese tourism “enables [foreigners] to fall in love with a credible, lovely, and respectable China through firsthand experience and personal observation, forming a correct understanding of China and deeply identifying with it.” This inbound travel “is an effective means of building China’s national image through non-governmental means.”
Academic exchanges are another domain ripe for soft-power opportunities. (The purpose of past educational programs for foreigners in Xinjiang, for example, has been framed with similar language: to “fall in love with Xinjiang.”) In a piece for the Made in China Journal last month titled, “Is China Winning Hearts and Minds among Global South Students?,” Yue Hou unpacked the results of a survey she and her colleagues conducted among over 900 foreign students enrolled in Chinese university programs between 2020 and 2023. She concluded that a majority of them shared a positive view of China, in contrast to their views of the U.S.:
The responses were collected anonymously, and we asked the students about their opinions of and experiences in China. Among them, 87 per cent held a favourable view of the country, while only 31 per cent held a favourable view of the United States (we modelled this set of questions on the PEW survey by Silver et al.).
[…T]he experiences of many of the youths we interviewed suggest an alternative perspective [to the common Western framing of China as a threatening authoritarian power undermining democratic norms]. Rather than viewing the world through a binary lens of ideologies or regime types, these individuals are assessing various models of development. For them, the appeal of China’s state-centric development model presents a practical alternative to Western market-led approaches. They seem to view China’s foreign policy towards the Global South as ‘pragmatic and non-interventionist’, in contrast to what they perceive as the more critical and ideologically driven narratives from the West. This perspective is further exemplified by a student from Pakistan, whom I will call Halima, who argued that South Asia should manage its own affairs independent of Western influence and welcome the presence of diverse international partners like Russia and China.
These perspectives are shaped by a mix of the students’ educational experiences in China and the realities of their home countries. While their views on development models and foreign policy often align with Chinese state narratives—partially due to how these narratives are embedded in their academic programs—our interviews revealed a more complex picture. Indoctrination alone does not fully explain their stance. Rather, students critically evaluate the Chinese State’s narrative against alternative models, drawing on their own observations of foreign involvement in their home countries. Ultimately, they arrive at their conclusions rather thoughtfully. [Source]
More broadly, people-to-people exchanges are also a domain for enhancing external propaganda, as expressed in recent Chinese think-tank forums. In late November, the Western Returned Scholars Association, under the United Front Work Department, hosted the Belt and Road Forum on People-to-People Connectivity in Guangxi. According to a China Daily summary, the association’s president, Ding Zhongli, called on “internationally educated individuals […] to continue sharing compelling narratives about the Belt and Road Initiative.” Huang Rihan, the director of Huaqiao University’s Maritime Silk Road Institute, who also spoke at the forum, called for increasing China’s international exchanges in education, tourism, and media, in part to combat Western media’s “disinformation” and “biased narratives” about China and to “help promote local culture.” (2024 has also been designated as the China-ASEAN Year of People-to-People Exchanges.) Earlier last month in Brazil, Xinhua co-hosted the inaugural Global South Media and Think Tank Forum. High-profile international participants interviewed by Xinhua praised this new “network of countries in the Global South [that is] cooperating and linking different agencies around a common communication project.”
