The full report can be read in PDF form here. Below is a brief introduction. A pilot study conducted by CDT and Doublethink Lab examines “embedded propaganda” (EP) in African news media. Our study defines EP as the practice of...
While China’s athletes won glory in Paris at this year’s Olympics and Paralympics, there was widespread agreement on Chinese social media that the country’s reporters did not. Bloggers and athletes alike rolled...
The CCP’s recently concluded Third Plenum yielded a final communiqué that acknowledged current economic, geopolitical, and ideological risks and the need for continued systemic reforms but offered little (yet) in the way...
The Third Plenum, a major Party conference on China’s economy held roughly once every five years, came to a close this past Wednesday. The closed-door meeting of Central Committee members reaffirmed the Party’s commitment to...
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has dominated Chinese headlines and social media through the weekend. While speaking at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania this Saturday, former President Trump was grazed on the ear by...
On Monday, May 20, Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party was inaugurated the president of Taiwan. Lai’s election in January was met with dismay by the Chinese government, which views Lai and the DPP as separatist...
Efforts by the Chinese state and its state-affiliated actors to engage with global media can be seen as part of a broader drive to enhance China’s soft power and shape narratives in the state’s favor. CDT has documented numerous...
Explaining a meme often takes the wind out of a joke’s sails. Not so in this case. A recent Xi Jinping quote published by Xinhua, China’s official state news agency, has breathed new life into a long-running meme...
The use of the standard Party formulation of Xi Jinping “pointing the way forward” on various policy issues has become so commonplace that the phrase has become an object of satire, a way of mocking Xi’s cult of personality and...
Over the weekend, discussions of Taiwan’s general election were both censored and drowned out on Weibo. Censors removed the hashtags “Taiwan Election,” “Taiwan General Election,” and “2024 Taiwan General Election,” as well as...
A fawning Xinhua article on Xi Jinping’s concern for citizens affected by natural disasters has become the latest piece of “low-level red, high-level black” propaganda. Intended to tout Xi’s steadfast leadership, it...
China-Kenya relations have weathered a tumultuous year. Anti-China protests, Chinese hacking allegations, and billions of dollars of debt owed to China have strained Kenyan public opinion. In order to address the problem,...
After being postponed for a year due to the 2022 COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown in nearby Shanghai, the 19th Asian Games are finally taking place in China’s eastern seaboard city of Hangzhou. For the Chinese government, the...
In only his second trip abroad this year, Xi Jinping attended this week’s BRICS summit in South Africa in the hope of scoring a major political victory. The five-member group—comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South...
Last week, the U.N. Human Rights Council began its 53rd session in Geneva, where country representatives will spend four weeks scrutinizing one anothers’ human rights records. China is a major presence, given the former U.N....
Surveys have shown that Xi Jinping’s hardline foreign policy is increasingly unpopular abroad. Given the CCP’s mixed success using soft power to repair China’s image, party propagandists have increasingly resorted to sharper...
Recent year-end retrospectives and New Year’s messages published by various Chinese media outlets—including People’s Daily, Xinhua, Southern Weekly, and NetEase News—have offered vastly different interpretations of 2022, the...
Last week, the NGO Freedom House released a special report titled “Beijing’s Global Media Influence 2022: Authoritarian Expansion and the Power of Democratic Resilience.” The report analyzes the growth of the CCP’s global...
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