> For decades, the United States has promoted democracy around the globe. But amid mounting U.S.-Chinese competition, a question has arisen: is Beijing attempting to export its authoritarian political system in a similar way? No, says Chinese leader Xi Jinping. “We do not seek to ‘export’ a China model,” he told an assembly of world leaders in 2017, “nor do we want other countries to ‘copy’ our way of doing things.” It would be a mistake, however, to think that Beijing is not seeking to shape global opinion in favor of China’s political system. The Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to promote autocracy are simply not as explicit as the United States’ hard-sell efforts to export democracy; instead, the CCP is soft-selling autocracy.
> To that end, the party has invested heavily in public diplomacy and influence operations intended to make the global public more accepting of its nondemocratic political system. It has developed a far-reaching program of trainings, conferences, and workshops that teach CCP-style management of the press, Internet, military, and civil society to foreign political leaders. And despite a perception among some Western policymakers and academics that these efforts are tone deaf, China’s external influence operations are more sophisticated, effective, and likely to succeed over the long run than many in the West believe. They are aimed primarily at people in the developing world, where many see the so-called China model as effective at delivering what matters most to them: a path out of grinding poverty and into the global middle class.
> In the face of Beijing’s increasingly resonant foreign propaganda, Washington has failed to rise to the challenge. It has yet to adopt a coherent message about the merits of the U.S. political system. In contrast to China’s messaging, which is tightly focused on winning over audiences in the developing world, U.S. messaging is scattershot and less persuasive. To compete, the United States needs to sell a positive vision for itself around the world. And it needs to refine this message for people in the developing world, which is likely to be the main arena of this competition. Should Washington fail to adapt its pro-democracy strategy to today’s evolving political and economic realities, it will cede ground to Beijing—and could well fuel international support for China’s autocratic model.
> **DEMOCRACY BY ANOTHER NAME?**
> To sell its political system abroad, the CCP frames it as responsive, meritocratic, and remarkably effective at shepherding economic growth—without calling attention to its authoritarian aspects. CCP messaging claims that China’s political system is receptive to citizens and their everyday demands for government services and infrastructure. Propaganda videos feature inspiring drone shots of engineering marvels such as China’s high-speed rail network, its impressive bridges, and its gleaming airports.
> The party also claims that the ruling party is staffed with highly competent politicians who undergo a rigorous selection process. Here, CCP messaging typically argues that the current civil service exam, which is in fact highly selective, is a legacy of the competitive imperial exam for selecting mandarins who served China’s emperors.
> The most important element in the CCP’s soft-sell strategy is touting China’s extraordinary economic growth—what amounts to a prosperity gospel for the autocratic world. The CCP’s foreign propaganda points toward China’s inspiring success in lifting hundreds of millions of people from dollar-a-day poverty into the global middle class, which is an undeniable fact. Of course, rather than giving credit for this success to the Chinese people, the CCP likes to claim that the ruling party is mostly responsible.
> Official messaging is generally upbeat and avoids a hard sell, even if the harsh and combative messages of a small subset of Chinese diplomats occasionally grab headlines. Xi and other party leaders have often stressed the need to “tell China’s story well” and spread “positive energy” about the country both at home and abroad. The underlying idea seems to be that hope and inspiration sell better than doom and gloom. Some of China’s foreign messaging is devoted to criticizing Western democracies and painting U.S. democracy as especially chaotic. For the most part, however, it promotes China’s own story.
> Notably, these messages don’t just elide the authoritarian aspects of China’s political system, they also claim that it is in fact democratic. The CCP’s official stance is that China is a “whole process democracy” in which the ruling party, while unelected, represents the interests of all people, in contrast to parties in democracies that supposedly represent just factions of society. This messaging builds support for China’s illiberal, authoritarian system while dressing it up as a populist democracy.
> The CCP pushes this message through an array of channels. The party has established a global television news network, CGTN, its answer to CNN or the BBC. It has funded an expansion of the global wire service Xinhua, which is making inroads abroad by placing its content into foreign newspapers. The party also increasingly uses covert influence operations on social media by promoting influencers who cheerily sell the merits of the Chinese system.
> **CHINA’S FRESH FACE**
> For decades, U.S. analysts have expressed skepticism as to whether the soft sell actually increases global acceptance of the Chinese political system. Their assumption has long been that the Chinese system is too authoritarian and too specific to the Chinese context to win over admirers overseas. China’s messaging, to many Americans’ ears, often falls flat. Some messaging is explicitly anti-American; moreover, the more positive stories of China’s growing prosperity can be seen as a threat to the United States’ global status—and given the United States’ greater wealth, there is little reason for it to emulate China’s system.
> It is now clear, however, that CCP messaging is in fact effective at changing hearts and minds and building support for China’s autocratic system—but mostly outside of wealthy democracies. In a study published in the American Journal of Political Science in 2024, I worked with an international team of researchers to survey people across 19 countries in six continents and to analyze data on thousands of propaganda videos produced by CGTN. We found that viewers’ positions on China moved dramatically after watching representative clips produced by CGTN. Although only 16 percent of people preferred the Chinese political model to the U.S. political model initially, after watching CGTN content, 54 percent stated the reverse. People also saw the Chinese system as more responsive, better at delivering growth, and, remarkably, more democratic in character.
> CCP messaging is particularly resonant in the developing countries we studied, such as Colombia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, and South Africa. It is not a coincidence that these are areas where China has invested heavily in expanding its media footprint. CGTN, for instance, opened a bureau in Nairobi in 2012, and the party’s English-language newspaper, China Daily, has established content-sharing agreements with dozens of media outlets in Latin America.
> A saving grace for the United States is that relatively few people consume China’s foreign-facing media, which means that however effective and slick its programming, its reach is not yet all that broad. For example, only seven percent of South Africans and six percent of Kenyans report regularly watching CGTN. The confined reach of China’s official media makes it, thus far, a limited tool.
> The United States cannot take it for granted, however, that the CCP’s official media messaging will continue to have a narrow audience. The viewership of CGTN and other channels is growing, if modestly. In Nigeria, for example, viewership increased from six percent of the population in 2018 to 11 percent in 2020. The CCP also relies on an array of other strategies to make inroads. It has, for instance, expanded the footprint of Xinhua, so that stories with pro-CCP messages, implicit or explicit, are more likely to appear in newspapers around the globe, sometimes without attribution to Xinhua itself.
> Moreover, China’s propaganda campaign is helped greatly by the fact that whereas the United States is old news, with a reputation born of decades of international activity, China is seen as a relatively new player. With many having relatively little knowledge about China and its system, the CCP is seizing the opportunity to define itself from scratch overseas. The United States, in other words, is the incumbent to China’s lesser-known challenger—and the United States, universally known and weighed down by its history of meddling and intervention, may find it very difficult to change minds. China, on the other hand, is a fresh-faced newcomer by comparison and can introduce itself as the better, unburdened alternative to Washington’s tired goods.
HD_Thoreau_aweigh on
Small nitpick, anyone more knowledgeable, please correct me:
Isn’t it well-established that it is nearly impossible for a short intervention (say a Chinese news propaganda video) to abruptly and sustainably change someone’s views?
I thought one of the takeaways of the replication crisis in psychology was a pretty firm rebuke of these types of findings?*
(*I’m much less informed about the limits of persuasion given regular, long term ingestion of propaganda. My question arise bc it seemed like the author implied his study focused on changing views spurred only by watching a small number of clips.)
sinuhe_t on
Not surprising. Firstly (as the article points) the US has an incumbency problem where it has actually been the superpower for some time and made some mistakes, while China is a newcomer that has not yet had the opportunity to screw things up. China is like the opposition party that can criticize and promise because they don’t have to deal with reality (though their problems with getting back their money from developed countries are I think a nice example of promises clashing with reality).
Secondly – well, it worked for China while democracy has failed in many developed countries (e.g Arabian Winter).
MrStrange15 on
I’ll probably come back to this when I have more time later, but in ancient times I wrote my thesis on this subject. I don’t really see it in the article, so I would add that the “system” that China is selling isn’t necessarily a copy of what they do at home. The primary argument, from the Chinese side, is basically that universalist models are stupid, and every country should have their own system, and that the international order should be built around this. In reality, this of course isn’t a democratic approach, where people can vote on their systems and find their own way, but instead a way to legitimatize non-democratic governance with “our culture is not conducive to democracy”-arguments. Instead of “Socialism/Human Rights/X with Chinese Characteristics”, what China is trying to sell is that any country should have their own “X with Culture Characteristics”.
>In order to ensure universal acceptance and observance of human rights, **the realization of human rights must take into account regional and national contexts, and political, economic, social, cultural, historical and religious backgrounds.** **The cause of human rights must and can only be advanced in accordance with the national conditions and the needs of the peoples. Each State should adhere to the principle of combining the universality and specificity of human rights and choose a human rights development path or guarantee model that suits its specific conditions.** States and the international community have a responsibility to create the necessary conditions for the realization of human rights, including the maintenance of peace, security and stability, the promotion of economic and social development and the removal of obstacles to the realization of human rights.
This can sound quite good in a positive sense, where country X adds additional rights, because they are culturally important. But the argument falls apart, when you start applying it the other way. You can more narrowly define freedom of speech, freedom of association, bodily autonomy, and so on. The point of this system (A Community of Shared Future for Mankind) is to legitimatize non-liberal approaches to universal rights,. I think its clear why this type of system is preferable to autocracies. Human Rights still exists as a concept, but in reality it becomes cultural specific rights, which the despot is free to determine, because they are the true representative of the people.
4 Comments
!ping FOREIGN-POLICY&DEMOCRACY
> For decades, the United States has promoted democracy around the globe. But amid mounting U.S.-Chinese competition, a question has arisen: is Beijing attempting to export its authoritarian political system in a similar way? No, says Chinese leader Xi Jinping. “We do not seek to ‘export’ a China model,” he told an assembly of world leaders in 2017, “nor do we want other countries to ‘copy’ our way of doing things.” It would be a mistake, however, to think that Beijing is not seeking to shape global opinion in favor of China’s political system. The Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to promote autocracy are simply not as explicit as the United States’ hard-sell efforts to export democracy; instead, the CCP is soft-selling autocracy.
> To that end, the party has invested heavily in public diplomacy and influence operations intended to make the global public more accepting of its nondemocratic political system. It has developed a far-reaching program of trainings, conferences, and workshops that teach CCP-style management of the press, Internet, military, and civil society to foreign political leaders. And despite a perception among some Western policymakers and academics that these efforts are tone deaf, China’s external influence operations are more sophisticated, effective, and likely to succeed over the long run than many in the West believe. They are aimed primarily at people in the developing world, where many see the so-called China model as effective at delivering what matters most to them: a path out of grinding poverty and into the global middle class.
> In the face of Beijing’s increasingly resonant foreign propaganda, Washington has failed to rise to the challenge. It has yet to adopt a coherent message about the merits of the U.S. political system. In contrast to China’s messaging, which is tightly focused on winning over audiences in the developing world, U.S. messaging is scattershot and less persuasive. To compete, the United States needs to sell a positive vision for itself around the world. And it needs to refine this message for people in the developing world, which is likely to be the main arena of this competition. Should Washington fail to adapt its pro-democracy strategy to today’s evolving political and economic realities, it will cede ground to Beijing—and could well fuel international support for China’s autocratic model.
> **DEMOCRACY BY ANOTHER NAME?**
> To sell its political system abroad, the CCP frames it as responsive, meritocratic, and remarkably effective at shepherding economic growth—without calling attention to its authoritarian aspects. CCP messaging claims that China’s political system is receptive to citizens and their everyday demands for government services and infrastructure. Propaganda videos feature inspiring drone shots of engineering marvels such as China’s high-speed rail network, its impressive bridges, and its gleaming airports.
> The party also claims that the ruling party is staffed with highly competent politicians who undergo a rigorous selection process. Here, CCP messaging typically argues that the current civil service exam, which is in fact highly selective, is a legacy of the competitive imperial exam for selecting mandarins who served China’s emperors.
> The most important element in the CCP’s soft-sell strategy is touting China’s extraordinary economic growth—what amounts to a prosperity gospel for the autocratic world. The CCP’s foreign propaganda points toward China’s inspiring success in lifting hundreds of millions of people from dollar-a-day poverty into the global middle class, which is an undeniable fact. Of course, rather than giving credit for this success to the Chinese people, the CCP likes to claim that the ruling party is mostly responsible.
> Official messaging is generally upbeat and avoids a hard sell, even if the harsh and combative messages of a small subset of Chinese diplomats occasionally grab headlines. Xi and other party leaders have often stressed the need to “tell China’s story well” and spread “positive energy” about the country both at home and abroad. The underlying idea seems to be that hope and inspiration sell better than doom and gloom. Some of China’s foreign messaging is devoted to criticizing Western democracies and painting U.S. democracy as especially chaotic. For the most part, however, it promotes China’s own story.
> Notably, these messages don’t just elide the authoritarian aspects of China’s political system, they also claim that it is in fact democratic. The CCP’s official stance is that China is a “whole process democracy” in which the ruling party, while unelected, represents the interests of all people, in contrast to parties in democracies that supposedly represent just factions of society. This messaging builds support for China’s illiberal, authoritarian system while dressing it up as a populist democracy.
> The CCP pushes this message through an array of channels. The party has established a global television news network, CGTN, its answer to CNN or the BBC. It has funded an expansion of the global wire service Xinhua, which is making inroads abroad by placing its content into foreign newspapers. The party also increasingly uses covert influence operations on social media by promoting influencers who cheerily sell the merits of the Chinese system.
> **CHINA’S FRESH FACE**
> For decades, U.S. analysts have expressed skepticism as to whether the soft sell actually increases global acceptance of the Chinese political system. Their assumption has long been that the Chinese system is too authoritarian and too specific to the Chinese context to win over admirers overseas. China’s messaging, to many Americans’ ears, often falls flat. Some messaging is explicitly anti-American; moreover, the more positive stories of China’s growing prosperity can be seen as a threat to the United States’ global status—and given the United States’ greater wealth, there is little reason for it to emulate China’s system.
> It is now clear, however, that CCP messaging is in fact effective at changing hearts and minds and building support for China’s autocratic system—but mostly outside of wealthy democracies. In a study published in the American Journal of Political Science in 2024, I worked with an international team of researchers to survey people across 19 countries in six continents and to analyze data on thousands of propaganda videos produced by CGTN. We found that viewers’ positions on China moved dramatically after watching representative clips produced by CGTN. Although only 16 percent of people preferred the Chinese political model to the U.S. political model initially, after watching CGTN content, 54 percent stated the reverse. People also saw the Chinese system as more responsive, better at delivering growth, and, remarkably, more democratic in character.
> CCP messaging is particularly resonant in the developing countries we studied, such as Colombia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, and South Africa. It is not a coincidence that these are areas where China has invested heavily in expanding its media footprint. CGTN, for instance, opened a bureau in Nairobi in 2012, and the party’s English-language newspaper, China Daily, has established content-sharing agreements with dozens of media outlets in Latin America.
> A saving grace for the United States is that relatively few people consume China’s foreign-facing media, which means that however effective and slick its programming, its reach is not yet all that broad. For example, only seven percent of South Africans and six percent of Kenyans report regularly watching CGTN. The confined reach of China’s official media makes it, thus far, a limited tool.
> The United States cannot take it for granted, however, that the CCP’s official media messaging will continue to have a narrow audience. The viewership of CGTN and other channels is growing, if modestly. In Nigeria, for example, viewership increased from six percent of the population in 2018 to 11 percent in 2020. The CCP also relies on an array of other strategies to make inroads. It has, for instance, expanded the footprint of Xinhua, so that stories with pro-CCP messages, implicit or explicit, are more likely to appear in newspapers around the globe, sometimes without attribution to Xinhua itself.
> Moreover, China’s propaganda campaign is helped greatly by the fact that whereas the United States is old news, with a reputation born of decades of international activity, China is seen as a relatively new player. With many having relatively little knowledge about China and its system, the CCP is seizing the opportunity to define itself from scratch overseas. The United States, in other words, is the incumbent to China’s lesser-known challenger—and the United States, universally known and weighed down by its history of meddling and intervention, may find it very difficult to change minds. China, on the other hand, is a fresh-faced newcomer by comparison and can introduce itself as the better, unburdened alternative to Washington’s tired goods.
Small nitpick, anyone more knowledgeable, please correct me:
Isn’t it well-established that it is nearly impossible for a short intervention (say a Chinese news propaganda video) to abruptly and sustainably change someone’s views?
I thought one of the takeaways of the replication crisis in psychology was a pretty firm rebuke of these types of findings?*
(*I’m much less informed about the limits of persuasion given regular, long term ingestion of propaganda. My question arise bc it seemed like the author implied his study focused on changing views spurred only by watching a small number of clips.)
Not surprising. Firstly (as the article points) the US has an incumbency problem where it has actually been the superpower for some time and made some mistakes, while China is a newcomer that has not yet had the opportunity to screw things up. China is like the opposition party that can criticize and promise because they don’t have to deal with reality (though their problems with getting back their money from developed countries are I think a nice example of promises clashing with reality).
Secondly – well, it worked for China while democracy has failed in many developed countries (e.g Arabian Winter).
I’ll probably come back to this when I have more time later, but in ancient times I wrote my thesis on this subject. I don’t really see it in the article, so I would add that the “system” that China is selling isn’t necessarily a copy of what they do at home. The primary argument, from the Chinese side, is basically that universalist models are stupid, and every country should have their own system, and that the international order should be built around this. In reality, this of course isn’t a democratic approach, where people can vote on their systems and find their own way, but instead a way to legitimatize non-democratic governance with “our culture is not conducive to democracy”-arguments. Instead of “Socialism/Human Rights/X with Chinese Characteristics”, what China is trying to sell is that any country should have their own “X with Culture Characteristics”.
Take for example [The Beijing Declaration](http://p.china.org.cn/2017-12/10/content_50095729.htm), which is about Human Rights in a national context. From Article 1:
>In order to ensure universal acceptance and observance of human rights, **the realization of human rights must take into account regional and national contexts, and political, economic, social, cultural, historical and religious backgrounds.** **The cause of human rights must and can only be advanced in accordance with the national conditions and the needs of the peoples. Each State should adhere to the principle of combining the universality and specificity of human rights and choose a human rights development path or guarantee model that suits its specific conditions.** States and the international community have a responsibility to create the necessary conditions for the realization of human rights, including the maintenance of peace, security and stability, the promotion of economic and social development and the removal of obstacles to the realization of human rights.
This can sound quite good in a positive sense, where country X adds additional rights, because they are culturally important. But the argument falls apart, when you start applying it the other way. You can more narrowly define freedom of speech, freedom of association, bodily autonomy, and so on. The point of this system (A Community of Shared Future for Mankind) is to legitimatize non-liberal approaches to universal rights,. I think its clear why this type of system is preferable to autocracies. Human Rights still exists as a concept, but in reality it becomes cultural specific rights, which the despot is free to determine, because they are the true representative of the people.