Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World, by Joshua Kurlantzick

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'Beijing’s Global Media Offensive' by Joshua Kurlantzick

The good news is that the bullying overreach of China’s Xi Jinping might be backfiring. According to Joshua Kurlantzick’s study, Xi’s aim to displace the U.S. as the leading global power has been driven not only by massive overseas investments (with heavy strings attached) but through sophisticated social media campaigns and concerted efforts to influence legacy media. The enormous project projects China’s power overseas while exporting its model of state-run capitalism governed by a surveillance state.

One of Xi’s miscalculations was the idea that ethnic Chinese in other countries would assist in his attempts to manipulate tilt elections in a pro-China direction. Citing Malaysia where a quarter of the population are of Chinese descent, Kurlantzick shows that they voted against Xi-backed candidates. They are primarily loyal to Malaysia, their home, not their ancestral homeland. 

Kurlantzick, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, can also point to Xi’s successes, including browbeating the spineless CPAs of Hollywood into expunging Taiwan, Tibet or anything unfavorable to Mainland China’s brutal regime from studio movies. China’s satellite television giant, StarTimes, lures viewers on several continents with inexpensive access to soccer games accompanied by newscasts that omit any negative mention of Chinese policies. Many authoritarian states, including Turkey, have begun to copy China’s system of internet control.

However, even Xi tacitly admitted in 2021 that China’s global image has plummeted from what Kurlantzick lists as COVID mismanagement, “wolf warrior diplomacy,” military aggression in the South China Sea and the country’s “too blunt information and disinformation campaigns.” But Beijing’s resources remain as enormous as Xi’s ambition. Kurlantzick advises greater effort from western media to expose China’s attempts to influence news reporting and for governments to respond to those efforts as the national security threat they have become.