Exchanges this week between Guyanese media and a provincial-level communication center in Shandong offer a glimpse of China’s broad push for influence abroad. The secret: convince journalists in the Global South that using Western media sources on China means unfair bias.

As China’s leadership pushes regional and local media and propaganda offices to strengthen their global communication efforts, Sichuan province takes a typical soft approach with Portuguese audiences.

The addition of external propaganda bases in Zhejiang and Tianjin over the past two weeks brings the total number at the provincial level to 23. These ICCs, also being launched at the city level, are meant to remake China’s approach to delivering its message externally.

A new regional media network for South Asia and Southeast Asia created by the government’s China Daily and the provincial propaganda apparatus in Yunnan offers another glimpse into how Xi Jinping is seeking to remake the CCP’s global communication.

Originally meant as a platform for dialogue, the “Understanding China” international conference has become a mere stage for China’s ruling party. It stands as yet another example of how the notion of dialogue has become twisted by China’s media statecraft in the Xi era — and how cities and provinces are now being roped into the business of external propaganda.

The latest outpost for China’s nascent International Communication Centers has been unveiled in Lanzhou New Area, a satellite city on the edge of the Gobi that has been dismissed as a ghost town. What does this tell us about China’s external propaganda efforts directed westward to Belt and Road partners?

China responded with fury and indignation to a report alleging that it has invested billions to build a “global information ecosystem” to spread propaganda and disinformation. A media analysis of the country’s response, which paints the US as an “empire of lies,” only substantiates the report’s main thesis.