Are you an editor with strong English skills? Capable of striking up relationships with overseas think tanks, universities, and key opinion leaders? Do you have experience working at central state media, or perhaps for an international public relations firm? Alternatively, are you AI literate, with a background in computer science — the kind of person who can train AI models and optimize AI-generated content (AIGC) creation? 

If this sounds like you, gainful employment is just a click away. Positions are opening in hundreds of centers across China now striving — with some difficulty — to staff up the world’s largest national network for international communication.

On January 10, a little-known Beijing-based publishing company published a list of job vacancies, ranging from English-language social media editors to AIGC specialists.

Established in 2015,  the company that posted the ad, Xufang International Media (煦方国际传媒), is a subsidiary of China International Communications Group (CICG), also known as the China Foreign Languages Publishing Administration (中国外文出版发行事业局). While CICG regards itself as a global media company, it is directly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department — and its primary role is to contribute to China’s external propaganda operations, or dawaixuan (大外宣). This involves a range of activities, including book translation and publishing, “multimedia international communication” (全媒体国际传播) — think influence across foreign social media platforms — and “external discourse innovation” (对外话语创新), which could include the deployment of AI and other new methods. The group is also engaged in international film co-production, like the cooperation CMP exposed a year ago between CICG and the Discovery Channel to promote favorable views internationally of Xinjiang.

CICG publishes decades-old propaganda staples like Beijing Review (北京周报) and China Today (今日中国). But it has also transformed with the times, now managing such digital platforms as  “China Matters,” which has 170,000 followers on YouTube and 9 million on Facebook. Videos on the platform are the sort of standard fare familiar to those who have seen external propaganda from the likes of CGTN, China’s international broadcasting arm. In one recent video, Bill Brown, a professor at Fujian’s Xiamen University whom CCP-run media have lionized as a man “with a Chinese heart,” speaks against “Western misconceptions of China today,” a standard state media frame. 

Seeking Talent

In the job ad this month, the CICG subsidiary positions itself as a key player in China’s digital outreach efforts, talking up China Matters as well as a product called “Third Eye on China” (第三只眼看中国). It claims to have partnerships with more than 100 international news agencies and scores of major newspapers and magazines. The company boasts, without evidence, that it “operates a social platform cooperation and dissemination network that covers 80 percent of foreign short video bloggers in the market.”

The company’s job listing offers a glimpse at what skillsets the country’s growing network of “international communication centers” (国际传播中心), or ICCs, are prioritizing as China tries to follow Xi Jinping’s directive to “tell China’s story well.” 

Understandably, the job listings emphasize bilingual talent. The ICC wants a supervisor to organize “international cultural exchange activities,” two editors with a high level of English to better work on messaging, and broadcasters who not only have good English but are “good at communicating with others.” The general trend is towards personnel attuned to their target audience, well-equipped to reach out to the international community.

Xufang International positions itself as a "new media" operation, focusing on social media and vlogging. So among the job listings is an "Overseas KOL Operations Manager," working to create “strategic partnerships” with foreign influencers and bloggers. Their English editors are expected to “attract fans’ attention through high-quality content” on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. 

Special priority is also given to AI-generated content, which the ICC wants two staff members to focus on full-time. One will be charting the annual targets of the center’s “AI Vision Studio” and pushing AI integration into what Xufang calls its “new media marketing.” Although it isn’t entirely clear what this means, the staffer’s job requirements — experience in natural language processing and recommendation algorithms — may mean they would be using AI to promote Xufang’s content on Western social media platforms. 

The other AIGC position is described as an “Application Engineer.” But the duties outlined, like creating “precise prompt words” and using AI for “video production” make it appear this employee will be producing AI videos, possibly along lines set by Chinese state broadcaster CCTV. Our previous experiments have shown that creating AI videos is dull and repetitive work, requiring patience with unpredictable AI diffusion models where the smallest change to the wording of a prompt can change everything.

Intriguingly, the only AI model the engineer requires knowledge of is Stable Diffusion, an AI-video generation model from UK-based Stability AI. Despite China’s push to create its own home-grown AI video generation services, it seems that Xufang does not think these are up to the task. Here, they are not alone. After months of beating around the bush, CCTV itself has recently credited Western AI services ChatGPT and Midjourney for producing their AI videos.

Four years into the surge in new ICCs that now cover nearly all of China, the centers have yet to break the mold when it comes to propaganda for global audiences. But Xufang’s job listing shows that innovation — particularly involving AI — is very much the order of the day.

Since the beginning of Xi Jinping’s “New Era,” confrontation has been at the heart of the Chinese Communist Party’s understanding of global information and communication. In his first major speech on propaganda policy in August 2013, Xi referred to the need for CCP victory in the “public opinion struggle” (舆论斗争), a phrase that for many bore uncomfortable shades of the disastrous pre-reform era.  The “struggle,” he made clear, was about raising China’s voice — the Party’s voice — over that of the West, a challenge state media have steadily called “a smokeless war.” 

Over the past three years, however, China’s steely determination to remake global public opinion, and to enlist the whole of Chinese society to do so, has been delivered with another conflict term: total war. 

The term’s use in the context of the CCP’s international communication since 2022 speaks to how thoroughly the leadership’s strategy in this arena has changed — from the centralized propagation of narratives through high-level state media and ministries, to a multi-layered and multi-local approach that involves, well, everyone. 

While that all-in approach is being touted as the strategy’s strength, it may also prove its fatal weakness. 

A Smokeless War for All 

The concept of “total war” (总体战), which refers to conflict in which combatants use any and all means necessary to achieve victory, was first coined by a Prussian military strategist in the late 19th century and later was associated closely with the Nazi war effort. In a contemporary CCP context, the term first appeared in Xi Jinping’s February 3, 2020, speech on the government’s response to the Covid pandemic at home.

From that point on, “total war” appeared constantly in the state media. In a clear sign, however, that Chinese leaders were mindful of its provocative historical overtones, the term was mysteriously absent from Xi’s speech to the G20 Summit in late March 2020. CMP founder Qian Gang surmised at the time that Xi’s speech writer had recognized the seriousness of the phrase, understanding that while “total war” sounded resolute to China’s leaders, it was unacceptable in an open global context.

By the end of 2021, as the leadership’s unpopular “zero Covid” policy persisted, “total war” had slipped into the official discourse on information policy too. Winning the “total war” against the pandemic required drumming up public support for the effort, emphasizing positives and playing down criticism. 

Then, in a speech nearly three years ago to set out the goals for the powerful CCP-run China Media Group (CMG), Shen Haixiong (慎海雄), the group’s president and a top CCP propaganda official, borrowed the full phrase used by Xi to refer to the anti-Covid effort, applying it to global communication. China, he said, was “fighting an active war, a sustained war and a total war (总体战) in the struggle for international public opinion.”  

China’s “smokeless war” is now a total war, demanding the involvement of the entire Chinese media ecosystem, of the entire bureaucracy, and of the entire society. The term, in fact, might be more appropriate to describe the full array of tactics and players now involved than that catchall generally favored (and often misapplied) by outside analysts: the United Front. 

Since Shen’s speech applying Xi’s resolute anti-Covid war metaphors directly to international communication, the CCP has pushed, right from the center, a total restructuring of global propaganda. The mobilizing of the full resources of society, the essence of total war, can be clearly seen in how local authorities, leveraging the media assets under their jurisdictions, have rushed to establish a new nationwide network of international communication centers (ICCs). These are tasked — from the county level on up to the provincial level — with “telling China’s story well” through initiatives directed outward. At CMP, we have called this strategy “centralization+” to reflect how multi-local forces have been unleashed even as vertical integration (including with central state media) remains strong.  

Though emerging in 2018 with the formation of a pilot center in Chongqing, China’s ICCs today look very much like a product of the whole of state and society approach that characterized China’s response to the pandemic. Since 2022, the year of Shen’s “total war” address at the China Media Group, ICCs have sprung up across the country, at every bureaucratic level. 2024 brought a boom in sub-provincial cities, counties and districts setting up what state media called “local ICCs” (地方国际传播中心), the numbers almost tripling over the course of the year. 

The institutions behind these lower-level ICCs go far beyond just local government and state media. Local universities, museums, publishers, overseas diaspora groups, and local branches of the CCP’s United Front Work Department — the office tasked with fostering allies outside the Party and overseas — are all lending a hand. The ICC system is now employing a wide array of actors inside and outside the political system in its battle to win the hearts and minds of foreign audiences. In the same way “total war” demands the mobilization of all resources to defeat a country’s enemies, this approach demands that all groups contribute to the cause — a kind of “total propaganda.”

Smelting Furnaces for China’s Voice

In recent weeks, the examples of extreme localization of the central strategy for global communication have emerged in quick succession. On December 6, the Guangzhou Daily Newspaper Group, operated by the city-level CCP leadership, established an in-house ICC. Alongside newspaper staff and officials from the municipal propaganda department, representatives from Guangzhou’s United Front Work Department and five local universities banded together to launch the project. These academic partners, according to the event’s readout, will help build a system of research labs for international communication, and also hire foreign students as “Guangzhou communication officers” (广州传播官). 

As we have noted previously in our coverage of China’s treatment of foreign students as propaganda resources, this tactic raises serious ethical issues, not just about the priorities of Chinese higher education but about the integrity of academic exchanges. 

The ceremony in Guangzhou also included regional and overseas Chinese outlets. Present for the event were staff from the Hong Kong-based Sing Tao Daily (星岛日报), a pro-CCP newspaper that prints overseas editions for Chinese communities in North America and Europe. According to local media reports, Indonesia’s Chinese-language Xunbao (讯报) newspaper phoned in to offer congratulations, alongside diaspora business groups like the Association of Chinese-Owned Enterprises in North Malaysia (北马中资企业协会). Each pledged to share their resources and play to each other’s strengths in “telling China’s story.” 

The day after the Guangzhou event, a similar coalition of institutions assembled in Yan’an, the CCP’s wartime base in northwestern China now regarded as hallowed political ground, to launch a new “international communication base” (国际传播基地) for “red culture” (红色文化), a reference to the sanitized and glorified history of the Communist Party. At the launch, the director of a local museum reviewed the wartime reporting of American journalist Edgar Snow, regarded today by the CCP as the model of foreign reporting on China: full of positives about the Party and its leaders. 

How will the base spread “red culture” internationally? Two major state-owned publishing houses have reportedly signed cooperation agreements with the local Xi’an International Studies University, which will publish works written by foreigners during the Yan’an period (1935-1947), to be translated into multiple languages. State-backed books on Yan’an are unlikely to electrify global Gen-Z audiences — a key focus at present of China’s external communication efforts. But such efforts underscore the diverse groups now involved in the CCP’s international communication push. Universities, publishing houses, local media, museums: All are pooling resources under the banner of ICCs in order to heed Xi Jinping’s call for a revolution in China’s global image. 

As it has accelerated nationwide, the process has resulted in awkward, even comical, gaps between what is practical and effective policy on international communication and what seems to be sheer performative nonsense.

Recently, on Christmas Day, two districts in the city of Ningbo also received ICCs. A propaganda official in one of the districts, Haishu (海曙), called the opening “a new chapter in Haishu's international communication work.” Two days later, Hangzhou’s Linping District held a marquee event to unveil its own ICC, centering its global communication strategy on the notion of “Linping Style,” to be promoted through online and offline activities. By our latest count, this brings the total number of ICCs in Zhejiang province alone up to 23. 

As the total war approach becomes policy from the top, talk of going global — though not exactly global thinking — is reaching fever pitch. The fixation on international communication can be seen everywhere, even outside the ICCs that form the backbone of the emerging new national system. On December 11, the Zhejiang Provincial Journalists Association (浙江省记协), a chapter of the CCP-run All-China Journalists Association (ACJA), launched a special professional committee (专业委员会) to advise on improving international communication across the province’s entire media system. 

Certainly, savvier regional ICCs (Shanghai and Chongqing spring to mind) should be watched closely for both overt and covert global communication efforts that make use of social media platforms, and harness trends like AI. Efforts directed at influencers in Taiwan, largely coordinated by provincial media groups in Fujian province, and including an array of local actors, have dominated headlines in the country in recent weeks — leaving Taiwanese alert and on edge over what are being broadbrushed as “united front” efforts stemming from China. 

And yet, a familiar pattern of waste is also already becoming apparent, as officials across the country clamor to make Xi Jinping’s vision of whole-society message mobilization a reality. This week, Heilongjiang launched its fourth provincial-level ICC in the capital city of Jilin, the "International Communication Center for Northeast China Tiger and Leopard Culture.” The ICC will reportedly spend millions of dollars on new equipment, including infrared-triggered wildlife cameras, to monitor the area’s population of around 70 wild Siberian tigers and 80 Amur leopards. Great news for tigers, perhaps. But for China’s international communication? According to state media coverage of the launch, the new center will “carry out content creation and development” to "build up a diversified, three-dimensional pattern of international communication.” 

As most media professionals know only too well, effective communication requires a keen understanding not just of platforms and technologies, but of audiences and their needs and interests. China’s “total war” for international communication has encouraged local and regional leaders to push far and fast beyond such practical concerns in the pursuit of political expediency. Many of these local ICCs are destined to become the backyard furnaces of global communication — a grand vision ending in total, wasteful foolishness. 

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.

Xi views the ICC system as an integral part of China’s external propaganda strategy. So how are the centers trying to get around this talent dearth?

Young Shoots at the Grassroots

By their very nature, ICCs require knowledge and experience of overseas cultures to better communicate with them and pinpoint ways to build audiences. Most ICC job adverts available online require advanced foreign language skills from journalists, executives and editors. Some demand more: Zhejiang’s ICC requires at least three years of bilingual experience, while the Western International Communication Center in Chongqing says it will prioritize candidates with over 2 years experience living in the UK or US. 

Although it is hard to gauge how much interest these job postings earned, or how easy they were to fill, available evidence indicates they appeal to only a small number of job seekers. Zhejiang’s job posting was read just 195 times on WeChat. The maximum number of reads for an international communication job posting we found on the platform was from Chongqing, which was around 1,600 times.  

Some ICCs are squaring up to the challenge with quick fixes. The report from Young Journalists Magazine says that some are drawing from their local area’s pool of international students, in the hope they can be more easily relatable to foreign audiences. ICCs in Anhui and Jiangxi, among others, tapped foreign students studying in their region to become “communication officers.” The end result of this approach was usually videos on X where students spoke about why they came to China and related their experience of traditional Chinese culture.

Hangzhou’s ICC signed a cooperation agreement with one local university in April, promising to work together to promote traditional Chinese medicine abroad — using the college’s international students as “ambassadors” to tell China’s story well. 

China’s foreign language universities are also a potential resource. Henan’s ICC signed a cooperation agreement with the foreign languages school of one local university, hiring its teachers as experts as “intellectual support” and promising to give their foreign language students “internship and practice opportunities.”

Some of these universities have strong pre-existing ties to the outside world, which ICCs leap to harness. In May, the Nottingham-Ningbo University (which the UK’s Nottingham University says is its “China campus”) signed an agreement with Zhejiang’s ICC to “utilize its international platform to foster cultural exchange and enhance global understanding of China.” While Chinese institutions and local governments see such utilization of student resources as unproblematic, formal cooperation of this kind — structured around what are clearly party-state agendas over educational ones — could potentially violate the obligations universities have to their students.

According to the principles openly affirmed by the University of Nottingham, its goal is to "support students to develop the skills to engage critically with new ideas." The university’s governance language is clear: “Freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas are central to the University of Nottingham’s mission of advancing truth, knowledge, and understanding.” How is such a commitment compatible with a memorandum of understanding for strategic support on international communication that commits the Ningbo campus (the University of Nottingham “China campus”) to using students to “raise the appeal of the China story” (中国故事感召力)? The clear danger of such a formal arrangement is that students and faculty feel obligated — in violation of the principle of the free exchange of ideas — to serve broader state agendas that should fall outside the purview of the student-university relationship.

Tapping Into “Gen Z” 

Recruiting from among young people is also an advantage on which the ICC system hopes to capitalize. They are tapping into a demographic willing to work for little to rise up the career ladder, at a time when China’s job market is in the doldrums. Not only that, but this also feeds into a broader trend in Chinese propaganda of targeting the world’s young people. A 2023 paper in the journal International Communication (对外传播), published by the CCP's Central Propaganda Department, explains getting the attention of “Generation Z” is key to external communication. 

There are other ways the ICCs can kill two birds with one stone. Shandong’s Weifang Bohai ICC has simultaneously solved the talent problem and enacted the government’s “AI+” policy. The ICC was able to use a collaboration with China Daily to take the likeness of one of their Western journalists, turning it into a virtual anchor deployed for regular broadcasts.  

The need for foreigners and foreign perspectives for ICC work can also speed up the process of ICCs going out into the world. Last week, Chongqing’s ICC announced plans to establish ten branches around the world, recruiting 30 foreign creatives and technicians to win hearts and minds abroad. The city is keen for foreign exchanges to bolster its economic development, but perhaps they’ve come to the conclusion that building overseas bases and recruiting foreigners is the best means to that end.

It makes sense that ICCs, under pressure to deliver on Xi’s new plan to beef up international communication, are experimenting with ways to work around the enduring set of problems that have historically troubled “external propaganda” work — including wooden and monolithic messaging, and a lack of audience understanding and responsiveness. So far, as China’s new ICC network finds its feet, the results are uneven. Some ICCs have sought a stronger overseas presence, while others have focused on drawing in young people, rolling out AI solutions, or tapping into existing educational exchanges. But one thing is certain: At the heart of this push from the center to enlist provinces and cities in the national project of global influence is a drive for new and innovative approaches. Whether this happens will depend on the politics, but also on the people.

International communications centers, or ICCs, are sprouting up all over China. These centers, a crucial piece in the leadership’s bid to remake its external propaganda matrix, have opened in nearly every province and dozens of cities nationwide. Their spread has been expansive — but far from even. One province, coastal Zhejiang, now hosts 16 “local international communication centers” (地方国际传播中心) at the municipal level or lower — five times the national average.

Zhejiang is one of China’s wealthiest provinces, but this alone cannot account for its surge in new ICCs. Even wealthier provinces, like neighboring Jiangsu and Fujian, have not experienced similar growth. So why has Zhejiang become home to so many ICCs? 

Act Globally

As we have detailed in previous research, provincial-level ICCs are spearheading efforts to “innovate” foreign-directed propaganda under a new province-focused strategy, responding to instructions issued by Xi Jinping in 2018. The idea is for central powers to mobilize the peripheries to contribute more actively to the work of what Xi calls “telling China’s story well.” 

Since 2021, when Xi Jinping held a collective study session of the Politburo on external communication, there has been a renewed push to strengthen the PRC’s “discourse power” abroad and to shore up what it calls “external propaganda” (外宣), by building a network of provincial and city-level ICCs. In June 2023, provincial and city-level ICCs created a mutual association to better coordinate work nationwide. The process of integrating the ICCs, both horizontally and vertically, including with central state media, has begun to emerge as a core strategy in China’s efforts to remake its infrastructure for global media and public opinion influence abroad.

ICCs, which deliver content to overseas audiences who do not pay for it, are not money-making ventures. “Their operations cannot be separated from the financial support of government bodies like the Propaganda Department,” writes one researcher for Young Journalists Magazine (青年记者杂志). The same article quotes an ICC employee in Chongqing who says that this lack of commercial viability, coupled with irregular government funding, has held back their work. Demand for international communication at the municipal level, they say, “still needs to be cultivated.”

Think Locally 

The same does not appear to be true a thousand kilometers to the east. Local governments in Zhejiang are flush with cash to spend on “culture, travel, sports, and media.” Looking at media reports on the province’s ICCs, there also seems to be a perception that money spent on ICCs will be returned through increased trade and tourism — that apart from making the political goals set by Xi, they will act as publicity bureaus for the localities where they are based. In Xianju county, local officials have tasked their ICC with turning the undeveloped region, known as a natural beauty spot, into “a world-class travel destination.” In Hangzhou’s Yuhang district, a local ICC was launched to spread awareness of the neolithic Liangzhu culture it once nurtured.

Compared to inland Chongqing, Zhejiang is deeply plugged into the global economy: from “world capital of small commodities” and New Silk Road terminus Yiwu to tech hub Hangzhou — home to e-commerce giant Alibaba and a mecca for online influencers — and thriving sea ports like Ningbo-Zhoushan, the world’s busiest port by cargo tonnage and home to its own ICC. At the launch ceremony for Yiwu’s ICC, emphasis was less on inspiring affection for the Chinese government abroad and more on “enhancing economic and trade exchanges” with other countries. Other cities like Wenzhou also have strong connections with diasporic communities worldwide. The President of the Chinese Association in Italy — which is home to a thriving community of migrants from Wenzhou — was present at the launch for the city’s ICC. When provincial capital Hangzhou’s ICC was unveiled, speakers hailed Zhejiang as both a crucial node for international trade and a “major overseas Chinese affairs province” (侨务大省) — meaning that a larger proportion of Zhejiang natives are living, working and trading outside the country. 

The answer to the question of why Zhejiang has launched so many more ICCs than any other province defies easy explanation. It is likely a combination of the various factors: more funds, more extensive overseas connections — and perhaps even the fact that Xi Jinping spent three and a half years as a top leader in the province. But the rapid spread of ICCs in Zhejiang suggests that while the top-down mandate to remake international communication is a factor, their setup is more than just a response meant to accommodate central government demands. Across the board, the centers promise to bring real, tangible benefits, suggesting they are not just performative political stunts but potential business opportunities. Whatever the balance of these factors may be, they are a reminder that even in China’s push for greater global influence, it continues to be local conditions and opportunities that matter the most.