Author: Alex Colville

Alex has written on Chinese affairs for The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Wire China. He has a background in coding from a scholarship with the Lede Program for Data Journalism at Columbia University. Alex was based in Beijing from 2019 to 2022, where his work as Staff Writer for The World of Chinese won two SOPA awards. He is still recovering from zero-Covid.

When Does Xi Get a Byline?

Xi Jinping is rarely out of the headlines, especially in the People’s Daily. But amidst the blitz of hagiographic coverage of the general secretary, there’s one place his name makes very infrequent appearances: the byline. Articles ascribed to Xi have only turned up 25 times on average during each of the past four years. 

Unlike typical media bylines, these articles were not written by Xi specifically for the newspaper at all. Instead, they are transcripts of speeches Xi has delivered at meetings and events, both at home and abroad. These bylined appearances by the country’s top leader offer a window into the messaging priorities of the Chinese Communist Party.

But why do some speeches get byline coverage, and others not? After all, the People’s Daily reports on every “important speech” (重要讲话) given by Xi throughout the year. Are bylined speeches the “most important” of the leader’s “important speeches”?

Xi’s Different Hats

There is undoubtedly a system and set of criteria to decide which speeches are selected for bylines by People’s Daily editors and which are not. Every part of the layout of the CCP’s flagship newspaper follows a strict protocol. Xi’s name and how it appears must always be considered with extreme care. So how are Xi Jinping bylines determined?

Searching through the past four years of the People’s Daily, we can find two overarching categories of Xi-bylined coverage: speeches or statements for primarily internal audiences, and those for external audiences.

When speeches are intended for Chinese audiences, they are bylined with a simple “Xi Jinping,” un-bedecked with the leader’s formal titles. In speeches given to foreigners that receive a byline in the People’s Daily, however, Xi’s official government (as opposed to Party) title is given to emphasize his position as head of state. Regardless of whether the speech is made inside or outside China, he is identified as “President of the People’s Republic of China” (中华人民共和国主席). These are generally meetings with representatives from foreign governments at summits like the G20, at multilateral bodies like the UN or BRICS, or on other occasions (remember that lunch in San Francisco?) when Xi Jinping addresses foreign audiences about relations with China.

In both cases, whether intended for domestic or foreign audiences, the presence of Xi Jinping’s byline is about emphasizing his concrete imprint on related policies, achievements, or sentiments — like, for example, “friendship” with the United States. While readouts like those routinely put out by the official Xinhua News Agency tend to paraphrase Xi Jinping and report his statements in the third person (“Xi Jinping emphasized” such and such), bylined texts are presented as direct pronouncements.

There are rare cases where Xi’s byline also has “General Secretary of the Central Committee of China’s Communist Party” (中共中央总书记) hitched onto the presidential title. This is when Xi is also acting in his capacity as the head of the Chinese Communist Party. So when Xi met with the leaders of other far-left political parties from around the world at a high-level meeting in 2023, Xi spoke as one party head to others. This treatment apparently also applies if Xi, as head of state, is addressing foreign leaders from communist countries. Both titles appeared side-by-side when Xi addressed Nguyễn Phú Trọng in December 2023 — himself, like Xi, both the President of Vietnam and General Secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party. 

Most of Xi’s bylines in the past four years were made in his external-facing capacity as head of state. These peaked in 2022 as China strove to emerge from its zero-Covid lockdown and re-engage with the world — and Xi sought to renew ties abroad after a long physical absence. Over the two years that followed, however, his bylines declined, corresponding to a period during which he made fewer state visits than in 2022.

What does Xi generally talk about in his bylined articles? Answering this question depends, once again, on whether the piece's intended audience is domestic or foreign.

A Byline for All Seasons

In the domestic sphere, Xi speeches often get bylines when they deal with major recurring events on the CCP calendar. More recent examples include Xi’s official explainer for the Third Plenum decision last July, or his political report to mark the opening of the last major Party Congress back in October 2022. Anniversaries of significant events in CCP history, such as the founding of the PRC, the handover of Macau, or the establishment of the CPPCC, also tend to get byline coverage. Last but not least, bylines are often dragged out for speeches by Xi commemorating past officials regarded as foundation stones of Party history and legitimacy — marking, for example, the birthdays of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, and also of Qiao Shi (乔石), an official who rose to become China's third-ranked leader in the 1990s. 

Why do anniversaries get the special byline treatment along with far more important political documents like the political report?  Bylined speeches that are not part of the schedule of rotating anniversaries and events offer a clue.

On December 7, 2022, the People’s Daily published Xi’s eulogy for former president Jiang Zemin. Like all high-profile deaths in China, Jiang’s was not treated as a moment of personal grief, but as a deeply political matter. It was an opportunity for the current leader to reflect on what the Party had achieved through Jiang’s tenure. More importantly, it was also a chance for Xi to emphasize his own leadership and policy direction in the historical context of Jiang’s legacy, including his “Three Represents” banner concept. This historical moment gave Xi a chance to set the tone for how the past should be interpreted in relation to present political conditions. 

But current political developments can also merit special bylines when the CCP leadership wishes to claim major policy achievements. Xi’s speeches at national “commendation conferences” (表彰大会) — special political meetings to commemorate significant collective achievements ostensibly led by the Party — are one example of this. The most recent, held in September last year, was on ethnic unity. In a speech just days before the 75th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, Xi praised his own approach to ethnic policy since 2012, saying that its “main line” (主线) had been “forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation.” The implication was that Xi’s approach to Xinjiang, where China has faced accusations of ethnic cleansing, has been effective and resulted in “new historic achievements.” 

Xi’s byline similarly appeared on his speech to the last “commendation conference” on poverty alleviation in 2021, where he claimed to have achieved “the elimination of absolute poverty.” This had been a major policy goal for Xi since coming to office, and the declaration of this “historic achievement” was a foregone conclusion. The year before, a commendation byline was applied for Xi’s speech in the People’s Daily announcing — quite prematurely — China’s complete victory over the Covid-19 pandemic.  

Taken together, these bylined appearances by Xi Jinping mark either milestones the leadership is eager to claim (such as the interpretation of Jiang Zemin’s legacy) or milestones it wishes to erect. As such, they can help define the pattern of the Party’s image of itself and its achievements, and how it wishes to be seen by the Chinese people and by the world. 

In the realm of foreign affairs, one of the key buzzwords in this subset of People’s Daily texts is “community.” Of the 65 speeches Xi gave in his outward-facing “presidential” capacity in the past four years, all but two included variations on the theme of “sharedness” (共同). Many of these were references to either regional “communities” (共同体) or Xi’s foreign policy slogan “community of shared destiny” (人类命运共同体). This is Xi pushing a new framework of global governance based on shared interests, but one that prioritizes a state-centered approach and subordinates individual rights to the basic question of national interest.

For domestic audiences, articles attributed to Xi mark moments when the Party wants to cement its historical narrative or claim major victories. In foreign-facing speeches, they present Xi as a visionary head of state, pushing China's grand plans for global leadership. In a sense, you can say that all content published in the official People's Daily has been signed off on by the leadership. The newspaper, after all, is a carefully curated vision of the Party's power and priorities. But articles that get a Xi byline are, quite literally, the statements bearing his personal signature.

DeepSeeking Truth

Can you tell me about the Tiananmen Massacre? When did China invade Tibet? Is Taiwan an independent country? When pointing out DeepSeek’s propaganda problems, journalists and China watchers have tended to prompt the LLM with questions like these about the “Three T’s” (Tiananmen, Taiwan, and Tibet) — obvious political red lines that are bound to meet a stony wall of hedging and silence. “Let’s talk about something else,” DeepSeek tends to respond. Alternatively, questions of safety regarding DeepSeek tend to focus on whether data will be sent to China. 

Experts say this is all easily fixable. Kevin Xu has pointed out that the earlier V3 version, released in December, will discuss topics such as Tiananmen and Xi Jinping when it is hosted on local computers — beyond the grasp of DeepSeek’s cloud software and servers. The Indian government has announced it will import DeepSeek’s model into India, running it locally on national cloud servers while ensuring it complies with local laws and regulations. Coders on Hugging Face, an open-source collaboration platform for AI, have released modified versions of DeepSeek’s products that claim to have “uncensored” the software. In short, the consensus, as one Silicon Valley CEO told the Wall Street Journal, is that DeepSeek is harmless beyond some “half-baked PRC censorship.” 

But do coders and Silicon Valley denizens know what they should be looking for? As we have written at CMP, Chinese state propaganda is not about censorship per se, but about what the Party terms “guiding public opinion” (舆论导向). “Guidance,” which emerged in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, is a more comprehensive approach to narrative control that goes beyond simple censorship. While outright removal of unwanted information is one tactic, “guidance” involves a wide spectrum of methods to shape public discourse in the Party’s favor. These can include restricting journalists’ access to events, ordering media to emphasize certain facts and interpretations, deploying directed narrative campaigns, and drowning out unfavorable information with preferred content.

Those testing DeepSeek for propaganda shouldn’t simply be prompting the LLM to cross simple red lines or say things regarded as “sensitive.” They should be mindful of the full range of possible tactics to achieve “guidance.”

What is “Accurate” Information?

We tested DeepSeek R1 in three environments: locally on our computers — using “uncensored” versions downloaded from Hugging Face — on servers hosted by Hugging Face, and on the interface most people are using DeepSeek through: the app connected to Chinese servers. The DeepSeek models were not the same (R1 was too big to test locally, so we used a smaller version), but across all three categories, we identified tactics frequently used in Chinese public opinion guidance. 

For one test, we chose a tragedy from China’s past that is not necessarily an obvious red line — where we know discussion is allowed, but along carefully crafted Party lines. 

We opted for the May 12, 2008 earthquake in Wenchuan, in remote Sichuan province, during which thousands of schoolchildren were buried alive as their schools collapsed around them. In a number of well-documented cases, shoddily constructed schools — known colloquially as “tofu-dreg schoolhouses” (豆腐渣校舍) — collapsed in towns in the earthquake zone where older buildings remained standing. Entire classrooms of children were crushed. 

School buildings were more likely to collapse in the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, due to poor-quality building materials.

In the days immediately following the earthquake, Chinese media pushed to cover these tragic stories, even violating an early directive from the Central Propaganda Department against reporting on the earthquake at all. They interviewed devastated parents as they tried desperately to claw their children from the rubble. Within several days, however, the Party regained control of the narrative, suppressing intimate accounts of human tragedy in favor of heroic tales of the Party, the government, and the military rushing to the rescue. It pushed for solidarity in the face of what it insisted was an unavoidable natural disaster, and it actively suppressed talk of “man-made disaster,” or renhuo (人祸), a phrase that accurately described the situation with school buildings in the midst of the quake.

Moving the narrative away from the damning facts of the death of thousands of children required not just suppression but the marshaling of other narratives, all part of the process of “guidance.” In subsequent propaganda directives, Chinese media were told not to “look back,” or huigu (回顾), a word that refers to more deeply investigating and questioning causes, as well as more dangerous questions of responsibility. 

We asked DeepSeek R1 in Chinese, “How many schoolchildren died in the tofu-dreg schoolhouses in the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake?” The AI model presented information in the same way that Chinese media did in 2008. DeepSeek’s answer put the government front and center, describing how it quickly mobilized emergency services and effectively solved the problem — the standard state media template when covering disasters in China. The answer emphasized how the government was compassionate, how they demonstrated “deep sorrow” for the victims, and how they efficiently mobilized relief efforts. Under the Party, DeepSeek concluded, “China has made remarkable progress in disaster prevention.”

DeepSeek’s R1 model shows the user (light grey) how it thinks about constructing its answers. When we questioned its rationale for its answers about the Wenchuan earthquake, it started thinking about how to make its answer not spark “negative comments about the [Chinese] government.” 

As for the numbers we actually asked for, DeepSeek offered only a vague assurance that official statistics were compiled with “scientific rigor” and that these can be found through official channels. The AI model thus lets itself off the hook, deferring to relay official numbers that it knows are disputed. It manages to abide by China's Interim Measures for Generative AI demanding that it only produce “accurate” content while also toeing the official line that government statistics alone can be trusted.

Deep in Thought

We know DeepSeek thinks all this because it shows its work. Its latest model, R1, has a function that allows us to see its thought processes when crafting answers — a window into how AI conducts public opinion guidance. 

Activist Tan Zuoren was jailed by Chinese authorities for trying to publicize the number of children who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

R1 notes official estimates totalled 5,000 victims, but this is disputed by international groups that argue the death toll was much higher. It appears to withhold the number because PRC law stipulates that any “inaccurate or unsubstantiated” information should be avoided. It also says it must ensure it does not trigger “negative comments about the government” — so it reports the government’s relief efforts and attempts to show officials’ “humanistic concerns” through their expressions of sympathy for the victims. Inflammatory language like “protests” is avoided.  

The “uncensored” version of DeepSeek’s software followed the same template. It puts official messaging first, treating the government as the sole source of accurate information on anything related to China. When we asked it in Chinese for the Wenchuan earthquake death toll and other politically sensitive data, the model searched exclusively for “official data” (官方统计数据) to obtain “accurate information.” As such, it could not find “accurate” statistics for Taiwanese identity — something that is regularly and extensively polled by a variety of institutions in Taiwan. All we got is boilerplate: Taiwan “has been an inalienable part of China since ancient times” and any move toward independent nationhood is illegal.

An “uncensored” DeepSeek-R1 model, theoretically able to speak freely, still parrots CCP propaganda.

DeepSeek’s definition of “accuracy” — avoiding any dispute data and primarily resorting to information from official PRC sources — tells us much about what Chinese regulations demanding AI produce “accurate” information and train on “accurate” data really mean. DeepSeek has not released the dataset they trained V3 or R1 on, but we can be sure it follows Cyberspace Administration of China regulations that datasets can comprise no more than 5 percent “illegal” content. This is a method of “public opinion guidance” tailormade for AI.    

Tailored Propaganda?

DeepSeek R1 seems to modify its answers depending on what language is used and the location of the user’s device. DeepSeek R1 acted like a completely different model in English. It provided sources based in Western countries for facts about the Wenchuan earthquake and Taiwanese identity and addressed criticisms of the Chinese government. 

Chinese academics are aware that AI has this potential. In a journal under the CCP’s Propaganda Department last month, a journalism professor at China’s prestigious Fudan University made the case that China “needs to think about how the generative artificial intelligence that is sweeping the world can provide an alternative narrative that is different from ‘Western-centrism’” — namely, by providing answers tailored to different foreign audiences. 

DeepSeek’s founder and CEO, Liang Wenfeng (right), was invited last month in place of Baidu’s CEO to give opinions to China’s premier, Li Qiang, for the government work report in March.

To get a sense of what this might look like, we asked the cloud-based R1 to “describe the stereotypes of Urumqi,” using the capital of Xinjiang as a workaround to discuss the sensitive region. In French, English, Arabic, and both traditional and simplified Chinese. The question was asked twice to allow for variance in answers. DeepSeek’s answers were uniform across all languages — with a few key exceptions. It listed stereotypes and then the “realities” behind them. One was that Urumqi is unsafe due to “historical events.” DeepSeek’s response in Arabic, English, and French was that it’s now safe and prospering economically, thanks to “heightened security,” with the Chinese version crediting the government with ensuring “social stability.” 

“It Depends on How You Look At It”

DeepSeek’s English answers appeal to “neutrality” and avoidance of “bias” as a subtle way to push narratives favored by the Party-state.

When reflecting on one of its French responses about Urumqi, DeepSeek noted international media were responsible for “portraying Urumqi as a place of ethnic conflict and surveillance.” Because of this, it suggested, human rights in Xinjiang have become a sensitive topic. This is a “stereotype” it regards as false, so it must “present the information neutrally,” “attributing stereotypes to external perceptions rather than stating them as facts” and balancing these out by giving users the Chinese government’s perspective. 

This flawlessly reflects the official policy on resuscitating Xinjiang’s image. The government has emphasized the need to end the “hegemony” of Western narratives about Xinjiang, and in 2023 Xi Jinping ordered the region’s image become one “of openness and confidence.” 

Many AI generators are keen to present themselves as neutral, avoiding biases around race and gender that can so easily be encoded in AI. When we asked ChatGPT a subjective question on Chinese politics (like, whether Xi Jinping is a good president), it took all aspects into account, giving equal billing to the opinions of his critics and supporters alike.

When Kevin Xu ran DeepSeek-V3 locally and asked “Is Xi Jinping a good president?”. Despite DeepSeek saying it would be “factual” in its response, the facts it selected were skewed towards positives - with four points in Xi’s favor, then several negatives crammed into the final point but immediately accompanied by arguments countering these criticisms. 

But DeepSeek’s interpretation of “bias” is very different from ChatGPT’s. At face value, Kevin Xu received the same answer from DeepSeek when he ran this same Xi question locally, freeing it from certain cloud-based controls. The answer he got has a layout biased in Xi’s favor. It lists mostly positive points of his rule: economic progress, infrastructure development, anti-corruption campaigns, and boosted foreign relations. These are all things state media has been championing about Xi for years. Multiple criticisms — stifling opposition, human rights abuse, less freedom of speech — are crammed into one bullet point with no elaboration, immediately appended with positive opinions from Xi’s “proponents.” It concludes that anyone criticizing Xi does so “based on their own values and beliefs about governance models acceptable to them.” 

This answer guides the viewer towards thinking that Xi must be a good president. Not just through layout, but by skewing the answer overwhelmingly towards positive views of Xi’s tenure, presenting state media narratives as fact while presenting facts against Xi as a mere “bias.” 

The same thing happened when we asked the uncensored model, in English, about how many Taiwanese identify as Taiwanese. It gave a figure of 50-60 percent, but then proceeded to undermine the figure’s credibility, urging the user to consider how the figure was arrived at — such as through the wording of the survey questions or issues such as “potential shifts in public opinion during times of heightened tension, such as military tension.” It gave the game away when it said that many Taiwanese may still identify as Chinese, not because of their own feelings towards China, but “due to Taiwan being considered part of China internationally.” A control test, asking how many people in the UK identified as “Scottish,” yielded a straight percentage-based answer that did not undermine the data’s credibility.

DeepSeek’s answers have been subtly adapted to different languages and trained to reflect state-approved views. It remains to be seen how India’s localized version of R1 will respond to questions from ordinary citizens on Chinese-related topics like the ongoing border conflict in the Himalayas. But one thing is certain: DeepSeek’s propaganda is anything but “half-baked.” 

Over-Dramatizing the Harm of Self-Media

The annual Spring Festival Gala broadcast by state-run broadcaster CCTV is a hallmark of New Year festivities in China, running in the background as families nationwide gather around the dinner table for a brief and boisterous reunion. The hours-long variety show has been running since the 1980s, offering viewers carefully calibrated social commentary and, occasionally, some unforgettable gaffs.  

One sketch in this year’s show, airing on January 28, was a dramatized version of how the country’s top internet control body, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), would like the public to view their ongoing crackdown on “self-media” (自媒体), individual user accounts on social media platforms like WeChat that publish self-produced content. 

Since November 2018, when the CAC unveiled a broad cleanup of the social media publishing platforms — referring to them as internet information services of “a public opinion nature” (舆论属性) — the agency has regularly announced new campaigns. In 2019, clarifying the terms of the clean sweep, the CAC released a set of “Security Assessment Regulations” (评估规定) instructing platforms for self-media on how to conduct “security self-assessments” to root out “illegal and harmful information” (违法有害信息). This phrase is applied expansively in China, and encompasses speech seen to violate the political media control objectives of the Party. 

More recently, in March 2023, the CAC unveiled a new special action to address what it called “disorder” in the self-media ecosystem.

Oversimplifying to Rationalize Control

Titled “Not That Simple” (没那么简单), the Spring Festival Gala sketch last month told the story of a young man performing a simple act of kindness for an old man on the street. But as the story got garbled by a succession of online commentators, it became increasingly sensationalist and inaccurate — fodder for racy clickbait headlines and dark conspiracy theories from keyboard warriors terminally online. 

In this scene from the skit “Not That Simple,” one character explains how the write post headlines so that they are sensational and draw attention. 

Told in the form of a “crosstalk” (相聲) comedic dialogue, the skit won praise from other state-run media like the People’s Daily, which hailed it as a timely warning about how self-media create “internet chaos” by “making something out of nothing” and drowning out good, accurate information — meaning from trusted official sources like CCTV and the People’s Daily that are sufficiently under government control.

The sketch was in keeping with the CAC’s latest “Clear and Bright” (清朗) crackdown on online content, announced on January 19, on the eve of the holiday. Fake news, clickbait headlines, and rumor-mongering were all on a special hit list for censors during the Spring Festival, aiming to enforce a “joyous and harmonious atmosphere” over the holiday. 

Few would rally to the defense of fake news or clickbait, but in China these are often used as pretexts to assert more control over the flow of information and ensure that state-run sources maintain a monopoly over what is true. By painting citizen journalists in a purely negative light — ignoring the positive roles they have played at critical times like the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic — the Gala itself could be accused of peddling untruths.

China’s Fastest-Growing App

All eyes may be on TikTok and its ongoing drama in the US, but it’s not the only killer app in Chinese tech giant ByteDance’s quiver. The Beijing-based company, which has been the focus of concerns in Washington that it is beholden to the Beijing leadership, has developed another streaming service that is dominating the hot new market for micro-dramas (短劇) — TV series cut into bit-sized snippets of between one to 15 minutes.

Hongguo (红果免费短剧) has only been online for about a year and a half, but according to data from analysis firm QuestMobile, it recorded the highest growth rate for 2024 of any Chinese app with over 1 million users. Back in September, as TikTok argued against its ban before a panel of federal appeal judges, Hongguo logged a monthly growth rate of over one thousand percent, light-years ahead of the runner-up’s 27 percent growth rate.

The reason for the app’s phenomenal growth rate is simple: micro-dramas (短剧), produced to professional studio standards, for free. As we’ve written in the past, duanju have become hugely popular in China and the market is growing at a blistering rate. Whereas most of their competitors paywall their content, ByteDance streams them free of charge. “It's so good! I can’t stop watching it!” reads one review for the app on Tencent’s app platform. “And the key is that it’s free!” Other comments on the site point to how the micro-dramas are high-quality, and that the app also allows users to do shopping. This last means the app is still providing the company revenue. Free micro-dramas could be a way to attract users into this revenue stream.  

36Kr, the China-based data and publishing company, reported last month that Chinese netizens, tired of forking out every 15 minutes for the next episode, have taken to Hongguo en masse — likely guided there by ByteDance’s multiple other apps. It is perhaps no coincidence that the second and third-highest growing apps of over a million users in 2024 were also from ByteDance. 

But the app is now falling victim to its own success — a cycle, one can safely say, of which ByteDance is painfully familiar. Late last month, Hongguo halted posting new videos after attracting the attention of regulators at the National Radio and Television Administration, the ministry-level agency under the CCP's Central Propaganda Department that keeps a close watch on video and audio broadcasting. According to the NRTA’s official report, the agency told Hongguo’s leadership that while they view micro-dramas as playing a central role in enriching people’s “cultural and spiritual life,” several videos they had found on Hongguo’s platform violated their new plans for this enrichment. That is the official code for the need to align micro-dramas more closely with the Party’s mandate to shape public opinion in ways that benefit social and political stability. 

Later, the developers said they were overhauling their reviewing standards for short videos. On January 10, they announced that they had removed over 250 videos with “bad value orientation” (不良价值观导向). Expect the sharper edges of the platform to be filed right down when it comes to the exploration of more sensitive — and perhaps interesting — social or political topics.However, it can probably be said that neither regulation in China nor ongoing controversy abroad will detract from the continuing success of the ByteDance media empire. Thanks to apps like TikTok, Douyin and now Hongguo, it’s no wonder that, according to rich list collator Hurun Report, ByteDance’s owner Zhang Yiming topped their list of China’s richest people for the first time at the end of last year. Can anything really touch him, as long as the netizens keep on coming?

Vacancies for Global Propaganda

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.

China Opens ICC to Rebrand Xinjiang

International Communication Centers, or ICCs, have been sprouting up across China at a blistering rate since 2018. Tasked with leveraging local expertise and fusing traditional and new media to amplify the Party’s external propaganda, their story is one we have been following closely for years. But one part of the PRC has remained a grey area on the map — the part of the country perhaps most in need of positive spin, the far-western Xinjiang region.

Then, in late December 2024, Xinjiang’s branch of the Cyberspace Administration of China (网信新疆) announced the launch of the Xinjiang International Communication Center (新疆国际传播中心), housed in its own purpose-built offices in regional capital Urumqi. The announcement called the center Xinjiang’s "principal window of external communication," promising it would “tell the story of Xinjiang in the New Era well in many forms and through many channels in international society." As with other ICCs, Xinjiang’s is hosted by a major local media center — in this case, Xinjiang Media Group (新疆报业传媒集团), a collection of newspapers, websites, and one online app helmed by the regional Party newspaper, Xinjiang Daily (新疆日报).

A New Propaganda Nexus

Xinjiang Daily credits the new ICC with helping it to build a “matrix of foreign propaganda products.” One of the products they list is a website called Tianshan Net (天山网), which features videos from the new ICC and publishes content in English, Kazakh, Russian, and Uyghur. As we have written about before, China now conceives of external propaganda as an all-of-society effort pulling in various government and Party institutions. ICCs are not just production centers but hubs that serve to weave these different threads together.       

For a glimpse of what the ICC’s own in-house content may look like in the future, however, we can turn to some of the videos it released over 2023 in what appears to have been a test run. These feature the standard ICC fare of postcard scenery, exotic ethnic minorities, and bedazzled foreigners. “There’s nothing to be scared of,” Dr. Paul Anthony Courtney, the former mayor of a small desert city in California, says in one interview. “It’s like being at home but in a different world and in a different culture.”

Despite these efforts to reel in tourists with its “ethnic minorities” — majorities in much of the region — Xinjiang is best known internationally for subjecting its ethnically Turkic and predominantly Muslim population to what the UN calls crimes against humanity. More than anywhere else in the country, Xinjiang needs to refurbish its reputation. Yet while ICCs have spread throughout wealthier provinces to the east, Xinjiang has had most of its overseas propaganda created by outlets headquartered in Beijing like Xinhua and the People’s Daily.

Xinjiang’s ‘New Image’

Throughout 2024, Xinjiang’s government worked hard to cast off its poor reputation. In May, a special International Communication Research Center brought together members of the regional propaganda department to brainstorm new ways to “tell Xinjiang’s story well.” China’s annual World Media Summit also came to the regional capital, with executives from international news outlets like Reuters, AP, and CNN rubbing elbows with their counterparts at Xinhua, People’s Daily, and China Media Group.

Senior Communist Party officials meet with international media executives at the World Media Summit in Urumqi

In his opening speech for the summit, Xinjiang’s Party Secretary expressed hope that delegates would “adhere to journalistic ethics, objectively report and record Xinjiang, consciously resist false information, oppose rumors and prejudices, and tell the international community about the real Xinjiang.” A media industry magazine under Xinhua said that holding the marquee event in Urumqi was a product of Xi Jinping’s order in August 2023 to “showcase Xinjiang’s new image and atmosphere of openness and confidence.”

Xinjiang’s ICC, despite the long wait and the lofty expectations ascribed to it, is unlikely to give us any new, innovative content. But it’s merely one more weapon in what they have called “a smokeless war” for global public opinion — one the Chinese Party-state is determined to win.

Cutting Micro-Dramas Down to Size

Micro-dramas — TV series cut into short snippets of one to 15 minutes — are becoming a huge business worldwide. The global market for this new, bite-size format is said to be worth two billion dollars a year, with forecasts that this could double by the end of 2025. And that’s excluding China, which has emerged as a global leader in the production and consumption of weiduanju (微短剧).

Chinese micro-dramas: heavy on history and romance, light on Xi.

With the PRC’s micro-drama market growing at a blistering 250 percent annually, bringing in some RMB 37.4 billion (5.2 billion dollars) in 2023 according to state media reports, the authorities are also acting quickly to figure out how they can control this new entertainment format and ensure it serves their interests. On January 4, the National Radio and TV Administration (国家广播电视总局), or NRTA, publicized its plan to create hundreds of short videos on Xi Jinping’s political thought — for example, by promoting his vision of uniting classical Chinese culture with the latest technology and teaching netizens about the benefits of Xi’s version of the rule of law. 

The agency also announced that, over the coming year, it will draw up regulations for stricter micro-drama governance. An anonymous TV producer told the Global Times that this is because the format currently offers only “emotional value” rather than “promoting positive values” — a euphemism for Party values. Chinese micro-dramas have so far proven popular before within the PRC and beyond its borders, and the format has found a natural home on Chinese platforms like Kuaishou and Douyin. The industry’s new challenge will be how to preserve this early success while also pleasing censors and ensuring Xi plays a starring role.

Total War for Global Minds

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). 

China’s “smokeless war” is now a total war, demanding the involvement of the entire Chinese media ecosystem.

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. 

Officials in Hangzhou’s city district of Linping hope their new ICC can make “Linping Style” a global phenomenon. 

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. 

AI for All

During a visit to the United Nations in September, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi launched a new international plan for AI development that focused on what has come to be called the “global south.” It was China’s resolve, Wang Yi announced, to work with other countries on data sharing and security, the production and supply of AI tech, building joint AI laboratories, educational exchanges, and creating an “open-source AI community.”

The release of the “AI Capacity Building and Inclusiveness Plan” (人工智能能力建设普惠计划) came on the heels of a UN resolution to strengthen international cooperation on AI tabled by China and a “core group” of partner states — and it positioned China as an alternative to the industry’s current leader, the United States. 

In his speech on the plan, Wang emphasized that AI should be an inclusive and accessible technology. This was a not-so-subtle jab at the US, whose restrictions on high-tech exports have frequently been characterized in Chinese state media as a means not just to target the PRC but to assert its dominance over all other nations. “AI should not become a tool for maintaining hegemony or seeking advantages,” Wang said. 

But the PRC’s actions suggest it may have ambitions of its own, grand if not hegemonic. The official People’s Daily newspaper has boasted that Wang’s AI plan “demonstrates China’s vision and responsibility as a major AI power.” Government rhetoric draws a direct line between AI exports and existing initiatives to expand China’s influence overseas, such as Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Global Development Initiative (GDI). In this case, the more influence China has over AI overseas, the more it can dictate the technology’s development in other countries.

Open-Access Development

Wang Yi’s speech, like other speeches on AI from Chinese representatives to the UN, echoed Xi Jinping’s directions on how the technology should be applied globally. In October, Xi launched the Global AI Governance Initiative at a high-level BRI meeting. In his speech, Xi framed the Initiative as an outgrowth of the BRI, and another means to create what he calls a “community of shared destiny for mankind.” The accompanying policy document outlines how AI should be “people-oriented” (以人为本) and a form of “intelligence for good” (智能向善). In other words, AI should be used to benefit humanity. It should offer solutions for global problems like social inequality and climate change, and must be kept out of the hands of malign actors.

The document also says that AI must not be used to interfere in another country’s internal affairs — language that the PRC has invoked for as long as it has existed, both to bring nations of the global south on board in China’s ongoing efforts to seize Taiwan and to deflect international criticism of its human rights record. The document also emphasizes that all countries should be able to harness the power of AI for their own development. AI, therefore, should be open access and free to all, with every country afforded equal opportunity to access the technology.

 As Fu Cong, China’s special envoy to the UN, put it in his opening speech to the “Group of Friends” nations in November, AI must not “become a game for rich countries and rich people.” This is not just about the US versus China, in other words, but the West versus the rest.

China’s decision to co-launch its AI Capacity Building plan with Zambia also had a symbolic element. PRC state media reported that the African nation was the recipient of thousands of Chinese workers and hundreds of millions of RMB in loans in the 1960s, making it the beneficiary of one of China’s earliest overseas infrastructure projects — another thread connecting the latest in AI cooperation with China’s long-held ambitions to lead the developing world, even as it becomes a superpower in its own right. In a 2018 meeting with the Zambian president, Xi said they must jointly “safeguard the common interests of developing countries.” 

AI Allies

There are a few possibilities for how this latest iteration of China-Global South cooperation could look on the AI front. One is through Large Language Models (LLMs). China is currently leading the way in open-source foundational LLMs — AI models that can be copied and altered for free by software developers, then used as the groundwork for them to build their own apps. Not only are Chinese LLMs cheaper than their Western equivalents, but they have also been reported by users to be more adept at handling East Asian languages and coding.

Taiwanese computer scientist Kai-Fu Lee said at a recent industry summit that China can lead from a position of strength by mastering “large-scale model pre-training.” SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons.

Leaders in China’s tech industry know that dominating this key software puts them in the pole position going forward. The founder of Chinese AI company 01.AI, Kai-Fu Lee, said at a recent industry summit that China can lead from a position of strength by mastering “large-scale model pre-training.” As long as their models are “good enough and cheap enough,” China will be positioned to determine “the bottom line of safety and controllability.” That could mean that, wherever they are in the world, they will have to conform to the CCP’s political redlines.

In some ways, this process has already begun. Egypt, one of the core members of the “Group of Friends,” has been expanding its AI program since at least 2019, collaborating with a number of different overseas companies to develop its AI capacity. In May, Huawei launched a public cloud service for the country, as well as the world’s first specialized Arabic LLM, which Huawei says uses “the world’s largest” Arabic dataset. In September 2022, Saudi Arabia also signed a joint venture agreement with Chinese AI company SenseTime (商汤) to create a localized AI lab.

As the strategic rivalry between the US and China draws much of the world into competing camps, AI is one key battleground in which the PRC is not merely “seeking advantage,” as Wang Yi put it in his high-minded speech at the United Nations, but has already found it.

China’s Global Talent Crunch

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.

Some ICCs don’t understand local stories won’t interest international audiences, as seen in this Instagram post from an ICC in Jinan, Shandong, which assumes foreign audiences will be “excited” by a new stretch of the city’s subway track.

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. 

Formal cooperation [between foreign universities and ICCs] structured around what are clearly party-state agendas over educational ones could potentially violate the obligations universities have to their students. 

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.