In recent years, with the intensification of strategic competition between the United States and China, the “battle for the narrative” in the international media landscape has become more heated. But in the push to understand Beijing’s influence efforts, there is a tendency among elements of Washington and the broader China-watching community to focus on specific aspects of China’s activities depending on where they sit in the U.S. system. In some cases, these narrow and often fragmented perspectives have handicapped Washington’s ability to compete with China in the information domain.
Three narrow approaches to analyzing China’s influence efforts stand out as particularly worrisome. The first is an excessive focus on Beijing’s covert influence operations and assessing them in isolation from its broader — and very overt — efforts to shape the perceptions of target audiences. The second is an excessive focus on the latest evolution in Beijing’s social media tactics. The third is an overreliance on digital tools and big data analytics to understand Beijing’s behavior. Although important, these narrowly focused — or “siloed” — examinations of China’s influence efforts can lead to a fragmented response and prevent the implementation of a more coordinated policy approach.
The key to developing informed policy responses to Beijing’s global propaganda efforts — covert, overt, digital, and analog — is to study them in their totality and ground them in an informed understanding of the Chinese Communist Party. This sort of comprehensive analysis can be used to predict China’s behavior, inform U.S. strategic communications planning, and craft messages designed to inoculate audiences against Beijing’s narratives. At present, the United States does not have a single entity tasked and funded to perform this cross-cutting mission. To win the battle for the narrative, the United States should designate and fund an organization with the mission of informing whole-of-government U.S. strategic communications planning in ways that help Washington get ahead of Beijing’s influence operations.
The Overt Matters, Too
In its 2024 Annual Threat Assessment, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned that the People’s Republic of China is “expanding its global covert influence posture” to sow doubts about U.S. leadership, undermine democracy, and extend Beijing’s influence. The assessment described China’s covert influence campaigns as incorporating increasingly sophisticated elements such as generative AI and Russian-style tactics aimed at amplifying divisions ahead of the 2024 elections.
But China’s influence campaigns are not confined to the shadows. Beijing’s efforts to shape foreign perceptions include a complex mix of overt and covert tactics. Wielding its massive state-run media complex, Beijing openly seeks to promote a positive image of China to audiences around the world — “to tell China’s stories well,” as General Secretary Xi Jinping describes it — and to discredit, undermine, and delegitimize its competitors, most notably the United States and U.S. partners and allies.
This campaign is driven by the perception that the United States and its partners and allies are waging “public opinion warfare” against China. In China’s strategic thinking, public opinion warfare is one of the “three warfares” and refers to the use of the media to influence public opinion and gain support from international and domestic audiences. The three warfares also include psychological warfare — the use of information and media to support military operations and advance political and military goals — and legal warfare — the use of international and domestic laws to gain international support and manage the political repercussions of military actions.
China’s efforts to expand its overt footprint in the global media environment go back more than two decades and can be traced to the early years of the Hu Jintao era (2002–2012). By the early 2000s, China’s rise as a global economic actor had become undeniable. In 2001, two key events formally marked China’s status as an emerging economic powerhouse: China joined the World Trade Organization, and Beijing was selected to host the 2008 Summer Olympics. Despite these very public successes, however, Beijing was concerned that China’s international image continued to suffer from a perceived anti-China bias in Western media, and that this hampered its efforts to develop international influence. In 2004, the party issued a series of directives designed to improve China’s foreign-directed media and re-established the External Propaganda Work Leading Small Group, marking the Chinese Communist Party leadership’s commitment to the cause.
In 2008, Beijing was confronted with its continued failure to “win hearts and minds” overseas when protests erupted along the path of the Olympic torch relay. This public relations debacle reinforced Beijing’s belief that it needed to improve China’s external propaganda. Less than a year later, China embarked on an estimated $6.6 billion campaign to expand its global media presence and improve its international news coverage.
China’s ongoing global campaign to shape foreign perceptions touches on virtually all aspects of the information environments of target countries, including print, digital, and broadcast media, and even information communications infrastructure. In the Mekong region, for instance, China has actively sought to establish a footprint that includes content sharing agreements with local media outlets in all five countries (Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar), financial investment in local media outlets in several countries, and investment in the development of telecommunications infrastructure by Chinese companies. Far from trying to hide these activities, China often touts them as part of its efforts to “build a community with a shared future for mankind.”
More Than Digital Media
Like many governments and media organizations around the world, China’s propaganda apparatus has adapted to the digital age. China’s state-run media complex has successfully leapt from print and broadcast to online and from traditional to new media. China’s official Xinhua News Agency, for instance, a has robust presence on Facebook, X, Sina Weibo (a Chinese micro-blogging website similar to X), and YouTube. Xinhua’s YouTube channel boasts 1.43 million followers. In addition, Beijing employs a range of social media manipulation tactics, including censorship, bots, trolls, and hired influencers, and it has even begun to experiment with generative AI.
But not all of China’s influence efforts are online. Although it is a critical endeavor, analysis that focuses on Beijing’s digital footprint risks failing to capture the scope of its offline activities, such as its broadcast propaganda and its efforts to target journalists. China’s official overseas broadcaster China Radio International, for instance, produces multimedia content in 61 languages broadcast worldwide. Its short-wave broadcasts reach countries like the pacific island countries, where radio has traditionally been a key source of news.
China’s efforts to influence foreign media and journalists — both inside and outside of China — also go well beyond the digital domain into the realm of real-world human interactions. Beijing’s agents employ tactics that can be as blatant as threatening journalists with physical violence or as subtle as suggesting that a foreign news outlet could lose access to Chinese markets if it does not adopt a pro-Beijing stance. Recently, Beijing has threatened foreign journalists with “an invitation to tea” — a common practice of summoning individuals and threatening them with criminal prosecution for violating China’s national security or counter-espionage laws if they publish information contrary to Beijing’s interests. Beijing has also punished foreign scholars and journalists by refusing to grant or renew visas as retaliation for unfavorable reporting. For those who rely on access to China for their livelihood, this practice can be a career killer and thus creates significant pressure to self-censor.
Overreliance on digital tools
China’s massive digital presence lends itself to the use of digital monitoring tools and analytical models. Indeed, those tools play an important role in capturing, quantifying, and understanding the flood of Chinese influence activities online. And, although they are certainly important to monitoring Beijing’s efforts to exploit the digital domain, it is all too easy for analysts to hyperfocus on their outputs and lose a sense of context.
Approaches that seek to monitor Beijing’s online footprint using big data analytics run the risk of becoming divorced from a broader understanding of the Chinese Communist Party — its imperatives, objectives, and history. This could result in flawed interpretations of the data and conclusions that lack predictive power. For instance, a layman reading one of Microsoft’s excellent reports on information operations by Chinese threat actors — which, quite understandably, focus on discrete 6- to 12-month periods of activity in the digital domain — could easily walk away with the sense that China’s online influence campaigns are rapidly improving their ability to craft narratives that resonate with target audiences. However, when you place these campaigns into their broader historical and political context, it becomes clear that the situation is more complicated — and possibly less dire. China’s influence operations and propaganda campaigns are the products of a system in which political correctness often takes precedence over all else — including effectiveness.
The Importance of History
Comprehensive analysis that considers the totality of Beijing’s influence efforts — overt, covert, digital, human, and analog — and grounds them in an understanding of China’s ruling Communist Party is critical to developing informed policy responses.
First, it is worth keeping in mind that seeking to shape foreign perceptions is not a new behavior for the Chinese Communist Party, and many of the tactics that it uses have been honed over decades. The use of external propaganda is a core element of how the party operates and has been throughout its history. Tactics such as grooming foreign “friends of China” trace back decades. Mao Zedong himself carefully cultivated a relationship with American journalist Edgar Snow, whose sympathetic portrayals of the Chinese Communist Party and its leaders gained worldwide attention in the 1930s. Similarly, the party has been printing its own newspapers and broadcasting its messages via radio since the Communist Army hid from Chinese Nationalist forces in the caves of Yan’an nearly 90 years ago. These two practices have been polished and adapted by Beijing over the ensuing decades and remain core elements of its external propaganda today.
Next, placing China’s media behavior in the context of recent party reforms can provide insight into how Beijing’s narratives might evolve over time. Since he came to power, Xi has sought to tighten the Chinese Communist Party’s control over China’s media ecosystem through organizational reforms carried out in 2018. As part of these reforms, the party abolished the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television and transferred its responsibilities to the Central Propaganda Department. This consolidation of party control over China’s media has serious implications for its behavior going forward. It suggests that party imperatives are likely to play a larger role in Chinese media behavior than the commercial imperative of achieving authentic audience engagement. It also means that the narratives that China pushes are likely to be highly predictable and support the master narratives that Beijing seeks to tell the world about itself — even if those narratives are not particularly palatable to target audiences.
Indeed, in the nearly two decades that I have been observing China’s media behavior, one of my key takeaways is that Beijing’s narratives are often quite predictable. Regardless of the specific event that Chinese media is covering, it seizes every opportunity to fulfill the Communist Party’s mandate to promote a positive image of China. At the broadest level, the following narratives permeate Chinse media’s foreign-directed reporting: China is peaceful; China’s approach to cooperation is mutually beneficial and win-win; China is a responsible member of the international community; China is a better partner to developing countries.
On the other side of the coin, Chinese media also reflexively seeks to undermine and delegitimize China’s competitors, especially the United States. Typical Chinese media reporting on America — especially U.S. activities related to competition with China — revolves around narratives such as the following: The United States seeks to maintain its global hegemony; the U.S. military is a destabilizing force; the U.S. approach to cooperation is self-serving; the United States uses international organizations to bully others; U.S. assistance to developing countries comes with political strings attached.
Chinese media reporting related to specific topics and policy issues — such as territorial disputes in the South China Sea or U.S. military deployments to the Indo-Pacific — promotes messages that generally fall within these master narratives and reinforce Beijing’s official position. A quick search within Xinhua’s English language site for the terms “U.S.,” “military,” and “destabilizing” produces a list of headlines seeking to portray the U.S. military as a destabilizing force in the South China Sea, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and globally.
Recommendations
If China’s narratives are predictable, then it is possible to get ahead of them. The first message people read or hear often resonates the loudest — psychologists call this the “primacy effect.” On key issues, it is possible for the United States to predict China’s rhetorical responses based on a historical analysis of how it has responded to similar actions in the past and to craft messages designed to inoculate audiences against Beijing’s narratives. For example, if portrayals of the U.S. military as a destabilizing force are a perennial feature of Chinese messaging targeted at partners and allies in the Indo-Pacific, U.S. strategic communications can frontload messages about the stabilizing role of a particular operation or deployment. Similarly, given the likelihood that China will seek to portray U.S. aid to Indo-Pacific countries as aimed at maintaining U.S. hegemony and undercutting their governments, U.S. messaging surrounding aid packages should emphasize respect for their sovereignty.
Washington should have an organization tasked with informing U.S. strategic communications vis-à-vis China. At present, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center is mandated to “direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. federal government efforts to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.” This is an absolutely critical mission, but it falls slightly short of what is necessary to compete with China in the information space. It puts the United States behind the curve — reacting when it is possible to anticipate, plan, and get ahead of China’s messaging. Giving an organization the mandate to understand and predict adversary propaganda and disinformation efforts could allow America to preempt China’s influence campaigns. At a minimum, this organization could serve in an advisory capacity to federal agencies, making recommendations regarding how to tailor strategic communications based on a comprehensive understanding of China’s influence efforts in various countries and regions and Beijing’s likely responses. A more ambitious approach would be to give this notional organization the mandate to develop a global whole-of-government U.S. strategic communications plan.
To win the battle for the narrative, the United States should designate and adequately fund an entity to inform its strategic communications planning in ways that anticipate adversary messages and get ahead of them. Fulfilling this mission will require comprehensive analysis of China’s influence efforts — overt, covert, digital, human, and analog — rooted in an understanding of the party.
Heidi Holz is a senior research scientist in CNA’s China and Indo-Pacific security affairs division. During her 18 years at CNA, her research has focused on China’s strategic communications, propaganda, and influence efforts.
The views in this article are the author’s and do not reflect those of CNA.
Image: The Fundação Oriente via Wikimedia Commons
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