Telling Chinese Stories Well: Two New Mechanisms of Chinese Influence on Foreign Media

The Chinese government cares deeply about its international image, with Chinese leader ​​Xi Jinping calling for his government to charm the world by telling Chinese stories well. While existing research has studied Chinese efforts to earn status from foreign governments and direct public diplomacy toward foreign publics, it has largely overlooked the country’s preoccupation with foreign media. 

In a new working paper, James Sundquist extends the study of China’s image management by explaining the varied reporting of leading print newspapers on China. Specifically, Sundquist tests the effectiveness of China’s use of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure lending and the purchase of media companies to influence foreign perceptions of itself. 

Main findings: 

• China is capable of shaping narratives about itself in foreign media through material means.
• Infrastructure lending, whether measured by new lending or the beginning of construction, successfully attracts journalistic coverage, but is less effective at leading newspapers to moderate their coverage of human rights issues in China. 
  • Newspapers in countries that borrowed from China did criticize its human rights record less and were slightly less likely to do so in the years when their home government borrowed from China. However, this association was much weaker than the influence of infrastructure lending on increased coverage of infrastructure topics. 
• Chinese ownership, however, leads to both an increase in reporting on China’s overseas infrastructure efforts and a significant decrease in reporting on human rights issues. 
  • In the case of the South African daily the Cape Times, the purchase of a 20 percent stake by Chinese state actors, China International Television Corporation and the China-Africa Development (CAD) Fund, led to even more dramatic changes in reporting. 
  • Notably on April 11, 2020, the Cape Times’ competitors, the Sunday Times, owned by the Black South-African-owned Lebashe Investment Group, broke the story on the wave of mistreatment of Black individuals in Guangzhou, following the identification of a cluster of COVID-19 cases among the Nigerian community. The Cape Times did not report on the incident until three days after the story broke, focusing coverage on the Chinese government’s response to the controversy, instead of the African outrage. The lede and body of the article emphasized the Chinese government’s “zero tolerance for discrimination.” This marked the extent of the Cape Times‘ coverage, aside from a brief mention of the incident in an article four days later.
• As the Chinese government intensifies its efforts to control foreign media coverage of itself, these mechanisms are likely to continue to be tools of choice. 
• Already materially powerful, China is expected to prioritize goals related to status and to discover that foreign perceptions are an important constraint on its abilities.

If countries wish to avoid or counter China’s influence over its media, identifying a proper response is far from straightforward. Belt and Road infrastructure projects may feed into one of China’s preferred narratives, but they are popular because they address a real need for investment in developing economies. Sundquist advises proponents of human rights to take heart that Belt and Road financing does not fully deter reporting on Chinese transgressions, but cautions that they should be concerned that ownership stakes in media companies have joined strategic vetoes in international organizations as tools for deflecting foreign censure.