How to Tell Chinese Stories Well: Exploring Mechanisms of Chinese Influence on Foreign Media

By James Sundquist

The “Rise of China” is one of the great stories of this century. But how is this story told? Is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) about South-South cooperation or debt-trap diplomacy? How much attention should be paid to China’s economic miracle and how much to its human rights violations?

A new working paper from the Boston University Global Development Policy Center sheds light on two ways the Chinese government encourages media in developing countries to “tell Chinese stories well.”

First, Belt and Road infrastructure projects generate extensive coverage about Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s signature global initiative and may even dissuade reporting on human rights issues in China. Second, the working paper investigates how reporting at the major South African daily the Cape Times changed after Chinese state actors acquired a 20 percent ownership stake in the paper. Compared to both its peer publications and its own history, the Cape Times’ reporting on the BRI took off, while human-rights-related coverage of China declined.

This matters because habitual media consumption shapes political attitudes. Since many foreign policy goals require goodwill to be achieved, governments strive to shape their image abroad, just as domestic politicians battle to control media narratives at home. To the extent that China’s efforts are successful in influencing foreign journalism, it is both shaping how it is remembered in “the first rough draft of history,” as well as improving its prospects for the future.

Background

The working paper draws on English-language newspaper reporting about China from 15 countries from 2010-2018, comprising seven South Asian nations, six from sub-Saharan Africa, as well as Australia and Canada. Even after excluding articles that mention China fewer than three times (which tended to discuss China only tangentially), the dataset included over 100,000 articles, too many to hand-code. Consequently, the automated method of structural topic modeling was used to classify articles by subject. By identifying clusters of common word usage, this method groups articles with similar content. Topic labels were chosen based on key words and validated by reading representative articles. Reporting on these topics varied widely across time and space, demonstrating that the larger story of China’s rise is highly dynamic. The two studies reported in the paper examine mechanisms by which China seeks to shift attention away from undesirable topics and toward favorable ones.

Belt and Road Projects Grab Attention

Although the BRI has many motivations, one is undoubtedly to burnish China’s image as a partner of developing nations. By tracing how reporting on the BRI changes in response to new infrastructure financing, the working paper reveals that news of these projects is distributed broadly to citizens in host nations. Whether measured by new funds or new projects, an expansion of the BRI is associated with a strong journalistic response. Many, but not all, of these articles are positive; future work will more systematically examine the sentiment of these articles.

Intriguingly, a country’s borrowing from China might also lead some domestic newspapers to reduce their reporting on Chinese-related human rights issues, perhaps out of unwillingness to criticize a strategic partner. However, this relationship is weaker, and might vary by country. Among countries in the sample, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Kenya borrowed the most from China; Pakistani and Sri Lankan newspapers are particularly reluctant to criticize China on human rights issues, but the Kenyan Daily Nation exhibits no such effect.

Chinese Ownership can Transform Reporting

 The second half of the working paper examines the political economy of media ownership, a topic that has been understudied relative to its importance in political communication. In 2013, two Chinese state-owned actors took a combined 20 percent stake in the South African daily the Cape Times, as part of its sale from Irish owners to a South African conglomerate. Despite only holding a minority share, this sale proved to have dramatic consequences for the paper’s reporting on China: attention to the BRI jumped, while reporting on China’s human rights issues slumped.

The pressure to avoid criticizing China was particularly apparent in a case study of an incident that occurred during March 2020 in Guangzhou, where a reported outbreak of COVID-19 among African residents of the south China city prompted mistreatment of visibly African individuals. News organizations across the continent, including South African sources, stridently condemned the incident, while the Cape Times ignored the issue for three days, before finally publishing an article that chose to emphasize the Chinese government’s responsiveness to the issue.

These patterns have important consequences for China’s global engagement because even in the digital era, traditional media are influential in shaping perceptions of foreign governments. By “telling Chinese stories well,” these media strategies build valuable goodwill.

Normatively, these findings raise questions with no clear answers. What kinds of foreign information campaigns should countries tolerate? Such campaigns are hardly limited to China –the United States has long sought to manage its image in Muslim countries as part of a counterterrorism strategy. Bans on foreign ownership of media companies might sound appealing, until one considers the Polish government’s effort to shut down a US-owned TV station critical of the country’s democratic backsliding.

Ultimately, Chinese efforts to shape foreign media are part of a larger debate about the merits and risks of the free flow of information, which every society continually negotiates.

James Sundquist is a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and a former Global China Pre-doctoral Research Fellow with the Boston University Global Development Policy Center.

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