Why Is China So Bad At Propaganda?

China is the world’s largest economy, and its military is rapidly modernizing. It has been incredibly successful at lifting its own citizens out of poverty and developing its infrastructure and industries. This, however, has not borne fruit politically, with the most recent government under Xi Jinping being increasingly repressive and conservative – and indeed more belligerent on the international stage as well.

So should the liberal world feel threatened by China’s success? Perhaps not just yet.

There is one major area in which China has consistently failed to achieve: soft power. Despite being an economic miracle, Chinese society and Chinese ‘values’ are distinctly unpopular on a global scale.

Despite billions spent on propaganda-heavy programming designed to sell China to the non-Chinese, their networks have poor following and little impact. Compared to lower-budget, yet vastly more successful Russian networks like RT and Sputnik, Chinese offerings like CGTV and CRI come across as stale (and bizarrely obvious) propaganda.

RT doesn’t mind whether it goes to the far-left or the far-right. But Chinese state media, reporting, and punditry can only act from a very narrow, officially approved scope, and the risk of the political extremes is too much. Instead of fascists and radicals, then, Chinese media is left with elderly politicians and business executives.

Crippled by strong hierarchies and political control, combined with an unwillingness to pursue counternarratives more nuanced than ‘China good, outside world bad’, China’s media is not succeeding in raising international views of China, even with Donald Trump in the White House. These failings are broken down in Hilton Yip’s article for Foreign Policy, which shows a convincing argument for why China is so bad at propaganda, and why this might not ever change.