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Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 10 | Spring-Autumn 2021
DOI 10.30966/2018.RIGA.10.3.
111
CHINA’S DISCOURSE ON
STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS:
INSIGHTS INTO PRC EXTERNAL
PROPAGANDA
Aurelio Insisa
Keywords—strategic communications, strategic communication, China, Chinese
strategic communications, propaganda
About the Author
Aurelio Insisa is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of
History at the University of Hong Kong
ABSTRACT
While tracing back to the second half of the 2000s, Chinese research
on strategic communications has experienced a notable uptick over
the last few years. Recent studies on China’s own practice of strategic
communications, and, more importantly, Xi Jinping’s call to build ‘a
strategic communications system with distinctive Chinese characteristics’
in May 2021, suggest that current Chinese views on the subject are
worthy of analysis. This article examines 15 years of scholarship on the
subject in Mandarin against the backdrop of institutional developments
concerning ‘propaganda work’ in the Chinese Party-State under the
Xi administration. It shows how the Chinese discourse on strategic
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1. Foreord
2. Laity
3. Athuis
4. Insisa
5. Fridman
6. Duell
7. Shapir
8. Shepherd
9. Dobreva
10. Kotze
11. Vuletic
12. Esmond
13. Shapir
communications has evolved from an assessment of US doctrines and
practices to a discussion of the effectiveness of the country’s ‘external
propaganda’. Contrary to previous attempts to adapt to a perceived
Western-dominated ‘discourse system’, Beijing is now seeking to afrm
its own values and interests on the global stage.
INTRODUCTION
On 31 May 2021, during the thirtieth group study session of the 19th
Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the Party’s General
Secretary and President of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Xi
Jinping stated:
it is necessary to strengthen top-level design and basic
research, build a strategic communications system [zhanlüe
chuanbo tixi] with distinctive Chinese characteristics,
and make tremendous efforts to improve international
communication inuence, the attractive power of Chinese
culture and China’s image, China’s discourse persuasiveness,
and international public opinion guidance.1
Notably, this was the rst time Xi referred to ‘strategic communications’
[zhanlüe chuanbo] in a public speech. Recent literature on Chinese
strategic communications has focused on Beijing’s efforts to craft and
project narratives in the geopolitical arena, exemplied by its Belt and
Road Initiative (BRI) in Eurasia and the Indo-Pacic, and in cross-Strait
relations with Taiwan.2 These studies have built on a holistic understanding
of strategic communications that emerged in Western scholarship in the
past decade that can be dened as ‘the use of words, actions, images,
1 ‘Xi Jinping zai Zhong-Gong Zhongyang Zhengzhi Ju di sanshi ci jiti xuexi shi qiangdiao jiaqiang he gaijin guoji
chuanbo gongzuo zhanshi zhenshi liti quanmian de Zhongguo’ [Xi Jinping Stressed the Importance of Strength-
ening and Improving International Communication Work to Show an Authentic, Multidimensional and Panoramic
View of China During the Thirtieth Group Study Session of the CCP’s Politburo], Xinhua, 1 June 2021.
2 Naoko Eto, ‘Japan-China Strategic Communications under the Belt and Road Initiative: The Case of “Third
Country Business Cooperation”’, Asian Perspective Volume 45, No 3 (2021): 533-558; Aurelio Insisa, ‘No Consensus
across the Strait: Chinese and Taiwanese Strategic Communications in a Contested Regional Order’, Asian Perspec-
tive Volume 45, No 3 (2021): 503-531.
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or symbols to inuence the attitudes and opinions of target audiences
to shape their behavior in order to advance interests or policies, or to
achieve objectives’,3 and as ‘[a] holistic approach to communication
based on values and interests that encompasses everything an actor does
to achieve objectives in a contested environment’.4 Further insights on
Beijing’s practice of strategic communications can be drawn indirectly
from literature focusing on the activities of Chinese bureaucratic actors
tasked with ‘propaganda work’ [xuanchuan gongzuo] and ‘united front
work’ [tongzhan gongzuo] targeted at foreign audiences;5 and also from
studies assessing Beijing’s attempts to achieve strategic objectives through
concerted leverage across information, economic, and security domains.6
Yet Xi’s recent statement highlights one key gap in the research. The
existing scholarship does not provide a granular inquiry of the meaning
of strategic communications in relation to other modes of political
communication devised by the Chinese Party-State to inuence foreign
audiences.7 To cover this gap, my research focuses on mainstream
academic literature on strategic communications published on the
Chinese Mainland from 2006 to the summer of 2021. The explanatory
power of this body of work is somewhat limited, mainly because of
the traditional reticence of Chinese scholars to discuss publicly the
mechanics of Party-State propaganda,8 and the long-established practice
of articulating sensitive debates within the circuit of ‘internal-circulation
3 James P. Farwell, Power and Persuasion: The Art of Strategic Communication (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown Univer-
sity Press, 2012), pp. xviii-xix.
4 Neville Bolt and Leonie Haiden, Improving NATO Strategic Communications Terminology (Riga: NATO StratCom
CoE, 2019), p. 46.
5 See: Kingsley Edney, The Globalization of Chinese Propaganda: International Power and Domestic Cohesion (New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2014); Anne-Marie Brady, Magic Weapons: China’s Political Inuence Activities under Xi Jinping
(Wilson Center, 2017).
6 See: Giulio Pugliese and Aurelio Insisa, Sino-Japanese Power Politics: Might, Money and Minds (Culemborg: Palgrave,
2017); J. Michael Cole, The Hard Edge of Shar p Power: Understanding China’s Inuence Operations Abroad (Macdon-
ald-Laurier Institute, 2018); Ross Babbage, Thomas G. Mahnken, and Gillian Evans, Winning Without Fighting:
Chinese and Russian Political Warfare Campaigns and How the West Can Prevail. Volume I (CSBA, 2019); Michael J. Mazarr
et al., Understanding Inuence in the Strategic Competition with China (RAND, 2021).
7 I use the term ‘Party-State’ in this article to describe China as a Leninist political system in which ‘the Party exer-
cises a monopoly of the state and military power to an extent unimaginable in democracies or most authoritarian
states’. See: Steve Tsang, ‘Party-State Realism: A Framework for Understanding China’s Approach to Foreign
Policy’, Journal of Contemporary China Volume 29, No 122 (2019): 305. In the context of this article, the term also
hints at the overlapping party and state identities of Chinese bureaucratic actors involved with propaganda work.
8 Anne-Marie Brady, ‘How “China” Frames “Taiwan”,’ in Taiwan’s Impact on China: Why Soft Power Matters More
than Economic or Political Inputs, ed. Steve Tsang (Palgrave, 2017, ebook edition), p. 24.
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1. Foreord
2. Laity
3. Athuis
4. Insisa
5. Fridman
6. Duell
7. Shapir
8. Shepherd
9. Dobreva
10. Kotze
11. Vuletic
12. Esmond
13. Shapir
only’ [neibu] publications unavailable to the public.9 Despite these
constraints, Chinese scholars advocating the adoption of a strategic
communications mindset among domestic bureaucratic actors, stress its
advantages vis-à-vis other modes of political communication. This type
of ‘constructive’ criticism determined the selection of relevant sources
within the literature. In turn, less emphasis is placed on more divulgatory
scholarship on strategic communications that is primarily concerned with
the exposition of Western, and more specically American, concepts
and practices.
Given these premises, the article is structured in the following way. The
rst section provides an overview of the concept of ‘communication’
within the broader context of China’s evolving conceptualisation and
articulation of its ‘external propaganda’ [duiwai xuanchuan] aimed at
foreign audiences. This section does not aim to present an account of
institutional development within the time frame of this article (late 1980s
to mid-2000s). Rather, it seeks to outline the intellectual background
and the benchmarks necessary to undertake a critical engagement
with Chinese scholarship on strategic communications, especially
regarding terminology. The second and third sections, which constitute
the bulk of this study, review Chinese domestic literature on strategic
communications with the goal of mapping the reception and adaptation
of the concept within the PRC. The second section covers the years
from 2006 to 2013, while the third covers the period from 2013 to
2021. The article continues with a fourth section, in which I investigate
patterns of correlation between the articulation of the Chinese academic
debate on strategic communications since 2013 on the one hand, and
the bureaucratic restructuring of Party-State actors tasked with external
propaganda under the Xi Jinping administration on the other. Given the
opacity of Chinese institutions, this section relies on a diverse body of
works consisting of ‘China-watching’ reports and secondary literature.
Finally, in the conclusion I sum up the ndings of this study and outline
remaining issues and areas of investigation.
9 Daniel C. Lynch, China’s Futures: PRC Elites Debate Economics, Politics, and Foreign Policy (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2015), pp. xi-xii.
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CHINA’S EXTERNAL PROPAGANDA AND ‘EXTERNAL/
INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION’, 1980s-2000s
Since at least the end of the First World War, the term ‘propaganda’,
translated in Mandarin as ‘xuanchuan’, has been popularly understood
in Western societies through a moralist outlook. It is associated with a
mode of political communication featuring one-way information ows,
widespread use of falsehoods and distortions, and malicious intent.10
Western attitudes toward propaganda stand in stark contrast with
China. The Chinese Party-State never disavowed the Leninist heritage
of its own propaganda institutions, which trace their origins to the
period prior to the establishment of the PRC in 1949 and the political
legitimacy of ‘propaganda work’.11 Any attempt to scan the landscape of
China’s inuence activities must start with acknowledging the continuing
centrality of this Leninist paradigm. More broadly, the Party-State’s ability
to adapt to new communication theories, information technologies, and
organisational approaches to maintain its hold on political power since
the era of reform and opening-up began in 1978,12 suggests that Chinese
propaganda cannot be reduced to popular Western perceptions of the
phenomenon. Rather, as Edney notes, propaganda should be primarily
understood as ‘a collection of practices through which the Party-State
exercises power in relation to the public articulation of discourses.’13
This relational understanding of propaganda highlights the differences
between ‘domestic propaganda’ and ‘external propaganda’. The former
can be understood as the exercise of power practices in the tightly
controlled discourse of the PRC. The latter as the exercise of a separate
10 On popular understandings of propaganda in Western societies, see Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castron-
ovo, ‘Introduction: Thirteen Propositions about Propaganda’, in The Oxford Handbook of Pr opaganda Studies, eds.
Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 1-16. On the moralist
framing of propaganda see: John H. Brown, ‘Two Ways of Looking at Propaganda’, CPD Blog, USC Center on
Public Diplomacy, 29 June 2006.
11 On the role of propaganda in the construction of Marxist-Leninist regimes, see: Peter Kenez, The Birth of the
Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization 1917-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). On
CCP propaganda before and after 1949, see: Anne-Marie Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in
the People’s Republic (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleeld, 2003); Timothy Cheek, ‘China’s Directed Public Sphere:
Historical Perspectives on Mao’s Propaganda State’, in Redening Propaganda in Modern China: The Mao Era and Its
Legacies, eds. James Farley and Matthew D. Johnson (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 36-53.
12 Anne-Marie Brady, ‘Guiding Hand: The Role of the CCP Central Propaganda Department in the Current Era’,
Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture Volume 3, No 1 (2006): 58-77.
13 Edney, The Globalization of Chinese Propaganda, p. 8.
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4. Insisa
5. Fridman
6. Duell
7. Shapir
8. Shepherd
9. Dobreva
10. Kotze
11. Vuletic
12. Esmond
13. Shapir
set of power practices within a contested discourse space that has been
shaped by Western perceptions of what is to be considered legitimate
or not. This predicament, namely the historical dominance of Western
norms and standards in the collective understanding of legitimate
modes of state communication, has posed a notable challenge to
Beijing—especially as the country’s interactions with the outside world
and its status in international politics have grown in tandem with its
astonishing economic growth since the late twentieth century. Contrary
to Western states, who—led by American example and the emergence
and development of public diplomacy—have been relatively successful
in distancing their own modes of state-driven political communication
from popular perceptions of propaganda, Beijing has not been able
to chart a similar ‘transition’ out of the Leninist propaganda model.
Political culture, pattern dependency within domestic institutions,
and, above all, the centrality of domestic propaganda practices in the
CCP’s exercise of political power appear as insurmountable obstacles
to this shift.14 As a result, discourse on political communication
targeted at foreign audiences, articulated across Party-State institutions
and Mainland Sinophone academia, has grown increasingly complex,
and at times downright confusing. This is because of a fundamental
internal contradiction: maintaining a Leninist propaganda model while
articulating new modes of political communication that should not be
perceived by foreign audiences as ‘propaganda’.
The concept of ‘external communication’ [duiwai chuanbo], also
described as ‘international communication’ [guoji chuanbo] in later
sources, has played a central role in this endeavour.15 The emergence
of ‘communication’ as a concept both related to and contrasting with
propaganda can be traced back to the second half of the 1980s, when the
Party-State and the scholars in its orbit began to undertake a re-valuation
14 See: Nicholas J. Cull, ‘Roof for a House Divided: How U.S. Propaganda Evolved into Public Diplomacy’, in
The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies, eds. Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013), pp. 131-146.
15 ‘External communication’ and ‘international communication’ are, ultimately, interchangeable terms. The two
adjectives generally convey slightly different nuances: ‘external communication’ focuses on the agency of Chinese
actors, while ‘international communication’ focuses on the two-way dynamic between Chinese actors and interna-
tional audiences. Other terms sometimes used by Chinese scholars, such as ‘media propaganda’ [meiti xuanchuan]
and ‘media diplomacy’ [meiti waijiao] can be associated with external/international communication, even though
they refer to a narrower media-centric dimension of this facet of external propaganda work.
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of China’s external propaganda activities.16 Among the studies published
in this period, a 1988 monograph authored by Duan Liancheng introduced
a contraposition between propaganda and external communication to
mainstream academic debate.17 The former was considered a solipsistic,
boastful, and damaging mode of political communication associated
with the darkest pages of the Cultural Revolution but still present in
the China of the 1980s. The latter was championed as a new alternative
based on communication studies, objective reporting, the establishment
of two-way ows of information, and the ability to adapt content and
channels of communication to different recipients.18 However, in doing
so, Duan also injected a considerable degree of ambiguity into the use
of the term ‘propaganda’ in Chinese discourse. The term was now used
both in a disparaging fashion to indicate outdated and damaging modes
of communication and in a neutral way to refer to the institutional set-up
and set of practices tasked with inuencing foreign audiences.
Throughout most of the 1990s, the nuances and ambiguities exemplied
by Duan’s study appeared in the minutiae of academic debate. In the
aftermath of the international backlash following the June Fourth
Incident, which Ohlberg has painstakingly reconstructed, concerns about
the perception of China’s state-driven political communication aimed at
foreign audiences took the backseat. Emphasis lay on an overhaul of the
external propaganda apparatus and of the strategic logic underpinning it.
In the rst half of the decade, the focus rested on restructuring existing
institutions, with the rise of the Ofce for External Propaganda / State
Council Information Ofce (SCIO) as the main engine of the propaganda
apparatus. As well as on the establishment of new infrastructure for the
dissemination of state-driven information abroad, with the creation and
16 Mareike Ohlberg, Creating a Favorable International Public Opinion Environment: External Propaganda (Duiwai Xu-
anchuan) as a Global Concept with Chinese Characteristics (PhD diss., Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, 2013),
pp. 278-280.
17 On the introduction in Sinophone Mainland Chinese communication studies of the term ‘chuanbo’ as a Man-
darin translation for ‘communication’ see: Jiang Fei, ‘Ruhe zouchu Zhongguo guoji chuanbo de “shizilukou”’
[How To Exit the Crossroads of Chinese International Communication], Guoji chuanbo [Global Communication]
Volume 1, No 1 (2016): 32-33.
18 Duan Liancheng, Duiwai chuanbo xue chutan / How to Help Foreigners Know China (Han-Ying hebianben) [A Prelimi-
nary Exploration of External Communications Studies (Chinese-English Bilingual Edition)] (Beijing: Zhongguo
jianshe chubanshe, 1988). Duan was a former director of the Foreign Languages Publication and Distribution
Ofce—a propaganda unit then under the Ministry of Culture.
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1. Foreord
2. Laity
3. Athuis
4. Insisa
5. Fridman
6. Duell
7. Shapir
8. Shepherd
9. Dobreva
10. Kotze
11. Vuletic
12. Esmond
13. Shapir
reorganisation of state media and the introduction of new practices such
as the institutionalisation of press conferences and the publication of
white papers. Successively, against the backdrop of this renewed media
and institutional infrastructure, the second half of the 1990s saw the
formalisation of a new strategic outlook that interpreted information
as one of the multiple domains of an international competition pitting
China against hostile foreign forces—a domain in which external
propaganda had the fundamental responsibility to create a ‘favourable
international public opinion environment’ that would facilitate China’s
rise.19
The issue of negative foreign perceptions of China’s external propaganda
would only re-emerge by 1999, to then take centre stage in 2003 and 2004,
when the Party-State implemented a comprehensive upgrade of external
propaganda rooted in a starkly realist, zero-sum view of international
politics as a multi-domain struggle for primacy. Against this backdrop,
external propaganda was reconceptualised as a priority task aimed at
sustaining and enhancing the PRC’s ‘comprehensive national power’
[zonghe guoli] against Western hostile forces. Now considered key in
upholding China’s cultural and ideological security, external propaganda
was elevated to the national security level. This conceptual shift, in turn,
explains the major changes affecting the articulation of Chinese external
propaganda throughout the mid-2000s: the implementation, through
massive investments, of a ‘going out’ [zouchuqu] strategy for Chinese
state-controlled media in 2004; the embrace of public diplomacy, with
the creation of a public diplomacy unit within the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs also in 2004 and the launch of the Confucius Institute in 2005; as
well as the ofcial adoption of ‘soft power’ [ruan shili] as a conceptual
tool to shape and scope this mode of political communication in 2007.20
19 Ohlberg, Creating a Favorable International Public Opinion Environment, pp. 297-334. 1997-1998 was a brief excep-
tion to this trend, as the CCP Central Propaganda Department decided to edit the ofcial translation of ‘xuanch-
uan’ from ‘propaganda’ to ‘publicity’ in 1997, a decision that would eventually lead the Party organ to change the
translation of its own English moniker to ‘Central Publicity Department’ the following year.
20 Ohlberg, Creating a Favorable International Public Opinion Environment, pp. 334-445. For a state-of-the-art overview
of soft power in China, see: Kingsley Edney, Stanley Rosen, and Ying Zhu, eds., Soft Power with Chinese Characteristics:
China’s Campaign for Hearts and Minds (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020).
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In the aftermath of these profound transformations, the academic
discourse on Chinese propaganda became increasingly fraught by the end
of the decade. Here external propaganda is to be understood, paraphrasing
Edney, as the set of diverse power practices held by the Party-State in the
international information sphere and the institutions and information
infrastructure supporting it. The aforementioned reforms of external
propaganda shaped an academic consensus around the fact that China
had now successfully ‘modernised’ its political communication and
moved away from outdated modes of ‘one-way’ political communication
associated with foreign audiences’ perceptions of ‘propaganda’. The
nature of this shift, however, remained contested, mainly because of
the difculty in placing external communication within this intellectual
construct. Starting with the reforms of state media tasked with external
propaganda in the early 1990s, the concept of external communication
mainly came to dene those media-centric power practices concerned
with the more immediate dimension of information dissemination:
the selection of information, the translation of content from domestic
propaganda and the creation of exclusive content for foreign audiences,
the organisation and management of ad hoc state media deputed to
the dissemination of information abroad, and the measurement of
effectiveness across different foreign audiences.21
Whether or not this specic dimension of China’s external propaganda
had to be considered as a subset of the new public diplomacy remained
subject to debate. Some scholars retroactively gured a three-stage
process in which China’s political communication targeted at foreign
audiences had evolved from the unidirectional propaganda of the
Maoist era to the two-way external communication that characterised
the rst decades of the reform and opening-up period, and nally to
the emergence of a contemporary, all-round public diplomacy.22 While
from a Western perspective the inclusion of state-driven information
21 See: Liu Na, Zhongguo guangbo dianshi duiwai chuanbo li yanjiu [Research on the External Communication Power of
Chinese Broadcasting and Television] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2017).
22 For an overview of the academic debate on communication, public diplomacy, and external propaganda in
China, see: Falk Hartig, Chinese Public Diplomacy: The Rise of the Confucius Institute (Abingdon and New York, 2015),
pp. 68-70.
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2. Laity
3. Athuis
4. Insisa
5. Fridman
6. Duell
7. Shapir
8. Shepherd
9. Dobreva
10. Kotze
11. Vuletic
12. Esmond
13. Shapir
dissemination clashes with perceptions of what constitutes public
diplomacy, these discourses reected a tendency, noted by Bandurski,
to present it as the evolution of China’s external propaganda writ-
large by the second term of the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao administration
(2007-2012).23 Other scholars, however, continued to regard external
communication as a part of external propaganda, and as separate from
the practices of public diplomacy focused on audience engagement. They
either foregrounded the successful transition from one-way propaganda
to two-way international communication, or considered ‘communication’
an ideal standard that was yet to be fully realised.24 It was within this
conceptual landscape, marked by the tension between the perceived need
to uphold a Leninist paradigm of propaganda and widespread concerns
for the reception and credibility of China’s political communication,
that Mainland Chinese scholars and Party-State institutions tasked
with propaganda work began to investigate the emergence of strategic
communications in the US from the late 2000s to the early 2010s.
CHINA DISCOVERS STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS,
2006-2013
The concept of strategic communications rst appeared in mainstream
Chinese academia in an article authored by Shen Suru and published
in July 2006 in the academic journal International Communication [Duiwai
chuanbo]. The article discussed the evolution of the PRC’s political
communication targeted at foreign audiences from outdated propaganda
models to soft-power focused public diplomacy. Shen dened strategic
communications, in a somewhat cumbersome manner, as ‘the promotion
of a set of themes or the implementation of specic government policies
through symbolic and communication activities’. She framed it as one of
three levels of Chinese public diplomacy, alongside ‘reporting’ [baodao]
and the establishment and management of close relations with elite
23 David Bandurski, ‘Public Diplomacy’, in The Decoding China Dictionary, eds. Malin Oud and Katja Drinhausen
(Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, 2021), pp. 46-49.
24 See: Xiaolin Zhang, ‘From ‘External Propaganda’ to ‘International Communication’: China’s Promotion of Soft
Power in the Age of Infor mation and Communication Technologies’, in China’s Information and Communications Tech-
nology Revolution: Social Changes and State Responses, eds. Xiaoling Zhang and Yongnian Zheng (New York: Routledge,
2009), pp. 103-120; Hartig, Chinese Public Diplomacy, pp. 68-70.
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actors and epistemic communities in foreign countries (namely, ‘united
front work’).25 The article remained an isolated case in the Chinese
academic landscape until 2008, when new studies began to appear
following the publication of a series of ofcial documents on strategic
communications issued by US bureaucratic actors: the US Department of
Defense’s (DoD) Quadrennial Defense Review Execution Roadmap for Strategic
Communication published in September 2006, the 2007 amendment of
the DoD Joint Publication 1-02 including for the rst time a denition
of strategic communications, and the US Department of State’s (DoS)
2007 National Strategy for Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication, the
2009 DoD Strategic Communication Joint Integrating Concept, and the 2010
US National Framework for Strategic Communication by the Obama White
House.26
It is possible to identify two main trends in this earliest period
of Chinese scholarship on strategic communications. The rst is,
unsurprisingly, preoccupied with explaining the emergence of a US
approach to strategic communications between the second George W.
Bush administration and the rst Obama administration. The rst three
academic monographs published on the subject in Mainland China
between 2008 and 2014, can each be considered part of this trend.
These studies focused on reconstructing how strategic communications
emerged from communication science, on mapping the evolution
of the bureaucratic and technological infrastructure that enabled
the US to transition from WWII propaganda to Cold War-era public
diplomacy to contemporary strategic communications, and on outlining
the relation between strategic communications and other modes of
US political communications. These include public diplomacy, public
affairs, psychological operations, and ‘international broadcasting’ [guoji
guangbo]—a term used to describe the US government’s inuence over
major international media. Moreover, with an eye on the War on Terror,
these studies presented the pivot to strategic communications as a tool
25 Shen Suru, ‘Kaizhan ‘ruan shili’ yu duiwai chuanbo de yanjiu’ [Developing Research on ‘Soft Power’ and ‘Stra-
tegic Communications’], Duiwai chuanbo [International Communication] No 7 (2006): 24-28.
26 For a review of the emergence of an ofcial literature on strategic communications in the US, see: Christopher
Paul, Strategic Communications: Origins, Concepts and Current Debates (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), pp. 19-20.
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11. Vuletic
12. Esmond
13. Shapir
to protract American dominance in the global information sphere, thus
maintaining its hegemonic status in international politics.27
The second trend in early Chinese scholarship on strategic
communications is an attempt to frame strategic communications in
terms of public diplomacy, soft power, and ‘national image’.28 Thus, Li
Defang described strategic communications as an important aspect of
Chinese public diplomacy, to be used in order to enhance a country’s
soft power.29 Meanwhile, Yu Zhaohui labelled it the centerpiece of an
integrated public diplomacy practice that aims to create an effective
national image to be disseminated on the global stage.30 Even scholars
such as Bi Yantao and Wang Jinling, who avoided reductionist denitions
of strategic communications as some sort of strategic dimension of
public diplomacy, tended to fall within this camp. The two authors
offered a more comprehensive denition of strategic communications,
dening it as a process by which governments or NGOs mobilise and
coordinate resources to transmit information and inuence designated
targets to realise specic strategic interests. Yet some of the goals they
outlined, such as image creation and identity construction,31 do reveal the
continuing dominance of these themes.
Integrating the debate on strategic communications in China in the wider
discourse on public diplomacy, soft power, and national image, also
allowed local scholars to use strategic communications as a conceptual
tool to convey ‘constructive criticism’ of China’s external propaganda.
Yu Zhaohui, for instance, ascribed Beijing’s perceived shortcomings
27 Yu Zhaohui, Zhanlüe chuanbo guanli: Lengzhan hou Meiguo guoji xingxiang goujian yanjiu [Strategic Communication:
An In-Depth Study of US Image-Building in the Post-Cold War Era] (Beijing: Shishi chubanshe, 2008); Bi Yantao
and Wang Jinling, Zhanlüe chuanbo gangyao [Essentials of Strategic Communications] (Beijing: Guojia xingzheng
xueyuan chubanshe, 2011); Li Jian and Zhang Chengyuan, Zhanlüe chuanbo: Meiguo shixian guojia anquan yu junshi
zhanlüe de zhongyao shoudian [Strategic Communications: An Important Means to Implement US National Security
and Military Strategy] (Beijing: Hangkong gongye chubanshe, 2014).
28 On the relation between ‘national image’ and foreign policy behaviour in China, see: Xiaoyu Pu, Rebranding
China: Contested Status Signaling in the Changing Global Order (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).
29 Li Defang, ‘Gonggong waijiao yu Zhongguo r uanshili jianshe’ [Public Diplomacy and the Construction of
China’s Soft Power], Lilun xuexi [Theory Study] No 2 (2008): 58-59.
30 Yu Zhaohui, ‘Zhenghe gonggong waijiao: Guojia xingxiang goujian de zhanlüe goutong xin shijiao’ [Integrated
Public Diplomacy: A New Perspective on the Strategic Communications of the Construction of National Image],
Guoji guancha [International Review] No 1 (2008): 21-28.
31 Bi Yantao and Wang Jinling, ‘Zhanlüe chuanbo chutan’ [A Preliminary Study on Strategic Communications],
Hainan Shifan Daxue xuebao (Shehui kexue ban) [Journal of Hainan Normal University (Social Sciences)] Volume 24,
No 5 (2011): 160-162.
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in constructing an appealing national image abroad and in providing
a ‘correct’ understanding of its policies to foreign audiences to the
absence of strategic communications mechanisms.32 Instead, Wang Yi
and Pang Tong used strategic communications as a tool to criticise the
effectiveness of what they dene as one of the subsets of China’s public
diplomacy: media diplomacy, or external communication. In their eyes
this practice featured bureaucratic actors who put too much emphasis
on ‘propaganda tasks’ [xuanchuan renwu] and neglected the ‘rules of
journalism’ [xinwen guilü], thus affecting China’s persuasiveness and
credibility on the international stage.33
During this rst phase of domestic scholarship on strategic
communications, the tendency to devise the concept as a tool to criticise,
or more precisely, to suggest improvements for Chinese external
propaganda, can also be seen among scholars discussing the propaganda
work of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). As early as the summer of
2008, Fu Changyi used strategic communications as a conceptual tool
to criticise traditional shortcomings of the PLA’s external propaganda
work: literal translation of internal propaganda content into external
propaganda, an inability to ‘zone’ [fenqu] propaganda and obtain a granular
understanding of target audiences to produce tailored communication
activities, as well as a tendency to respond slowly to crises, hampering
the timely dissemination of accurate reports to foreign audiences. More
importantly, against the backdrop of US developments, Fu argued that,
in order to effectively meet the requirements of national strategy, PLA
external propaganda work should be elevated to a strategic position and
incorporated within the overall framework of China’s strategy to develop
international communication.34
32 Yu Zhaohui, ‘9·11 hou Meiguo Zhong-Dong zhanlüe chuanbo guanli yanjiu’ [A Research on the US Manage-
ment of Strategic Communications in the Middle East after 9/11], Alabo shijie [Arab World], 44.
33 Wang Yi and Pang Tong, ‘Qianxi wo guo meiti waixuan gongzuo de zhuanxing zhi lu’ [A Preliminary Analysis
of the Avenues of Transformation for the External Propaganda Work of Our Country’s Media], Wenhua yu chuanbo
[Culture & Communication] Volume 2, No 5 (2013): 14-17.
34 Fu Changyi, ‘Mei jun zhanlüe chuanbo de tedian ji dui wo jun duiwai xuanchuan gongzuo de qishi’ [Charac-
teristics of the US Armed Forces’ Strategic Communications and Lessons for the External Propaganda of Our
Armed Forces], Xi’an Zhengzhi Xueyuan xuebao [Journal of the Xi’an Politics Institute of PLA] Volume 21, No 4
(2008): 40-43.
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1. Foreord
2. Laity
3. Athuis
4. Insisa
5. Fridman
6. Duell
7. Shapir
8. Shepherd
9. Dobreva
10. Kotze
11. Vuletic
12. Esmond
13. Shapir
Fu’s views were echoed later in 2011 by Li Mingfu, who also portrayed
strategic communications as a criterion to improve the effectiveness
of PLA external propaganda work. Li was the rst scholar to provide
a concrete example of the PLA’s ineffective external propaganda that
could have beneted from a strategic communications approach: the
2001 Hainan Island spy plane incident involving the US.35 Also in 2011,
Wei Chao re-examined the nexus between PLA external propaganda and
strategic communications, focusing more directly on Western media’s
perceived capacity to monopolise the global information environment
through agenda setting and thus to project their ‘China threat theory’.
Wei suggested to bridge this gap by maximising ‘source control’ [xinyuan
kongzhi] in the dissemination of the PLA’s external communication
to Western media, and by simultaneously enhancing engagement with
the foreign public. In a rather puzzling move, Wei also argued in favour
of donating ‘propaganda materials’ as a possible tool of strategic
communications targeting the foreign public.36 Similarly, Wang Jianjun
highlighted three proposals for PLA strategic communications: the
‘optimisation’ of the various organs tasked with the ‘management of
military information’; the simplication of censorship procedures to
speed up information dissemination; and a deeper engagement with
foreign media. These proposals were later echoed by Xiao, Liu, and
Zhang’s call for strengthening military-civilian cooperation, establishing
a cross-agency information sharing platform, and strengthening
oversight on intelligence acquisition, resource allocation, and stafng.37
A further insight can be drawn from these studies: contrary to scholars
focusing on China’s international relations, scholars working in the
orbit of the PLA were not particularly worried about dening the
35 Li Mingfu, ‘Mei jun xingiang zhanlüe chuanbo de neihan tedian jiqi qishi’ [The Essential Features of the US
Armed Forces’ Strategic Communications – and Insights on Them], Guofang keji [National Defense Science &
Technology] Volume 268, No 3 (2011): 85-88. On the inter national and domestic impact of the 2001 US spy plane
incident see: Peter Hayes Gries, China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics and Diplomacy (Berkeley, CA and London:
University of California Press, 2004), pp. 108-109.
36 Wei Chao, ‘Zhongguo jundui de duiwai xuanchuan yu zhanlüe chuanbo’ [The External Propaganda of China’s
Armed Forces and Strategic Communications], Duiwai chuanbo [International Communications], No 8 (2011): 9-10.
37 Wang Jianjun, ‘Linian zhuanbian: Wo jun guoji xingxiang jiangou de xianshi yaoqiu’ [A Conceptual Shift:
Pragmatic Requirements to the Construction of Our Armed Forces’ International Image], Junshi jizhe [Military
Correspondent] No 2 (2012): 42-43; Xiao Liuwei, Liu Yan and Zhang Zongbo, ‘Mei jun zhanlüe chuanbo fazhan
tedian ji qishi’ [Developing Features of the US Armed Forces’ Strategic Communications and Their Implications],
Guofang keji [National Defense Technology and Science] Volume 35, No 4 (2014): 28-32.
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Chinese Armed Forces information activities as ‘propaganda’. Bypassing
ambiguities in distinguishing between external propaganda as a set of
power practices, and external propaganda as a discrete mode of political
communications supposedly superseded by either public diplomacy
or international communications, these scholars tended to interpret
strategic communications simply as a cipher for better propaganda work.
STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS IN THE XI ERA, 2013-2021
A qualitative shift in Chinese scholarship on strategic communications
emerged from 2014. Critiques of China’s external propaganda based on
strategic communications, as well as proposals for adopting mechanisms
and a mindset based on it, assumed a more sophisticated and concrete
character. Four speeches delivered by the Chinese leader Xi Jinping in
the second half of 2013 can be retroactively singled out as signaling a
top-down shift in the direction of the country’s external propaganda.
This shift, in turn, led to new developments in the research agenda on
strategic communications.
The rst was Xi’s announcement of what would eventually morph into
the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) during an ofcial visit to Kazakhstan
in September 2013.38 The BRI is still an evolving project as it approaches
its second decade. Despite enduring international backlash and obstacles,
the BRI has become a tangible example of Beijing’s ambitions to expand
its geo-economic footprint across and beyond Eurasia, and a key driver
in promoting an alternative model of international governance to the
Western paradigm.39 The second was a speech given by Xi in October
of the same year at the Peripheral Diplomacy Work Conference. For
the rst time the Chinese leader signaled a shift away from the Denghist
credo ‘hide one’s capabilities and bide one’s time’ [taoguang yanghui],
and the arrival of a new era for Chinese diplomacy in which Beijing
38 ‘President Xi Jinping Delivers Important Speech and Proposes to Build a Silk Road Economic Belt with Central
Asian Countries’, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, 7 September 2013.
39 Within the sizeable literature on the BRI, the most comprehensive analysis of its geo-strategic rationale is
arguably: Nadège Rolland, China’s Eurasian Century: Political and Strategic Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative (Se-
attle: National Bureau Research, 2017). On inuence projection in the context of the BRI, see: Nadège Rolland,
‘Mapping the Footprint of Belt and Road Inuence Operations’, Sinopsis, 8 December 2019.
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1. Foreord
2. Laity
3. Athuis
4. Insisa
5. Fridman
6. Duell
7. Shapir
8. Shepherd
9. Dobreva
10. Kotze
11. Vuletic
12. Esmond
13. Shapir
would ‘strive for achievements’ [fenfa youwei].40 Finally, the third and
fourth were two speeches that Xi delivered in August, for the annual
National Propaganda and Thought Work Conference, and in December,
during the twelfth group study session of the 18th Politburo of the CCP.
These two speeches grounded the Party-State propaganda work in the
new, emerging direction of China’s engagement with the outside world.
At the August conference Xi asked to innovate ideas and methods in
propaganda and ‘thought work’,41 while later in December he called for
permeating every aspect of the country’s external communication with
contemporary Chinese values and expanding its platforms and vehicles.42
The rst discernible pattern in assessing how directives asking
for a more proactive external propaganda have ltered down into
Chinese scholarship, concerns the conceptualisation of strategic
communications. As seen in the previous section, with the exception of
PLA environments, during the Hu-Wen administration Chinese scholars
had primarily understood strategic communication as a dimension of
public diplomacy. Since 2014, however, the main framework grounding
strategic communications in the broader debate on external propaganda
has become that of external communication. Several scholars have
framed this shift as a course reversal in relations between China and
the international public opinion environment. If in the past China had
tried to t within a ‘discourse system’ shaped by the West, now the
Party-State had the opportunity, through strategic communications, to
successfully project its own values onto the international public opinion
40 ‘Xi Jinping zai zhoubian waijiao gongzuo zuotan hui shang fabiao zhongyao jianghua’ [Xi Jinping Delivered
an Important Speech at the Work Conference on Peripheral Diplomacy], Xinhua, 25 October 2013. For a detailed
analysis of this speech, see: Michael D. Swaine, ‘Chinese Views and Commentaries on Periphery Diplomacy’,
China Leadership Monitor, No 44 (2013): 1-43. Further evidence that 2013 was a key year in the reconceptualisation
of China’s foreign policy behavior and objectives can be found in: Bonnie S. Glaser and Alice Szalwinski, ‘Major
Country Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics’, China Brief Volume 13, No 16 (2013): 9-12.
41 ‘Xi Jinping zai quan guo xuanchuan sixiang gongzuo huiyi shang qiangdiao xionghuai daju bawo dashi zhuoy-
an dashi nuli ba xuanchuan sixiang gongzuo zuo de geng hao’ [Xi Jinping Stressed the Importance of Keeping
the Larger Picture in Mind, Grasping General Trends, Looking Towards Great Matters, Doing Propaganda and
Thought Work Even Better at the National Propaganda and Thought Work Conference], Gongchandang yuan wang
[Website of the Members of the CCP], 21 August 2013.
42 ‘Xi Jinping zai Zhong-Gong Zhongyang Zhengzhi Ju di shi’er ci jiti xuexi shi qiangdiao jianshe shehuizhuyi
wenhua qiangguo zhuoli, tigao guojia wenhua ruan shili’ [Xi Jinping Stressed the Importance of Building a So-
cialist Culture to Strengthen the Country and of Putting Further Efforts into Improving National Cultural Soft
Power During the Twelfth Group Study Session of the CCP’s Politburo], Gongchandangyuan wang [Website of the
Members of the CCP], 31 December 2013.
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environment. Shi Anbin and Wang Xi, for instance, advocated a shift
toward strategic communications and away from what they perceived as
external propaganda driven by Realpolitik calculations. For them strategic
communications offers a powerful and appealing alternative, based on
the symbiosis of traditional and socialist moral values encapsulated in
the ‘Chinese Dream’.43
Similarly, Wang Weijia argued that China’s attempt to embed its external
communication within a Western-dominated global media market since
the 1990s to ‘tell the China story well’ [jianghao Zhongguo gushi],
had only resulted in a situation where ‘nobody listens to’ and ‘nobody
believes in’ [shuo le mei ren ting, ting le mei ren xin] China. However,
as the balance of power in international politics changes, Beijing is on
the threshold of acquiring capacities that will allow it to achieve ‘cultural
autonomy’ and escape from its subaltern position in the global public
opinion environment. Moreover, Wang argued, because of this shift in
the international balance of power, an ofcial strategic communications
organ is bound to emerge as a consequence of the centripetal bureaucratic
process in the Party-State that will proceed in lockstep with the
expansion of the country’s capabilities. According to Wang, in a future
where boundaries between national security, social governance, and
propaganda management will eventually blur, strategic communications
mechanisms responding directly to the central leadership will emerge
from the seamless integration of ‘economic work, diplomatic work, and
national security work’ [jingji gongzuo, waijiao gongzuo, guojia anquan
gongzuo].44
More broadly, Wang Weijia’s article is an example of how strategic
communications has become a topic that allows scholars to insert
themselves into wider conversations on the future direction of China’s
external propaganda, at a time when the Party-State leadership has
43 Shi Anbin and Wang Xi, ‘Cong ‘xianshi zhengzhi’ dao ‘guannian zhengzhi’: Lun guojia zhanlüe chuanbo de
daoyi ganzhao li’ [From Realpolitik to Noopolitik: On the Moral Appeal of National Strategic Communications],
Xueshu qianyan [Frontiers] No 12 (2014): 16-25.
44 Wang Weijia, ‘Zhong guo duiwai chuanbo huayu tixi mianlin de shishi yu tiaozhan’ [The Current Scenario and
Challenges Facing China’s External Communication Discourse System], Guojia Xingzheng Xueyuan xuebao [Journal
of Chinese Academy of Governance] No 3 (2017): 10-14.
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1. Foreord
2. Laity
3. Athuis
4. Insisa
5. Fridman
6. Duell
7. Shapir
8. Shepherd
9. Dobreva
10. Kotze
11. Vuletic
12. Esmond
13. Shapir
reafrmed a hands-on approach. This predicament explains the
proliferation of denitions of ‘national strategic communications’
[guojia zhanlüe chuanbo] that emphasise the centrality of state actors
and international communication in recent years. Wang Fang, for
instance, has dened strategic communications as a ‘communication
behaviour’ and a ‘strategic viewpoint’ that is state-centric and guided by
national interest, that aims at seeking support within the international
community and at winning over the ‘right to speak’ [huayu zhudong
quan], that is based on rules and systematic planning, that is articulated
through mass media and other channels of communication, and that is
targeted at both specic countries and at the international community.45
Jiang Fei has portrayed it, instead, as an evolution of international
communication from an original model of cross-cultural communication
in which the main actors were NGOs and individuals, to a new type of
communication guided by political and military interest-groups.46 Finally,
Zhu Yubo labelled it an ‘institutionalized and systematized propaganda
activity led by the state to serve a nation’s strategic interests and goals.’47
From this perspective, even Zhao Qizheng’s questionable claim that Mao
Zedong’s 1938 work On Protracted War represents an avant-la-lettre case
of strategic communications that proves how Chinese statesmen have
long mastered this art, could be interpreted as an attempt to enhance the
appeal and the legitimacy of the concept.48
A second, more intriguing pattern in recent Chinese scholarship
concerns the proliferation of suggestions and proposals to enable
‘national strategic communications’ within the Chinese Party-State. One
facet of this scholarship is concerned with the managerial dimension of
state media—a trend that further proves how, since the beginning of the
45 Wang Fang, ‘Guojia zhanlüe chuanbo kuangjia yu huayu tixi goujian yanjiu’ [A Research on the Construction of
a National Strategic Communications Framework and Discourse System], Guangxi shehui kexue [Social Sciences in
Guangxi], 262 (2017): 143-147. On the Chinese concept of ‘right to speak’, a term also translatable as ‘discourse
power’, see: Kejin Zhao, ‘China’s Rise and Its Discursive Power Strategy’, Chinese Political Science Review Volume 1,
No 3 (2016): 539-564.
46 Jiang, ‘Ruhe zouchu Zhongguo guoji chuanbo de “shizilukou”’.
47 Zhu Yubo, ‘Fanyi de zhanlüe chuanbo guan - Yi “Zhongguo guanjian ci” xiangmu wei li’ [A Strategic Com-
munications View of Translation Through the “Chinese Keywords” Project Case Study], Dangdai waiyu yanjiu
[Contemporary Foreign Languages Studies] No 2 (2020): 111-118.
48 Zhao Qizheng, ‘Tisheng dui ‘zhanlüe chuanbo’ de renshi he shijian’ [Promoting the Knowledge and the Practice
of Strategic Communications], Gonggong waijiao jikan [Public Diplomacy Quarterly] No 3 (2015): 1-5.
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Xi era, strategic communications has been more closely identied with
external communication rather than public diplomacy. Scholars calling
for this type of managerial reform, however, have only provided vague
suggestions for the improvement of external propaganda in state media
—perhaps because it is a sensitive topic in open-access mainstream
scholarship. Cheng Manli and Zhao Liangying focused on the absence
of coordination among propaganda units, on the continuing presence of
ineffective self-reported evaluations to measure effect, and on the lack of
scientic methods to measure outcomes, while arguing in favour of the
establishment of at management, centralised allocation of resources,
merging of units with overlapping responsibilities, and the creation of
a joint workforce.49 The overall picture suggests that in this context
strategic communications can be understood as a conceptual platform
to call for the enactment of ‘better’ propaganda, similar to the earlier
literature that emerged in PLA environments in the second half of the
2000s. It should not be surprising, then, that these studies have resorted
to the same type of stark contraposition between one-way propaganda
and two-way communication that traces back to Duan Liancheng’s work
in the late 1980s. Zhao Liangying and Xu Xiaolin, for instance, have
lamented that China’s ‘international communication has been managed
as if it was propaganda’.50
More importantly, beyond this narrow managerial dimension, Chinese
scholars have made more concrete proposals for the establishment
of new institutional mechanisms for strategic communications within
the Party-State. Zhao Qizheng has suggested the creation of an ad
hoc institution that would include organs tasked with ‘government
diplomacy’, public diplomacy, national security, external propaganda,
49 Cheng Manli, ‘Guoji chuanbo nengli jianshe de xietongxing fenxin’ [A Collaborative Analysis of International
Communication Capacity Building], Dianshi yanjiu [TV Research] Volume 295 (2014): 16-17; Wang Mei, ‘Cong
zhanlüe cengmian wei wo guo guoji chuanbo jianyan xiance: Zhuanfang Beijing Daxue Guojia Zhanlüe Chuanbo
Yanjiuyuan yuanchang Cheng Manli’ [Suggestions for Our Country’s International Communication from a Strate-
gic Level: An Interview with the Director of the National Strategic Communications Institute of Peking Univer-
sity, Cheng Manli], Duiwai chuanbo [International Communications] No 3 (2015): 30-31; Zhao Liangying, ‘Meiguo
de guojia zhanlüe chuanbo tixi jiqi qishi’ [The US Strategic Communications System and the Insights That Can Be
Drawn From It], Xueshu baijia [Academic Debate] No 10 (2015): 11-13.
50 Zhao Liangying and Xu Xiaolin, ‘Jiji goujian Zhongguo guojia zhanlüe chuanbo tixi’ [Actively Building a Chi-
nese National Strategic Communications System], Xueshu baijia [Academic Debate] No 9 (2016): 10-14.
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1. Foreord
2. Laity
3. Athuis
4. Insisa
5. Fridman
6. Duell
7. Shapir
8. Shepherd
9. Dobreva
10. Kotze
11. Vuletic
12. Esmond
13. Shapir
and foreign aid.51 Shi Anbin and Wang Xi have advocated the
launch of interministerial meetings to plan the country’s strategic
communications on major foreign policy issues and initiatives, and the
establishment of a strategic communications mechanism within the
Central National Security Commission formed in November 2013.52
The most comprehensive proposal, however, has been advanced by
Zhao Liangying in his 2017 monograph. Zhao’s proposal opens with a
scathing assessment of the bureaucratic infrastructure of the Party-State
international communication, described as a sprawling ensemble of units
unable to coordinate effectively amongst each other. This, according to
Zhao, means that the country’s communication capabilities are unable
to keep pace with the country’s rising status in global politics. To solve
this impasse, he advocates the creation of a strategic communications
system within the Party-State bureaucratic machine, that would adapt US
mechanisms to the Chinese political system.53
Here it is necessary to consider the layered meaning of the term ‘system’
in the Party-State bureaucracy, which translates to two different terms
in Mandarin: ‘xitong’ and ‘tixi’. As Engstrom explains, a ‘xitong’-system
is ‘a discrete system that carries out specic functions’. Conversely a
‘tixi’-system is ‘a large integrated system that comprises multiple types
of xitong-systems … and carries out numerous and varied functions.
Specically, a tixi-system denotes either a system of systems or a
system’s system’. To further complicate these denitions, ‘no distinct
or objective conceptual boundary can be drawn between most systems
(xitong) and what constitutes a system of systems (tixi); this is a matter of
perspective.’54 It is worth noting how, from this bureaucratic perspective,
external propaganda can be seen as a ‘tixi’-system that is articulated
across two ‘xitong’-systems, namely ‘foreign affairs’ and ‘propaganda’.55
51 Zhao Q., ‘Tisheng dui “zhanlüe chuanbo” de renshi he shijian’.
52 Shi and Wang, ‘Cong “xianshi zhengzhi” dao “guannian zhengzhi”’.
53 Zhao Liangying, Meiguo guojia zhanlüe chuanbo tixi yanjiu [A Research on the US National Strategic Communica-
tions System] (Wuhan: Wuhan Daxue chubanshe, 2017).
54 Jeffrey Engstrom, System-Confrontation and System Destruction Warfare: How the People’s Liberation Army Seeks to
Wage Modern Warfare (RAND, 2018), pp. 2-3.
55 Ohlberg, Creating a Favorable International Public Opinion Environment, p. 150.
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Thus, Zhao argues that China must establish a new strategic
communications ‘tixi’-system capable of harnessing the external
communication capacities of multiple Party-State organs. At the helm
of this ‘tixi’-system there would be a ‘national strategic communications
leading small group’ [guojia zhanlüe chuanbo lingdao xiaozu] (LSG)
guided by the Party-State leadership and responsible for the overall
design, coordination, promotion, and implementation of China’s
strategic communications.56 The LSG would include the heads of a
variety of Party-State organs: propaganda, diplomacy, national defence,
national security, commerce, culture, tourism, folk religions, united front,
Macao, Hong Kong and Taiwan affairs, but also major companies and
media organisations. A ‘national strategic communications centre’ would
then be established under the supervision of the LSG, headed by a gure
with a specic prole: versed in both Chinese and Western cultures, and
possessing a profound knowledge of communication strategies, national
strategy, and the ‘diplomatic arts’. Dedicated ofces answering directly
to the centre would then be established in all relevant departments,
creating the key nexus for the articulation of strategic communications.57
As a ‘tixi’-system, strategic communications would rely on four ‘xitong’-
systems, reecting the diverse responsibilities of the Party-State organs
involved: public diplomacy, online public opinion, media propaganda,
and national defence communication.58
A third pattern that has emerged in the scholarship concerns the
application of strategic communications. Bi Yantao and Yin Juanjuan
have discussed the use of strategic communications on social media as a
tool for Chinese border governance against extremists.59 Bi Yantao, this
time together with Lin Xinyan, has presented strategic communications
56 LSGs are ‘coordinating bodies that address important policy areas that involve several different (and occa-
sionally competing) parts of the bureaucracy’. Since the beginning of the Xi administration, the number and
scope of LSGs has expanded dramatically, becoming key vehicles in the centralisation of power conducted by
the Chinese leader. See: Christopher K. Johnson and Scott Kennedy, ‘Xi’s Signature Governance Innovation: The
Rise of Leading Small Groups’, CSIS, 17 October 2017.
57 Zhao L., Meiguo guojia zhanlüe chuanbo tixi yanjiu, pp. 259-260.
58 Ibid., pp. 263-274.
59 Bi Yantao and Yin Juanjuan, ‘Xin meiti, zhanlüe chuanbo yu bianjiang zhili’ [New Media, Strategic Commu-
nications, and Frontier Governance], Yichun Xueyuan xuebao [Journal of Yichun College] Volume 36, No 5 (2014):
64-67.
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2. Laity
3. Athuis
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5. Fridman
6. Duell
7. Shapir
8. Shepherd
9. Dobreva
10. Kotze
11. Vuletic
12. Esmond
13. Shapir
as a tool to soften the backlash experienced by the BRI. 60 Similarly, He
Hui has suggested a concerted strategic communications approach to
respond to the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration over the South
China Sea that ruled in favour of the Philippines and which Beijing
has not recognised. Once again, it is difcult to consider strategic
communications in these studies as little more than a cipher for a more
effective but fundamentally traditional form of propaganda. Bi and Lin
reduce strategic communications, in the context of the BRI, to achieving
a more granular understanding of target audiences and focusing on
contrasting Western readings of the geopolitical signicance of the
project.61 Instead, He Hui’s understanding foregrounds timely responses
and the integration of different channels of communications such as
news, advertising, public relations, peer-to-peer personal communication,
book distribution, movies and TV promotions, and other communication
methods and forms, to convey China’s policies and positions on territorial
disputes such as the one concerning the South China Sea.62
Other studies, however, show a more sophisticated understanding of
the challenges and opportunities that come with embracing the strategic
communications paradigm. An article published in 2017 by Kou
Liyan provides a concrete picture of strategic communications as an
inherently dynamic process that exists at the juncture between long-term
strategic objectives and the need to adapt a state’s communication to
an everchanging international scenario. Kou uses the rise to power of
President Trump and his administration’s ‘America First’ foreign policy as
a case study. Against this backdrop, Kou uses strategic communications
as a tool to criticise the Chinese tendency to rely on macro-level and
abstract concepts in its political communication. Although, the solution
the author proposes to counter backlashes against China and the BRI—
to provide relatable stories that emphasise the contraposition between a
supposedly inspirational ‘Oriental collective struggle’ against a ‘Western
60 Bi Yantao and Lin Xinyan, ‘Zhanlüe chuanbo shijiao xia de “Yidai-yilu”’ [The Belt and Road Initiative from a
Strategic Communications Perspective], Gonggong waijiao jikan [Public Diplomacy Quarterly], No 1 (2016): 73-79.
61 Bi and Lin, ‘Zhanlüe chuanbo shijiao xia de “Yidai-yilu”’.
62 He Hui, ‘Jiaqiang Nanhai zhuquan guishu Zhongguo de zhanlüe chuanbo’ [Strengthening Strategic Commu-
nications over China’s Sovereignty on the South China Sea], Duiwai chuanbo [International Communication] No 11
(2016): 26-27.
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individual struggle’—fall under those same trappings.63 Another example
of a scholarly piece showing an acute understanding of key traits of
the Western strategic communications paradigm is a recent article by
Xu Meng on the COVID-19 pandemic. As in the case of Kou’s article,
Xu emphasises the saliency of strategic communications in situations
where a long-term strategic objective, such as the construction of a
national image appropriate to China’s economic and political status, is
forced to adapt to the challenges posed by an unexpected crisis, such
as the pandemic. Between the lines of domestic political correctness,
Xu highlights a distinctly Chinese type of strategic communications, one
that is built upon the coordination of domestic propaganda and external
propaganda for a single, paramount, strategic objective: domestic regime
stability.64
It is worth concluding this overview of Chinese scholarship in the Xi
era with an outlier case: the Research Institute of National Strategic
Communications of Peking University, a think tank launched in
November 2014.65 A few months after its creation, a short essay authored
by the Director of the Institute, Professor Cheng Manli, and previously
published in the Guangming Daily (one of the major state newspapers)
was posted on the SCIO website. The essay provided a concise outline
of the emergence of strategic communications in the US, dening it
as a process that is more goal-oriented, more ‘offensive’, and better at
integrating resources than public diplomacy. Cheng presented a three-
stage agenda that, through the integration of communication activities
of state media, public diplomacy actors, national security, and military
intelligence organs, would eventually integrate into a ‘national strategic
communications’ organ tasked with inuencing both domestic and
63 Kou Liyan, ‘Zai “wei-douzheng” zhong kaizhan zhanlüe chuanbo: Telangpu ru zhu baigong dui Zhongguo
zhanlüe chuanbo de yingxiang ji yingdui’ [Developing Strategic Communications in the ‘Micro-Blogging Con-
frontation’: The Impact of Trump’s Arrival in the White House on China’s Strategic Communications and Its
Response], Duiwai chuanbo [International Communication] No 2 (2017): 18-20.
64 Xu Meng, ‘Zhongda tufa shijian zhong guojia xingxiang de zhanlüe chuanbo: Jiyu zhong guo kangií xinguan
feiyan yiqing de sikao’ [National Strategic Communications during Major Emergencies: Insights From China’s
Thinking on Fighting the New Coronavirus Epidemic], Shijiazhuang Xueyuan xuebao [Journal of Shijiazhuang Uni-
versity] Volume 32, No 2 (2021): 102-109.
65 ‘Beijing Daxue jiang chengli Guojia Zhanlue Chuanbo Yanjiuyuan’ [Peking University Will Establish the Re-
search Institute of National Strategic Communications], Renmin wang [Website of the People’s Daily], 19 Novem-
ber 2014.
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1. Foreord
2. Laity
3. Athuis
4. Insisa
5. Fridman
6. Duell
7. Shapir
8. Shepherd
9. Dobreva
10. Kotze
11. Vuletic
12. Esmond
13. Shapir
foreign audiences through ‘manipulation or management’.66 Also in
2015, the Research Institute began to run the ‘China House’ project in
the Pakistani cities of Karachi and Islamabad. Explaining the task of the
project, Cheng described the China Houses as ‘long-term mechanisms
for the “localisation” of popular diplomacy’ that had the mission of
enhancing contacts with Pakistani media and think tanks. Quite candidly,
Cheng explained that the people-to-people contacts driven by an NGO
such as the Institute could avoid ‘the strong avor of propaganda’
[qianglie de xuanchuan secai] that comes with ofcial diplomacy, and
could help Beijing reach a deeper level than government institutions in
establishing those ‘people-to-people bonds’ critical to the success of the
BRI in Pakistan—one of the geostrategic junctions of the project.67 The
publication on the website of the SCIO, and especially the China House
project in Pakistan, suggest that Cheng Manli and her Research Institute,
at least for a short period of time, enjoyed a degree of interaction
and even coordination with Chinese Party-State actors, setting them
apart from other Chinese scholars and the other centres on strategic
communications that appeared in the PRC throughout the 2010s.68 Yet,
as of late 2021, the Research Institute does not have a dedicated webpage
on the website of Peking University, and no recent reports or studies
associated with the institute are accessible to the public. Similarly, no
trace of the ‘China House’ project appears online, suggesting the project
was rapidly folded after its launch. At the moment the Research Institute
seems to be simply a ‘nameplate’ for Professor Cheng Manli. It remains
to be seen whether it will be relaunched after Xi’s call for establishing a
strategic communications system.
66 Cheng Manli, ‘Guojia guoji chuanbo nengli jianshe xuyao yongyou zhanlüe shiye’ [The Construction of Nation-
al International-Communication Capacities Requires the Possession of a Strategic Vision], State Council Informa-
tion Ofce of the People’s Republic of China, 21 July 2015.
67 Cheng Manli, ‘Tansuo minjian waijiao xin moshi: Beida Guojia Zhanlüe Chuanbo Yanjiuyuan zai Bajisitan de
shijian’ [Exploring a New Model of Popular Diplomacy: The Activity of the Peking University’s National Strategic
Communications Institute in Pakistan], Guoji chuanbo [Global Communication] No 1 (2016): 82-86.
68 At least nine strategic communications research institutions within Mainland Chinese universities were estab-
lished between 2010 and 2017. See: Yang Qifei and Chen Hong, ‘Zhongguo zhanlüe chuanbo yanjiu kuangjia yu
huayu tixi goujian’ [The Research Framework and Discourse System Construction of China’s Strategic Communi-
cations], Xueshu shalong [Academic Salon] No 2 (2019): 206.
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STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS AND
EXTERNAL PROPAGANDA IN THE XI ERA
Scholars scrutinising the Chinese Party-State have highlighted how the
gradual emergence of a ‘total national security concept’ [zongti guojia
anquan guan] during the rst term of the Xi administration (2013-
2018) has driven a comprehensive, centripetal process of bureaucratic
restructuring affecting virtually all the actors involved in the production
of what could broadly be dened as external propaganda.69 Because of
the blurring of boundaries between the internal and external dimensions
of national security, the separation between internal and external
propaganda has lost salience in the face of a new paradigm prioritising
centralisation, coordination, and proactiveness, leading to a wave of
bureaucratic restructurings.
The rst and arguably most signicant restructuring, though never
directly acknowledged by state media, was the absorption of the leading
organ tasked with external propaganda, the CCP Ofce for External
Propaganda (better known by what became its ‘governmental nameplate’
SCIO), within the CCP Central Propaganda Department (CPD) in
2014.70 A similar pattern can be seen in the PLA reforms enacted in
2016, in which the General Political Department, the organ which had
been responsible for PLA external propaganda, was incorporated into the
newly established Political Work Department of the CCP Central Military
Commission (CMC).71 The establishment of the Central United Front
Work Small Leading Group in 2015 and comprehensive restructuring
of tasks and bureaucratic organisation of the CCP United Front Work
Department that followed, can also be considered steps in this process.
Especially if we consider ‘united front work’ targeted at overseas Chinese
communities, foreign businesses, and political elites as one of the facets
69 Matthew D. Johnson, ‘Safeguarding Socialism: The Origins, Evolution and Expansion of China’s Total Security
Paradigm’, Sinopsis, 16 June 2020.
70 Jichang Lulu, Filip Jirouš and Rachel Lee, ‘Xi’s Centralisation of External Propaganda SCIO and the Central
Propaganda Department’, Sinopsis, 25 January 2021, p. 8.
71 On post-2016 reforms: Joel Wuthnow and Philip C. Saunders, ‘Chairman Xi Remakes the PLA’, in Chairman
Xi Remakes the PLA: Assessing Chinese Military Reforms, eds. Philip C. Saunders et al. (Washington, D.C.: National
Defense University Press, 2019), pp. 1-42.
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1. Foreord
2. Laity
3. Athuis
4. Insisa
5. Fridman
6. Duell
7. Shapir
8. Shepherd
9. Dobreva
10. Kotze
11. Vuletic
12. Esmond
13. Shapir
of external propaganda, here understood in its broader meaning as the
exercise of power through practices of discourse-control in a contested
international environment.72 The process of comprehensive bureaucratic
restructuring continued in the following years as the CPD, by assuming
the unied supervision over ‘news and publishing work’ [xinwen chuban
gongzuo] in 2018,73 became the supervising organ of the Central Radio
and Television Network, a new unit that absorbed state media tasked
with external propaganda74: China Global Television Network, China
National Radio, and China Radio International.
The political and organisational concerns motivating these developments
can all be associated with a strategic communications paradigm. This
notwithstanding, the opacity of both the Chinese political system and,
by virtue of the parallel ‘neibu’ [internal circulation only] circuit of
publication, the relationship between the academic community and the
Party-State, prevents any meaningful attempt to unearth a causal nexus
between research on strategic communications and the bureaucratic
restructurings enforced between 2014 and 2018. While it is safe to
assume that the PLA and the Ministry of National Defense had been
closely monitoring the development of US strategic communications
doctrine since the mid-2000s,75 there is not enough evidence to identify
an institutional embrace of strategic communications throughout the
2010s. In light of this, I argue that the causal link should be reversed.
Growing interest in strategic communications in Chinese academia in
recent years should be understood as a reection of the Xi administration’s
concerns for increasing bureaucratic centralisation, coordination, and
proactiveness of the Chinese external propaganda machine. Concerns
72 Alex Joske, ‘The Central United Front Work Leading Small Group: Institutionalising United Front Work’,
Sinopsis, 23 July 2019.
73 ‘Zhong-Gong Zhongyang yinfa “shenhua dang he guojia jigou gaige fang’an”’ [The CCP Central Committee
Issued the ‘Program for the Deepening Reform of Party and Government Organs’], Xinhua, 21 March 2018.
74 Here to be understood in the immediate, media-centric dimension of external communication. David Bandur-
ski, ‘When Reforms Means Tighter Control’, China Media Project, 22 March 2018.
75 Tangential evidence of the Party-State’s knowledge of strategic communications is given by a Chinese scholar’s
account of their participation in an ‘advanced training course’ [gaoji peixunban] in ‘international strategic commu-
nications’ [guoji zhanlüe chuanbo] organised by the Foreign Affairs Ofce of the Ministry of National Defense
in March 2010. See: Jin Chuan, ‘Zai ying wai renwu zhong zhanxian Zhongguo jundui xingxiang: Canjia guoji
zhanlüe chuanbo gaoji peixunban de sikao yu tihui’ [Showing the Image of China’s Army When Welcoming For-
eign Visiting Deployments: Reections on Participating in an Advanced Training Course in International Strategic
Communications], Duiwai chuanbo [International Communications] No 8 (2010): 21-22.
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which had been made explicit in the speeches delivered by Xi in the
second half of 2013, examined in the previous section. The best
evidence supporting this argument is the shift in the conceptualisation
of strategic communications that occurred between the Hu-Wen era and
the Xi era. While the earliest scholarship on strategic communications
attempted to provide an indigenous framework centered on public
diplomacy, by the mid-2010s strategic communications was framed in
terms of external communication, reecting the Party-State leadership’s
change of priorities. Further patterns that can be identied in this body
of work, namely growing attention given to the bureaucratic organisation
of strategic communications and the application of related practices to
face crises and challenges in China’s foreign policy, strengthen this claim.
There still are, however, lingering questions regarding the timing of
Xi’s call for building a strategic communications ‘tixi’-system with
Chinese characteristics. What does this announcement mean for future
conceptualisation and articulation of strategic communications? That is
assuming that the term will not happen to be a hapax legomenon in the CCP
vocabulary given the authoritative nature of the source. In short: why
did Xi announce the construction of a strategic communications system
in May 2021, and not earlier? After all, the shift in Beijing’s posture in
international politics and an open willingness to reshape global norms and
values around domestic standards predates these developments, tracing
back to the earliest years of the Xi administration.76 My argument is that
the two major events that have prompted a renewed sense of urgency for
upgrading China’s international communication capabilities, were indeed
the core themes of his May 2021 speech.77 The rst is the COVID-19
pandemic. Recent scholarly pieces have emphasised China’s efforts to
counter international backlash, tout its extraordinary success in public
health management, and, since the earliest stages of the pandemic, shape
76 Mareike Ohlberg, ‘Boosting the Party’s Voice: China’s Quest for Global Ideological Dominance’, MERICS
China Monitor, 21 July 2016.
77 ‘Xi Jinping zai Zhong-Gong Zhongyang Zhengzhi Ju di sanshi ci jiti xuexi shi qiangdiao jiaqiang he gaijin guoji
chuanbo gongzuo zhanshi zhenshi liti quanmian de Zhongguo.’
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1. Foreord
2. Laity
3. Athuis
4. Insisa
5. Fridman
6. Duell
7. Shapir
8. Shepherd
9. Dobreva
10. Kotze
11. Vuletic
12. Esmond
13. Shapir
public health paths out of the crisis at a global level.78 As early as February
2020, Xi stressed the need to strengthen ‘integrated communication’
and control public opinion at home, while also seizing the initiative and
effectively inuencing international public opinion.79 The second is the
perception of an acceleration in the decline of the US in the aftermath
of racial protests in the summer of 2020, the mismanagement of the
COVID-19 pandemic under the Trump administration, and the Capitol
Riot on 6 January 2020.80 In light of this, as of late 2021, we do not
yet know what the construction of a Chinese strategic communications
system will amount to. Will an institutional mechanism be established,
possibly along the lines articulated by Zhao Liangying, that will supervise
an upgrade of international communication as the key facet of the Party-
State external propaganda? Or will it evolve into a ‘discourse’ instead – an
ofcially-sanctioned conceptual platform in the domestic public space to
articulate a continuing process of centralisation, coordination, and pro-
activeness in disseminating the ‘China story’ to the outside world.
CONCLUSION
The study of strategic communications has been a niche topic in the
Chinese academic landscape. Recent developments, however, suggest that
the subject is worthy of attention. One reason is the increasing scholarly
attention in Anglophone academia towards China’s practice of strategic
communications, in lockstep with other regional actors in the Asia-
Pacic.81 A second reason is the announcement of the establishment of a
‘system of strategic communications with Chinese characteristics’ by the
Chinese leader Xi Jinping in May 2021. In the absence of grey literature
78 Nadège Rolland, ‘China’s Pandemic Power Play’, Journal of Democracy 31, No 3 (2020): 25-38; Suisheng Zhao,
‘Rhetoric and Reality of China’s Global Leadership in the Context of COVID-19: Implications for the US-Led
World Order and Liberal Globalization’, Journal of Contemporary China, 2020; Lina Gong, ‘Humanitarian Diplomacy
as an Instrument of China’s Image-Building’, Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, 2021.
79 Xi Jinping, ‘Zai Zhongyang Zhengzhiju changwei hui huiyi yanjiu yingdui xinxing guanzhuang bingdu feiyan
yiqing gongzuo shi de jianghua’ [Speech During a Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the
CPC Addressing the Response to the Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia Epidemic], Qiushi [Seek Theory], 15 Feb-
ruary 2020.
80 On recent developments in Chinese perceptions of the US, see: Jude Blanchette and Seth G. Jones, ‘How Bei-
jing’s Narrative of Strategic Decline Is Leading to Strategic Overcondence’, CSIS, July 2021.
81 Chiyuki Aoi, ‘Japanese Strategic Communication: Its Signicance as a Political Tool’, Defence Strategic Communica-
tions Volume 3 (2017): 71-102; James D.J. Brown, ‘Russian Strategic Communications toward Japan: A More Benign
Model of Inuence?’, Asian Perspective Volume 45, No 3 (2021): 559-586.
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or detailed ofcial statements from which it is possible to discern the
Chinese Party-State’s conception of strategic communications, this study
has mapped Mainland Sinophone scholarship on the subject, from the
introduction of the concept in the domestic academic landscape in the
second half of the 2000s to the period of Xi’s announcement in 2021.
It has then framed this scholarship in the context of the comprehensive
institutional reforms pushed by the Xi administration since 2013.
The key nding of this study is the distinct articulation of strategic
communications in China as a discourse on the effectiveness of the
country’s external propaganda. More precisely, this study has shown
how strategic communications has been used as a conceptual tool to
scope issues related to the perceived credibility decit of a Leninist
propaganda system competing in a global information environment.
Mainland Sinophone scholarship on strategic communications has, as
a result, been concerned with providing a new vocabulary and a new
approach to discuss issues that have long preoccupied propaganda actors
in China: the effectiveness of bureaucratic organisation, the adaptation
to technological developments in the global information domain, the
correct identication of target audiences and the appropriate localisation
of propaganda activities, the relationship with domestic propaganda, and
the measurement of outcomes.
In addition, by examining this body of work, this study has also shed
light on the wider debate over the role of state-driven information
dissemination—dened as ‘external communication’ or ‘international
communication’ in Chinese ofcial and academic parlance—within the
wider set of practices dening external propaganda in the 21st century.
Throughout the second term of the Hu-Wen administration (2008-
2013) this facet of external propaganda was generally subsumed in an
attempt to present Party-State external propaganda mainly through
the frame of public diplomacy. Following the rise to power of the
Xi administration, however, the main frame of reference for external
propaganda appears to have shifted toward external communication.
This change in terminology may appear as evidence of a solipsistic, if
not esoteric, debate to observers on the outside. But, in simpler terms,
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1. Foreord
2. Laity
3. Athuis
4. Insisa
5. Fridman
6. Duell
7. Shapir
8. Shepherd
9. Dobreva
10. Kotze
11. Vuletic
12. Esmond
13. Shapir
it signals an inward shift in focus: from engagement with and adaptation
to foreign audiences, to the challenges for Party-State bureaucratic actors
to craft, organise, and disseminate information, coherent with domestic
propaganda and the requirements of an ever-expanding national security
agenda. More importantly, this shift is the result of a wider and more
consequential change in posture under the Xi administration: Beijing
moved away from an attempt to explain and justify China’s positions and
interests within a Western-dominated international ‘discourse system’ to
launching a bid to reshape said system according to Chinese values and
worldviews.
The scholarship examined in this study has closely followed this
evolution. The early phase focused on the divulgation of US strategic
communications doctrine that emerged during the George W. Bush and
Obama administrations. But by the end of the Hu-Wen administration
the scholarship pivoted to portraying strategic communications as a
‘strategic’ dimension of public diplomacy that could contribute to
enhancing the country’s soft power and construe a more effective ‘national
image’. In the aftermath of Xi’s rise to power, however, scholars began
to produce research on the bureaucratic and managerial dimension of
external communication, putting the coordination of Party-State actors
and media into the spotlight, and devising strategic communications-
focused responses to international crises. This development leads to the
second meaningful nding of this work. Proposals raised in the second
half of the 2010s by Mainland Chinese scholars to update the Party-State
external propaganda apparatus according to a strategic communications
paradigm that privileges coordination and centralisation in fact followed
actual institutional make-overs within the Party-State external propaganda
apparatus that had previously occurred under the radar, tracing back to
between 2014 and 2016.
These ndings, in turn, open two paths for future research on China’s
strategic communications. The rst regarding the relationship between
Party-State bureaucratic actors involved with propaganda work and
the academic community on the Mainland. As this study suggests,
domestic scholarship on propaganda, similar to academic debates on
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China’s international relations, may provide a ‘perceptual parameter’ of
the opinions and thoughts present in the leadership of the country’s
propaganda actors.82 In light of the opacity of Chinese institutions tasked
with propaganda work, examining domestic scholarship may remain, in
the short to medium term, one of the few avenues available to track
developments in this eld. Future access to ‘internal-circulation only’
[neibu] publications may prove particularly useful from this perspective.
A second path of research considers the establishment of a ‘tixi’-system
of strategic communications with Chinese characteristics. The key
questions will be whether this system will result in the emergence of
ad hoc strategic communications organs embedded in the Party-State’s
propaganda apparatus, as Mainland Chinese scholars have proposed,
or whether it will evolve into a more nebulous organisational frame
including pre-existing organs, as the use of the term ‘tixi’ [system of
systems] by Xi himself appears to imply.
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