China’s Global Public Opinion War with the United States and the West
Heidi Holz
August 14, 2024
In recent years, with the intensification of strategic competition between the United States and China, the “battle for the narrative” in the international media landscape has become more heated. But in the push to understand Beijing’s influence efforts, there is a tendency among elements of Washington and the broader China-watching community to focus on specific aspects of China’s activities depending on where they sit in the U.S. system. In some cases, these narrow and often fragmented perspectives have handicapped Washington’s ability to compete with China in the information domain.
Three narrow approaches to analyzing China’s influence efforts stand out as particularly worrisome. The first is an excessive focus on Beijing’s covert influence operations and assessing them in isolation from its broader — and very overt — efforts to shape the perceptions of target audiences. The second is an excessive focus on the latest evolution in Beijing’s social media tactics. The third is an overreliance on digital tools and big data analytics to understand Beijing’s behavior. Although important, these narrowly focused — or “siloed” — examinations of China’s influence efforts can lead to a fragmented response and prevent the implementation of a more coordinated policy approach.
The key to developing informed policy responses to Beijing’s global propaganda efforts — covert, overt, digital, and analog — is to study them in their totality and ground them in an informed understanding of the Chinese Communist Party. This sort of comprehensive analysis can be used to predict China’s behavior, inform U.S. strategic communications planning, and craft messages designed to inoculate audiences against Beijing’s narratives. At present, the United States does not have a single entity tasked and funded to perform this cross-cutting mission. To win the battle for the narrative, the United States should designate and fund an organization with the mission of informing whole-of-government U.S. strategic communications planning in ways that help Washington get ahead of Beijing’s influence operations.
https://warontherocks.com/2024/08/chinas-global-public-opinion-war-with-the-united-states-and-the-west/
