Could China's Southeast Asia Media Offensive Get Even Better?
From influence operations to media deals, China's ability to learn and adapt may be a better indicator of the future trajectory of its media offensive than evaluations of current performance.
A new book argues that while China’s media offensive in Southeast Asia and the world may have a mixed record thus far, Beijing is likely to quickly and substantially improve its success in the coming years.
Could China's Southeast Asia Media Offensive Get Even Better?
Context
“[S]ome of these messages have an ulterior aim of persuading you to take sides,” Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong warned in the Chinese version of his National Day speech last year in a rare public spotlight on foreign influence operations amid anti-U.S. messaging on the Russia-Ukraine war and instances of Chinese influence campaigns in Southeast Asia’s only Chinese-majority country1. Though this was a notable event, it was just the latest in a series of episodes highlighting China-linked influence and information operations in Southeast Asia, only some of which surfaced publicly — be it media-related aspects of Malaysia’s multi-billion dollar 1MDB scandal or content sharing pacts and exchanges in countries from Thailand to Indonesia2. Some recent studies also note how this focus raises difficult questions about assessing such activities, including definitions, traction measurement relative to overall ties and evaluations of effectiveness that account for the agency of Southeast Asian governments and their populations in their responses3.
A new book by Council on Foreign Relations scholar Joshua Kurlantzick, Beijing’s Global Media Offensive, argues that though China’s influence and information tactics have an uneven record in Southeast Asia as well as globally, they still bear watching because Beijing could get better, faster in the coming years. Kurlantzick goes beyond less helpful aggregate notions of “Chinese influence” to provide examples of how China is deploying tools within its media arsenal that cover nearly all of the countries in Southeast Asia — be it Chinese representatives approaching Indonesian stations to shift funding from U.S.-funded to Chinese state-owned media broadcasts or China’s alleged role in new media outlets that emerged in Cambodia’s landscape. The book’s twelve chapters delve into the history, motives, opportunities, means, successes, failures and effects of China’s efforts, with the final chapter including some recommendations on how to respond (see table below on select key chapters and Southeast Asia examples within them)4.
Southeast Asia Examples in Select Chapters of Beijing’s Global Media Offensive
Analysis
The book helps shine light on the evolving nature of China’s media offensive in Southeast Asia and how it interacts with the context within which it takes shape. For Kurlantzick, China’s media offensive was more contingent than deliberate, and it took shape in regions like Southeast Asia as China learned from its setbacks, grew its power under a more assertive Xi Jinping, capitalized on the troubles faced by democracies and advanced amid broader technological and geopolitical trends. The book also acknowledges that this evolved in a more diverse and messier picture with a wider cast of characters beyond just China — one which will be more recognizable to those familiar with Southeast Asian media environments than the picture of some sort of scary, omniscient Chinese monolith. This includes wealthy businessmen buying up media companies, newspapers republishing Chinese state media content about obscure regional meetings that few global outlets cover, or journalists who find themselves being asked to parrot Chinese foreign ministry talking points on the South China Sea during training programs.
The book also assesses how effective various Chinese tactics are and how they are likely to pan out in the coming years (see table below). Kurlantzick views China’s media offensive as part of the shift from the emphasis on “soft power” in the 1990s and 2000s (which was the basis for his book Charm Offensive5) to a greater focus on and integration with “sharp power” over the past few years — the latter being a term coined in this context in 2017 to describe efforts aimed at distraction or manipulation within the political and information environments of target states6. As such, the effectiveness of China’s leveraging of the combination of soft power and sharp power toolkits, information control and markers of traditional influence is likely to depend on how specific tactics play out, with important implications for Southeast Asian states where they have already taken root as further explored below.
Success of China’s Media Tactics in Southeast Asia
