Join our speaker Josh Kurlantzick, senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, and moderator Bay Fang, President of Radio Free Asia, for a community dialogue on the impacts of China's global influence activities.

Since China’s ascendancy toward great power status began in the 1990s, many observers have focused on its economic growth and expanding military power. In contrast, most viewed China’s ability to project “soft power” through its media industries and its sharp power global influence campaigns as quite limited, and its ability to wield influence within the domestic politics of other countries as nonexistent. But as Joshua Kurlantzick shows in his new book Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China's Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World, all of these things have begun to change dramatically.

Kurlantzick will discuss how China is attempting to become a media and information superpower around the world, and also trying to wield traditional forms of influence to shape the domestic politics of other countries. Indeed, China for the first time is actively seeking to insert itself into many other countries’ elections, social media, media, and overall politics, including that of the United States.

He also will trace the ways in which China is increasingly collaborating with Russia in their efforts to become more powerful global influencers via disinformation and other tools. Yet while China has worked hard at becoming a media superpower and to influence other countries' politics and societies, it sometimes has failed to reap gains from its efforts. It has undermined itself with overly assertive, alienating diplomacy and is now broadly unpopular in many countries. Still, Kurlantzick contends, China’s media, information, disinformation, and more traditional influence campaigns will continue to expand and adapt, potentially helping Beijing to wield major influence over other countries’ politics—and to export its models of political and internet control.

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