Beijing’s Global Media Offensive
on April 20, 2023
Joshua Kurlantzick
on April 20, 2023
Joshua Kurlantzick is Senior Fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is the author, most recently, of Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World. Kurlantzick was previously a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he studied Southeast Asian politics and economics and China’s relations with Southeast Asia, including Chinese investment, aid, and diplomacy. Previously, he was a fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy and a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy. He is currently focused on China’s relations with Southeast Asia, and China’s approach to soft and sharp power, including state-backed media and information efforts and other components. He is also working on issues related to the rise of global populism, populism in Asia, and the impact of COVID-19 on illiberal populism and political freedom overall.
Updates to Our Database of Arrests Related to the Hong Kong National Security Law
on April 13, 2023
We updated our suite of graphics tracking the impact of Hong Kong’s National Security Law. It now includes information on the 248 individuals arrested between July 2020, when the law went into effect, and March 31, 2023. Information on these individuals’ cases, compiled by our partners at the Georgetown Center for Asian Law, includes grounds for arrest, and, where applicable, resulting charges and convictions.
In January 2023, police arrested six individuals for selling books about the 2019 protests at a book fair.
10 Years of The North Korea Challenge
A China in the World Podcast
on April 13, 2023
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the China in the World Podcast, Carnegie China is launching a series of lookback episodes, using clips from previous interviews to put current international issues in context. This episode looks back on the past 10 years of China’s relationship with North Korea.
Appeasement at the Cineplex
on April 6, 2023
Although Beijing and Hollywood inhabit political and cultural universes that have little in common, they are similar in one important respect: both have expended vast amounts of energy, time, and capital confecting imaginary universes. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long proselytized for sundry versions of its Maoist/Marxist/Leninist revolution through state-sponsored propaganda campaigns that have even airbrushed large chunks of its unsavory past from the historical record. Hollywood has engaged in its own escapist mythmaking by producing films filled with fantasy and backing them with promotional campaigns irrigated by galaxies of movie stars and inexhaustible reserves of PR and advertising. Both have wantonly employed wishful thinking, mendacity, and deception to create alternate realities that have managed to distract their respective mass audiences from the actual circumstances in which they have been living.
As Macron Arrives in Beijing, What’s Next for Europe and China?
A ChinaFile Conversation
on April 5, 2023
One year after the EU-China Summit of April 2022—famously described as a “dialogue of the deaf” by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell—relations between Europe and China remain tense and further complicated by China’s ongoing stance towards Russia and the war in Ukraine. At the same time, Chinese diplomats continue to float new proposals designed to improve ties with the EU, and European leaders continue to explore opportunities for engagement. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in November right after the 20th Party Congress, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visited last week, and French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Beijing today, accompanied by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Meanwhile, as U.S.-China relations approach new lows, American diplomats continue to lobby their European counterparts to adopt similar perspectives and policies with respect to China’s actions on the global stage. Against this backdrop, heightened by Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Moscow, and as European public opinion towards China turns ever more sour, what is the path forward for European-Chinese relations? Are there likely to be any meaningful differences between European and U.S. approaches to China? And might efforts like those of Scholz and Macron yield any adjustments in China’s own behavior, including but not just limited to its approach to the war in Ukraine?
Giulio Pugliese
on April 3, 2023
Giulio Pugliese is a Lecturer at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford, a Part-Time Professor on EU-Asia Studies at the European University Institute, and Senior Fellow at the Istituto Affari Internazionali. He specializes in the international politics of the Asia-Pacific with a focus on Japan, China, and the United States. He has presented and published on academic, policy-oriented, and commercial themes, including in The Australian Journal of International Affairs, The Asia-Pacific Journal, International Affairs, Pacific Affairs, The Pacific Review, and Defence Strategic Communications. He is a regular contributor to Asia Maior, Italy’s leading journal on contemporary Asian affairs, and co-author of Sino-Japanese Power Politics: Might, Money and Minds (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017, also available in Korean).