---

Maria Repnikova is assistant professor in Global Communication at Georgia State University, a Wilson Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, and the author of the acclaimed book Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism. She was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the Project for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. She speaks fluent Mandarin, Russian and Spanish. What follows is a lightly edited Q&A.

Q: You begin your terrific book Media Politics in China with a quote from Antonio Gramsci, that cultural hegemony is “not…domination by means of force,” but “the organization of consent.” Let’s start here. What does the Chinese Communist Party understand about how to organize consent?

A: Consent-building and cooptation has long been at the heart of CCP rule. We hear a lot about censorship and repression. But the subtleties of cooperation and organization of consent in China are less understood, especially outside of academia. Many Chinese citizens, including businesspeople and other societal groups, willingly support the Chinese Communist Party, and actually in some sense admire and recognize the Party’s successes. This is an uncomfortable reality for outside observers who hope that China will one day become “more like us.” 

In my work on Chinese media, politics, and digital journalism, I have found that the Party-state has sophisticated strategies to garner consent among elite journalists and also the wider public through media channels. Journalists have been invited in subtle ways to partake in the governance process by examining and reporting on political and economic issues in a constructive manner. They’re invited to criticize, but in a specific, solution-oriented way. Many Chinese journalists I’ve interviewed believe they are contributing to governance improvements, especially at the local level. This is an entirely different conception of journalism than in the West, where many journalists see themselves as “watchdogs” who should speak truth to power for its own sake. 

On social media, average citizens can participate in spreading and co-creating propaganda messages that relate to their everyday sentiments and concerns. That’s another way of building consent. In the pandemic, for example, the propaganda narrative is not about the Party winning the war against the virus, but the nation itself. They elevate individual heroes like doctors and delivery workers. The Party builds consent by delegating creation and dissemination of these kinds of stories to average citizens. This effort has been going on for a long time in various forms, but it’s become much more sophisticated in the digital domain. 

There’s clearly an unwritten line of acceptable criticism versus unacceptable criticism. Can you give some examples on both sides of that line?

The line is obviously very-fast shifting. There’s a red zone of issues that have been long viewed as completely unacceptable for discussion online. For instance, criticizing the Party at the highest levels, criticizing Xi Jinping or other central Party leaders, criticizing and/or speculating about succession, opposition political figures or movements, or questioning the idea of China’s territorial integrity, especially when it comes to Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan. 

But many issues that I look at in the book fall into the gray zone of sensitive but semi-permissible domain. For example: corruption, governance, and infrastructure failures at the provincial level and below. Crisis management at various levels of government. Other social issues, like women’s rights and sexual harassment. And China’s specific foreign policies towards various nations, including the United States. 

Some very exciting and topical issues like environmental governance also fall into the gray zone, which means that they can be discussed pretty openly for a certain period of time. As certain crises or events become hugely topical, and millions of people suddenly start discussing them, the Party starts to see them as more sensitive. And, eventually, they get censored. The pandemic is a good example. For a couple of weeks to a month in early 2020, we saw some really exciting and vivid investigative reports and online discussions. You might say that moments of crisis can open up windows of opportunity for discussion in the gray zone. Because the gray zone is pretty wide at any given time, China’s media sphere, especially on social media, is still quite dynamic.

Is this a replicable toolkit for other authoritarians? Say I’m Vladimir Putin, or Kim Jong-un, and I’m thinking about a future where more and more civic life will take place on social media. Could the CCP’s social media techniques provide a model to keep a closer eye on what my population is thinking and perhaps get more popular buy-in for my policies?

That’s an interesting question. It taps into the wider discussion of whether the Chinese authoritarian model is an “exportable” entity. Organization of consent, or “rule by cooperation,” is a feature of all authoritarian regimes. There’s almost always some gray zone, some form of expression that’s somewhat sensitive and critical, but nevertheless tolerated. North Korea is a totalitarian regime, so it is slightly different. But if we think about Russia or Iran, or other semi- or hybrid authoritarian regimes, there is quite a bit of contestation despite repression. I think it would be tough to “export” China’s toolkit, since it involves very sophisticated and large-scale monitoring of public opinion. China mobilizes significant resources into this enterprise. That’s hard to export. Less sophisticated authoritarian regimes may aspire to China as a model, but they may not have the institutional capacity to implement these techniques. 

My view is that China is not ‘exporting’ its model deliberately, and that most other countries could not import a ‘China model’ even if they wanted to.

Much also depends on the nature of state-society relations in a given case. For example, there’s a lot more collaborative and interactive relationship between state and society in China than say, in Russia, which has significant opposition movements, like the one currently led by Alexei Navalny that has no counterpart in China, targeted specifically at Putin himself. State-society dynamics are distinctive in China for other historical and cultural reasons. 

My view is that China is not “exporting” its model deliberately, and that most other countries could not import a “China model” even if they wanted to. The very idea of a “Chinese model” is itself fragmented and hard to pin down. Chinese governance involves a lot of experimentation in policymaking processes. That’s something that Chinese officials and people who train leaders from developing countries in China have told me themselves: there’s no coherent toolkit, no single textbook you could write on “how China governs.” 

For my current research project, I’m looking closely at these training materials. They are more about successful case studies or examples, mostly concerning economic governance versus political ideological governance. In Ethiopia, where I’ve done a lot of my research, there’s a lot of respect for how much China has accomplished, but if you ask Ethiopian officials whether they might adopt a similar form of ideological management or public opinion management in Ethiopia, they say that they don’t really know where to even begin. 

To what extent is this a resource challenge? China has the “50 cent army,” individuals paid to push Party-approved narratives on social narratives. China has censors to review content and remove it quickly if necessary. China has A.I. capabilities that can wipe out any post that uses sensitive or problematic keywords. Let’s say I’m a sufficiently motivated authoritarian who acquires the software and hires a bunch of censors and 50 cent army posters, but I don’t have the cultural or historical qualities that make the CCP unique. What are the chances that I could pull off something similar to what the CCP has done?

It’s a tough question because what happened in China hasn’t happened at the same scale anywhere else. Part of it certainly is a resource challenge. There are simpler or cheaper ways of controlling societies and, in particular, the media. In Russia, for example, the government seems to have found that it’s more cost-effective — tragically, of course, because some journalists get murdered — to just communicate outright to the media community what lines cannot be crossed via occasional signaling. Other countries, like Ethiopia, occasionally just shut down the Internet. So, yes, perhaps if another authoritarian regime had the same resources and know-how it could develop similar control and co-optation mechanisms. 

At the same time, China has this obsession with understanding public opinion, not just squashing it and censoring it. There’s a belief that understanding what people are thinking will help make sure there’s no social unrest. I agree with the argument Elizabeth Perry made in her conversation with you about the Party’s constant adaptation to public sentiments. It’s not just about resources; it’s also about the modes of adaptive governance that empower the CCP’s sophisticated co-optation of public opinion.

You write about how the CCP has been systematic about engaging with citizens online and using metrics to quantify what it is learning in the process. You write, for example, about how the People’s Daily set up an “Online Public Opinion Monitoring Center” that publishes quarterly reports. What metrics does the CCP use to organize and understand public opinion? And what do you think it has learned?

On this subject, I would like to recommend recent writings by my colleague Lianrui Jia at the University of Toronto and Angela Wu at NYU and Rogier Creemers at University of Leiden who explore this specific topic in more detail. 

I think the CCP has two main agendas. One focuses on learning about emerging issues that are perhaps potentially destabilizing, with the goal of containing them. The other focuses on specific governance issues, such as environmental governance. The first we might call preemptive. The other, more technocratic.

What metrics are they using? I think this depends a lot on the issue at hand and the actors involved in doing the monitoring. It is important to note that by now, public opinion monitoring has evolved into a lucrative business. Lianrui finds that the individuals doing this work are becoming professionalized as “public opinion specialists.” In her study, she notes that they are paid a minimum of $1,000 a month, and while there are already over 2 million individuals in this profession, the demand for them is growing. Recent investigations by Jessica Batke and Mareike Ohlberg also reveal how the CCP outsources public opinion monitoring to private companies. This commercialization push means that what kind of data is being collected depends on what government entity is requesting the data and for what specific purpose. 

Also, while the collection of data is massive, its categorization is not always straightforward nor adequate. As Angela Wu writes: “Lacking direct measures for gender, income, ethnicity, citizenship (hukou), these data, despite their abundance, are ‘unfriendly’ to the investigation of systemic inequality; they also tend to obscure organizational practices of content production and censorship at work” (p. 7). In her piece, she is primarily interested in the challenges this poses for social scientists engaging with Chinese data, but these limitations also affect the final product received by government entities. Therefore, while the Party-state is systematic about collecting data, how the data is being analyzed and measured is another question that’s worth exploring in much more depth. The scale in-and-of itself does not equate with quality of data.

You write about how Party social media accounts like to push non-political stories like weight loss tips, or other feel-good human-interest stories. What is the rationale for this? Is this backed in data about what people engage with? Is it Chinese style clickbait? Is it trying to push netizens to follow Party accounts so that they can be fed more explicit propaganda later on? 

The commercializing, gamifying, and monetizing of propaganda have all been themes in recent years. Creative and playful content tend to get shared more readily than explicitly political content. So in that sense, the Party is following a “market logic” in content creation. 

This is partly a response to the atrophy of traditional media. People no longer read physical newspapers, as you will notice if you visit China. Some people watch television, but for the most part people consume information online. The propaganda apparatus has had to adapt. There are now many apps affiliated with traditional Party media, like People’s Daily, under different names. They’re selling a different news product — affiliated with Party media but branded separately. The content is often produced by young, educated people who know the tastes of younger social media consumers. The idea is to make the news product attractive or fun, maybe even a bit addictive, to make users come back to the app and consume other political content. 

The result has been the invention of more subtle forms of propaganda than traditional media used to carry. For example, there are apps that let you “go on trips” with Xi Jinping, watching his speeches and tracing his travel routes on a map. There’s a gaming dimension to it: users are more likely to engage with an app if they can win something, like a coupon or certificate they can share with friends. Playful and more exciting content helps drive people back into official media channels in the digital domain. 

The CCP, throughout its history but particularly during the Cultural Revolution, has had a deep and abiding love for big character posters (dazibao). These were, in a sense, the analog ancestors of tweets. Sometimes they were overtly political; sometimes they just referred to everyday life. Do you see a direct historical lineage? 

There’s definitely a degree of historical continuity. The difference between big character posters in the past and the current forms of expression via Weibo is that the process of creating today’s content is more interactive than ever before. In the past, maybe citizens were encouraged to make their own posters. Nowadays, much of it is co-created between officials and citizens and in groups of multiple citizens and then edited and shared and reinvented further. 

Can you give an example of co-creation? Do social media pages affiliated to Party organizations comment on individuals’ posts, or re-share them? 

Co-creation takes several forms. One kind is “co-creation via co-optation”: items created by citizens or even foreigners but appropriated by the Party. In the pandemic, for example, content created by netizens or journalists was picked by Party media and spun into heroic narratives. At various points, foreign experts praised China’s handling of the pandemic, and Chinese propaganda outlets repackaged those statements and pushed them hard in various media.

But co-creation also happens when the Party gives space to regular citizens to contribute content. One example from 2015 that we used in my article with Kecheng Fang is city officials from several major Chinese cities urging citizens to post photos of “harmonious families” as part of the international family day celebration. Thousands of families posted photos and lively discussion ensued. This example also shows the merging of traditional family values with political governance. Some of that content was reposted on official media.

You have made the provocative argument that in some ways (though not all) China is more democratic than Russia, even though the latter is a hybrid authoritarian system that holds regular elections and has opposition parties. Are you saying that the Chinese public opinion management system you’re describing here is a form of direct democracy?

The traditional standards of measuring it will be procedural: to what extent there is freedom of expression, rule of law, free elections, and so forth. But these measures can be misleading. In Russia, dissenting voices may be expressed, but they rarely interact with official channels and influence policymaking. In China, the space for critical expression is significantly narrower, and shrinking over time. But there’s more space, at least until recently, to shape or influence policymaking and broader public opinion than in Russia. If we think about democracy in non-procedural terms, about citizens’ ability to engage or influence the government, then China has created — at least until recently — spaces for this that have no equivalent in Russia. I was calling for a rethink in how we compare authoritarian regimes. My analysis here was specifically focused on the role of critical journalists in the two countries. 

If we think about democracy in non-procedural terms, about citizens’ ability to engage or influence the government, then China has created — at least until recently — spaces for this that have no equivalent in Russia. 

Whether the Chinese system resembles a form of “direct democracy,” to address your question specifically, is a different and much more provocative claim. One of the most important elements of democracy is accountability, surely. China is listening and engaging, but that doesn’t mean that there’s much accountability at all above the local level.

Tell us about Xi Jinping’s public persona, as it’s being constructed on social media. How is it different from Vladimir Putin’s, for example?

For six or seven years now, there’s been a big emphasis on Xi on social media platforms, both Chinese and non-Chinese. There have been new apps created dedicated to understanding his speeches or tracing his travels. It’s all very specifically focused on him. The goal, I think, is to create a more interactive relationship with the leader, to help citizens symbolically engage with him or even be virtually present as he speaks, for example, in one app, by encouraging people to “clap” alongside him at the Party Congress. There is a clear interest in creating a warm persona for Xi, presenting him as family man, depicting him with his wife to further the idea that the family unit mirrors the Party unit. It’s inspirational, motivational. They call him “Uncle Xi” or “Leader Xi,” and other sweet, cute nicknames. 

As you note, and as Chinese netizens have noted, too, this is very different from Vladimir Putin’s image. Putin is portrayed as distant and feared, while Xi is portrayed as a kind of family member — older, revered, and a bit softer. It’s also worth noting that Putin has been at the heart of Russian politics for a long time in a regime often characterized as personalistic autocracy. So, Russian propaganda doesn’t need to work hard to convince the audience that Putin is in control and symbolizes the country. Whereas in China, the Party rules and some leaders in the past have been essentially secondary characters. Xi needed to create a distinctive persona from scratch. 

What does political satire look like on the Chinese internet? Do Chinese citizens get to “co-create” Xi’s image?

Political satire is not dead. It survived in the Soviet Union, in subtle forms, written by hand or shared through word-of-mouth. Humor never really disappears. It’s a key mechanism of venting and processing and simply surviving in any system, but especially in a system that’s so closed, where it’s so hard to express critique explicitly. 

During the 19th Party Congress, when Xi spoke for about three and a half hours, there were really fun images they came up: rats staring at the screen, bored by his never-ending speech, or Jiang Zemin yawning was another big hit. There is a “toad worshipper” cult of Jiang that Kecheng Fang at the Chinese University of Hong Kong has analyzed in some depth. Netizens fell in love with these references to Jiang, who represents a style of rule that was more playful, more open, accessible, and perhaps, for some, more exciting than Xi’s. They were contrasting it indirectly, not comparing it side by side. There are also satirical memes that twist the Chinese language or use English words to comment on current events. These memes can stay hidden for a while until they get deciphered and censored. 

Sometimes seemingly innocent memes cross a line and become sensitive. For example, the meme of Xi as Winnie the Pooh got censored. This meme made him appear as too soft and not dignified enough. But you can see in this example how Xi’s image in particular, and the scope of acceptable discourse on Chinese social media, is a dynamic and fast-moving process. We’ll keep seeing images like this emerge and then disappear. But some people are collecting those images, so we’ll have an archive over time to study.

If the CCP has such an effective methodology for governing using domestic social media, why is it so bad at promoting its image abroad? My Facebook feed is chock-full of paid ads from China Daily and other CCP mouthpieces showing Uyghurs singing and dancing as “proof” that what’s happening in Xinjiang is not so bad. That’s not going to convince me; in fact, it repulses me. Can you help us understand the disconnect?

I think here we need to talk more broadly about why China’s global media push has thus far produced only mixed results. Empirical survey work in different parts of the world has shown that, indeed, this kind of content is not very appealing. Part of the lack of appeal is that foreign viewers know it’s produced by the CCP. There’s a legitimacy factor: if the audience outside China doesn’t think Chinese state media is fair or objective or independent, their first instinct is to disbelieve whatever they’re shown.

There’s also clearly a problem with the content itself. Media schools in China pride themselves on practicing “constructive” journalism. By this, they mean positive storytelling: good stories, focus on solutions rather than problems, and so forth. The whole storytelling agenda of Chinese propaganda for foreign audiences carries a constructive tone. That means that many negative stories are not discussed at all. That’s not very exciting for the audiences. Rather than responding to current events, they hew to the same narratives, the same stock characters, the same ideas, over and over. This journalistic style is domestically-geared, and it doesn’t really work with external audiences.

Contrast this to Russian state media, which does much more provocative reporting about other systems. We can argue about how objective or professional it is. But it’s inarguably more exciting. A recent study of Latin American viewers by Pablo Sebastian Morales, for instance, found that Russia Today (RT) is much more widely recognized and more popular than China’s CCTV-E [the CCP’s Spanish-language news channel]. In interviews, I’ve asked CGTN staff why they haven’t adopted the methodology of Russia Today. Their answer is that RT style is that of a “troublemaker” and that’s not the image that CGTN is trying to create worldwide.  

Increasing censorship over international reporting and China reporting for international viewers is another constraint. When Chinese journalists are restricted from reporting on certain stories, it makes it harder for them to compete with foreign news agencies for readers’ and viewers’ attention. I’ve found this in interviews with people from Xinhua News Agency. Why would foreign readers prefer your content over, say, Reuters or AP? 

I’ve also found that Chinese state news agencies don’t study extensively the public’s reactions to their reports. When they self-evaluate, they usually emphasize quantity versus quality. They ask questions like: how many reports do we put out? How many retweets do the posts get? How many physical copies of China Daily are being inserted into foreign newspapers? What they don’t ask is whether these inserts are being read or just tossed out. I suspect this won’t change in the short term. 

Is it perhaps a bit unfair to compare Chinese and Russian foreign propaganda? They have different objectives. Chinese propaganda pushes a hopeful, positive, even naïvely optimistic story about China. Whereas Russian propaganda, as I read it, is all about inviting the reader into a cynical compact. The implicit message is: you don’t trust the authorities or the media in your country — maybe you don’t trust us, either — but within that spirit of conspiratorial distrust, here are some stories you might find interesting. It’s not directly trying to push a positive story about Russia.

This is what I mean by “constructive” versus “destructive” messaging. It’s the difference between constructing a story and distracting from or casting doubt on other stories. The first is about external communications; the second is closer to an influence operation. How often do you really hear about “the Russian story”? What is the Russian story, beyond Russia being powerful or aggressive externally? Russian foreign propaganda is focused mostly on pushing the message that other countries are failing or misinforming their citizens. 

RT, for example, will invite left-wing intellectuals from Western countries to speak about their work if it’s critical of their own country’s policy or society. These people act in a somewhat naïve manner: they get a platform to explain their work, but it’s being used, obviously, to present a picture of the West as basically a failed enterprise. Russia has been quite creative and clever about finding and using intelligent critical voices in countries it’s trying to influence. 

China is not doing this, at least to the same extent. Maybe it will in the future. But for now, it’s more about “telling China’s story well.” This story is complex and multifaceted. Foreign publics have preconceived notions about China. So even in a place where China has significant economic interests, such as Ethiopia, there’s still suspicion among the public about what China is doing in their country and what China has to offer other than cheap products. They may have grievances: why is this road not finished? That’s where CGTN is supposed to come in. Its coverage is supposed to be completely positive, not covering or engaging any of those potential grievances.

Could you tell us a bit about your recent work on the Confucius Institutes? You seem to find that this is actually a much more effective model than traditional social media or audiovisual propaganda at getting local buy in, in supporting pro-China ideas.

In my recent work on Confucius Institutes in Ethiopia, I find that there is a pragmatic appeal of these institutes that often goes unnoticed in ideological discussions of Chinese soft power. In particular, CIs in Ethiopia and arguably in other developing countries with heavy Chinese economic presence, represent much more than just cultural or linguistic training facilities, but also channels for employment at Chinese enterprises. Many students learning Chinese in Ethiopia are hoping to get jobs at Chinese companies and scholarships in China. So the comparison might not be as much with other soft power mechanisms, but also across regional contexts. Much of the current argument about the failure of Chinese soft power is rooted in Western context. We need to look much beyond that to get a holistic and dynamic picture of China’s global public outreach initiatives. 

---