Beijing's Global Media Offensive: China's Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World

Kurlantzick's analysis of China's attempt to become a global media and information superpower is the most comprehensive single-volume treatment of Chinese state media expansion, political influence operations, and information environment shaping available in the English-language literature. Senior Fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, Kurlantzick traces China's efforts across four domains: the expansion of state media outlets (Xinhua, CGTN, China Daily), the acquisition of or content-sharing arrangements with local media, the control of the digital infrastructure through which information flows, and the use of disinformation and political financing to shape the domestic politics of target countries.

The book's analytical contribution extends beyond documentation to assessment. Kurlantzick systematically interrogates what is often assumed rather than demonstrated in discussions of Chinese information influence — how effective these operations actually are. His finding is more nuanced than the dominant narrative: China has invested enormously in global media influence and achieved significant infrastructure penetration, but has frequently failed to achieve the audience reach and credibility it sought, often undermining itself through assertive diplomacy that alienates the audiences its media is trying to cultivate. This measured assessment is more useful for practitioners than either the dismissive or the alarmist accounts that characterise much of the literature.

The sharp power versus soft power distinction the book develops — separating commonplace cultural soft power from more covert and coercive sharp power tactics — provides a vocabulary that practitioners have found useful for describing Chinese influence operations with greater precision than either 'propaganda' or 'public diplomacy' alone allows. For analysts assessing Chinese information operations in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, Europe, or the Global South, this book remains the essential reference.