China’s Soft Sell of Autocracy Is Working

For decades, the United States has promoted democracy around the globe. But amid mounting U.S.-Chinese competition, a question has arisen: is Beijing attempting to export its authoritarian political system in a similar way? No, says Chinese leader Xi Jinping. “We do not seek to ‘export’ a China model,” he told an assembly of world leaders in 2017, “nor do we want other countries to ‘copy’ our way of doing things.” It would be a mistake, however, to think that Beijing is not seeking to shape global opinion in favor of China’s political system. The Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to promote autocracy are simply not as explicit as the United States’ hard-sell efforts to export democracy; instead, the CCP is soft-selling autocracy.

To that end, the party has invested heavily in public diplomacy and influence operations intended to make the global public more accepting of its nondemocratic political system. It has developed a far-reaching program of trainings, conferences, and workshops that teach CCP-style management of the press, the Internet, the military, and civil society to foreign political leaders. And despite a perception among some Western policymakers and academics that these efforts are tone deaf, China’s external influence operations are more sophisticated, effective, and likely to succeed over the long run than many in the West believe. They are aimed primarily at people in the developing world, where many see the so-called China model as effective at delivering what matters most to them: a path out of grinding poverty and into the global middle class.

In the face of Beijing’s increasingly resonant foreign propaganda, Washington has failed to rise to the challenge. It has yet to adopt a coherent message about the merits of the U.S. political system. In contrast to China’s messaging, which is tightly focused on winning over audiences in the developing world, U.S. messaging is scattershot and less persuasive. To compete, the United States needs to sell a positive vision for itself around the world. And it needs to refine this message for people in the developing world, which is likely to be the main arena of this competition. Should Washington fail to adapt its pro-democracy strategy to today’s evolving political and economic realities, it will cede ground to Beijing—and could well fuel international support for China’s autocratic model.

DEMOCRACY BY ANOTHER NAME?

To sell its political system abroad, the CCP frames it as responsive, meritocratic, and remarkably effective at shepherding economic growth—without calling attention to its authoritarian aspects. CCP messaging claims that China’s political system is receptive to citizens and their everyday demands for government services and infrastructure. Propaganda videos feature inspiring drone shots of engineering marvels such as China’s high-speed rail network, its impressive bridges, and its gleaming airports.

The party also claims that the ruling party is staffed with highly competent politicians who undergo a rigorous selection process. Here, CCP messaging typically argues that the current civil service exam, which is in fact highly selective, is a legacy of the competitive imperial exam for selecting mandarins who served China’s emperors.

The most important element in the CCP’s soft-sell strategy is touting China’s extraordinary economic growth—what amounts to a prosperity gospel for the autocratic world. The CCP’s foreign propaganda points toward China’s inspiring success in lifting hundreds of millions of people from dollar-a-day poverty into the global middle class, which is an undeniable fact. Of course, rather than giving credit for this success to the Chinese people, the CCP likes to claim that the ruling party is mostly responsible.

China promotes its illiberal, authoritarian system while dressing it up as a populist democracy.

Official messaging is generally upbeat and avoids a hard sell, even if the harsh and combative messages of a small subset of Chinese diplomats occasionally grab headlines. Xi and other party leaders have often stressed the need to “tell China’s story well” and spread “positive energy” about the country both at home and abroad. The underlying idea seems to be that hope and inspiration sell better than doom and gloom. Some of China’s foreign messaging is devoted to criticizing Western democracies and painting U.S. democracy as especially chaotic. For the most part, however, it promotes China’s own story.

Notably, these messages don’t just elide the authoritarian aspects of China’s political system, they also claim that it is in fact democratic. The CCP’s official stance is that China is a “whole process democracy” in which the ruling party, while unelected, represents the interests of all people, in contrast to parties in democracies that supposedly represent just factions of society. This messaging builds support for China’s illiberal, authoritarian system while dressing it up as a populist democracy.

The CCP pushes this message through an array of channels. The party has established a global television news network, CGTN, its answer to CNN or the BBC. It has funded an expansion of the global wire service Xinhua, which is making inroads abroad by placing its content into foreign newspapers. The party also increasingly uses covert influence operations on social media by promoting influencers who cheerily sell the merits of the Chinese system.

CHINA’S FRESH FACE

For decades, U.S. analysts have expressed skepticism as to whether the soft sell actually increases global acceptance of the Chinese political system. Their assumption has long been that the Chinese system is too authoritarian and too specific to the Chinese context to win over admirers overseas. China’s messaging, to many Americans’ ears, often falls flat. Some messaging is explicitly anti-American; moreover, the more positive stories of China’s growing prosperity can be seen as a threat to the United States’ global status—and given the United States’ greater wealth, there is little reason for it to emulate China’s system.

It is now clear, however, that CCP messaging is in fact effective at changing hearts and minds and building support for China’s autocratic system—but mostly outside of wealthy democracies. In a study published in the American Journal of Political Science in 2024, I worked with an international team of researchers to survey people across 19 countries in six continents and to analyze data on thousands of propaganda videos produced by CGTN. We found that viewers’ positions on China moved dramatically after watching representative clips produced by CGTN. Although only 16 percent of people preferred the Chinese political model to the U.S. political model initially, after watching CGTN content, 54 percent stated the reverse. People also saw the Chinese system as more responsive, better at delivering growth, and, remarkably, more democratic in character.

CCP messaging is particularly resonant in the developing countries we studied, such as Colombia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, and South Africa. It is not a coincidence that these are areas where China has invested heavily in expanding its media footprint. CGTN, for instance, opened a bureau in Nairobi in 2012, and the party’s English-language newspaper, China Daily, has established content-sharing agreements with dozens of media outlets in Latin America.

The United States is the incumbent to China’s lesser-known challenger.

A saving grace for the United States is that relatively few people consume China’s foreign-facing media, which means that however effective and slick its programming, its reach is not yet all that broad. For example, only seven percent of South Africans and six percent of Kenyans report regularly watching CGTN. The confined reach of China’s official media makes it, thus far, a limited tool.

The United States cannot take it for granted, however, that the CCP’s official media messaging will continue to have a narrow audience. The viewership of CGTN and other channels is growing, if modestly. In Nigeria, for example, viewership increased from six percent of the population in 2018 to 11 percent in 2020. The CCP also relies on an array of other strategies to make inroads. It has, for instance, expanded the footprint of Xinhua, so that stories with pro-CCP messages, implicit or explicit, are more likely to appear in newspapers around the globe, sometimes without attribution to Xinhua itself.

Moreover, China’s propaganda campaign is helped greatly by the fact that whereas the United States is old news, with a reputation born of decades of international activity, China is seen as a relatively new player. With many having relatively little knowledge about China and its system, the CCP is seizing the opportunity to define itself from scratch overseas. The United States, in other words, is the incumbent to China’s lesser-known challenger—and the United States, universally known and weighed down by its history of meddling and intervention, may find it very difficult to change minds. China, on the other hand, is a fresh-faced newcomer by comparison and can introduce itself as the better, unburdened alternative to Washington’s tired goods.

THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF AUTOCRACY

China uses traditional media and social media to sway the broader global public, but the CCP also has a complementary strategy for advancing its system among elites: workshops and summits to sell the benefits of Chinese-style governance. The Chinese government runs extensive programs instructing politicians across the globe about the mechanics of the CCP’s system of government. By the mid-2010s, according to a 2024 Atlantic Council report, the party was running an average of 1,400 training programs per year in developing countries on issues such as national governance, ethnic policies, and new media. But the effectiveness of these programs at changing minds or patterns of governance remains unclear.

The CCP also runs special training schools in Africa for politicians from regimes dominated by single parties. In 2022, the party established the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School in Tanzania in partnership with parties in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, many of which have experienced decades of dominant-party rule. The school focuses on the lessons of CCP-style party governance and discipline for parties in Africa. In addition to these workshops for civilian elites, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army trains foreign soldiers at military academies in China and abroad on maintaining control of the armed forces.

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY CAN’T SELL ITSELF

The United States cannot afford to stand idly by as China accelerates its efforts to sell its political system to the global public. So far, U.S. messaging has been far less coherent and effective than China’s influence campaign. This discrepancy became clear in my study; when survey respondents drawn from a global sample viewed both U.S. and Chinese messaging, on balance they moved toward China.

U.S. policymakers must acknowledge that selling political models is an important arena of political competition—one that the United States stands to lose. Official U.S. messaging to foreign audiences in the developing world is haphazard and gauzy, expounding on the idea of the United States, U.S. civil liberties, and the American way of life. There has not been a serious attempt to sell the merits of the U.S. system; Chinese messaging, on the other hand, is laser-focused on building global support for its system through consistent and targeted strategies. And amid the potential domestic political chaos ahead of November’s presidential election, the idea of American democracy does not simply speak for itself anymore.

The idea of American democracy does not simply speak for itself anymore.

There is much, however, that Washington can do on this score. The United States should direct funding toward State Department public diplomacy programs that evenhandedly portray the U.S. political system in all its glory and dysfunction—and, crucially, highlight the country’s dynamic economy. The CCP’s messaging strategy owes much of its success to highlighting pocketbook issues, especially the ability of the Chinese system to promote growth. China’s recent economic woes may very well undercut the ability to sell this message to a broad audience. The United States should take this as a lesson worth following and point to the considerable successes of the U.S. economy in producing innovation and prosperity.

The United States should also work to emphasize the advantages of democratic political systems, such as a free press. Washington should not lean exclusively on government organs for its messaging purposes; who wants to dine on state media when there are more exciting options on the menu? Instead, the United States could subsidize independent U.S. press operations abroad, including supporting U.S. newspapers’ foreign bureaus, cable news outlets, and Internet media operations. Foreign audiences are eager to consume American television, print, and Internet journalism that is free and honest—and that includes both critical and positive coverage of the United States.

In the long run, this is a competition the United States can win. Curiosity about the Chinese system does not mean that states actually can or will emulate it; China’s particular blend of a strong ruling party and elements of a capitalist market economy would be difficult to replicate elsewhere. Moreover, given China’s economic slowdown and the personalization of the CCP around Xi, Beijing’s economic appeals may soon start to lose their luster. The best advertisement for the U.S. system remains the United States itself—and the capacity of the country to live up to its democratic ideals.