Opinion | Xi Jinping’s China is losing its propaganda war left, right and centre this year

The overseas propaganda arm of China has suffered major defeats this year, with regard to Hong Kong, Xinjiang and the trade war. Officials show so little understanding of how democracies work, they almost seem to be trying to make China look bad

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Published: 11:00am, 16 Dec 2019Updated: 11:00am, 16 Dec 2019

If President Xi Jinping’s team carries out annual job appraisals, China’s overseas propaganda team will surely be found to have performed catastrophically. Whether it is Hong Kong or Xinjiang, Huawei or the trade war with the United States, the Chinese regime has had a string of notable public relations failures this year.

While the regime’s propaganda efforts have worked quite well on the domestic audience, mainly because of the Great Firewall, the overseas propaganda arm has suffered major defeats. Despite deploying numerous resources via official and unofficial channels, the regime has not only failed to achieve its intended purpose of interacting well with the rest of the world but also aggravated its poor international image.

As former Chinese reporter Jasper Jia summed up on Twitter, dozens of government departments with billions at their disposal spent 10 years on the propaganda projects, but they have done a worse job than a little girl.

That girl would be Li Ziqi, the Chinese internet celebrity who has more than 7.5 million subscribers on YouTube and apparently wields more soft power than, say, CGTN, the English-language channel of the state broadcaster CCTV that has 1 million subscribers on YouTube. (However, it remains unclear how Li’s team received official approval to upload videos to YouTube via a virtual private network.)

Xi has declared that Beijing, presumably including propaganda officials and the official media, needs to “tell China’s story well”. But, in the past year, these officials have failed quite spectacularly in this mission.

While more Chinese diplomats and embassies have activated Twitter accounts, they have entered a cold new world: now they know how unwelcome they are on the social media platform, and some of them probably feel like they are talking to a wall. They are unable to get their musty messages across in the free world, and yet they don’t seem to have figured out why.