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Why do authoritarian states sometimes play up dangerous international crises and embarrassing diplomatic incidents in domestic propaganda? Andrew Chubb and Frances Wang suggest it may be due to the competing explanations of mobilization, signaling, diversion, and pacification.

Image courtesy of interviewee. May 28, 2024

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This video video discusses a debate in comparative politics regarding the purposes of authoritarian regimes' propaganda strategies. Traditionally, such propaganda was viewed as primarily aimed at persuasion. However, there is a contrasting view suggesting that its main purpose is to intimidate the public and demonstrate state power, discouraging challenges to authority.

The authors assert that authoritarian regimes, exemplified by China, often have broader ambitions for their propaganda. They utilize it not just to maintain power, but to mobilize allies, communicate with international audiences, and assert moral superiority in global disputes. A case study highlighted is the South China Sea arbitration between the Philippines and China, where the Philippine government aimed to challenge China's maritime claims through international legal frameworks. Despite declaring that it would not recognize the arbitration, China's extensive propaganda campaign perplexingly increased as the arbitration progressed, leading to numerous articles in state-run media.

The authors propose that multiple motivations can coexist during propaganda campaigns, including domestic mobilization, signaling to international audiences, and diversion from internal issues. They observed that Chinese propaganda aimed to reinforce nationalist sentiment and distract from domestic economic challenges during a period of economic instability in China. The study emphasizes the complexity of authoritarian propaganda and suggests future research could explore the life cycles and motivations behind such campaigns, not just within China but also in other regimes and contexts.

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First of all, we were looking at a debate in comparative

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politics about the purposes

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of authoritarian regimes, propaganda.

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In a general sense,

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a very interesting debate has been going on for a few years,

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about the extent to which, you know,

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intuitively it would be about persuasion.

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Uh, but then another side of that debate really argues

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that it's more about intimidating the public

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by deluging them with sort of outrageous propaganda

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and ultimately de demonstrating the state's power to sort

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of shove propaganda down their throats

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and thereby transmit a message

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that you shouldn't challenge our power.

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'cause the state is really very powerful.

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So it's ultimately not about persuasion.

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Um, and we thought that debate is, is very interesting.

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But, but our view is that, you know, based on the case

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of China, authoritarian regimes are probably

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more ambitious than that.

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It's not just about sort of staying in power,

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and that authoritarian regimes can use propaganda

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for other purposes, mobilizing their allies, communicating

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to international audiences, maybe trying

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to take the moral high ground in an international dispute.

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Um, so that was one debate.

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And the other was really

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between international relations scholars like us

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who look specifically at the propaganda behavior on

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foreign policy issues.

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Is it proactively sort of state led

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for the state's purposes, like signaling or diversion,

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or is it kind of more reactive to public opinion

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and basically oriented towards

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containing nationalist sentiment?

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The case that we looked at was the Philippines versus China

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arbitration in the South China Sea,

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which China launched a massive propaganda campaign about,

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the background was, I,

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I think your listeners will probably be quite familiar

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with the South China Sea issue in general.

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Uh, but in 2013,

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the Philippines launched this arbitration case under the,

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UN convention on the Law of the Sea,

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after China seized control of Scarborough Shoal, one

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of these, mid-ocean features that,

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the Philippines previously considered itself

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to, control.

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So the Philippines purpose was really to try

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to delegitimize the nine dash line claim

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that China had been sort of using, ambiguously to,

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demarcate the area

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that it was claiming sovereign maritime rights over,

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to basically get a ruling from international legal jurists

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that this was contrary to the 1982 UN convention on the Law

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of the Sea, which China was a signatory to.

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And so it was the Philippines.

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Um, now China, actually didn't think this was really a,

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a plausible strategy for the Philippines.

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Um, they thought that basically this type

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of litigation had been ruled out by its own,

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declaration in 2006 that it, it didn't accept any of the,

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dispute resolution,

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annexes in the UN convention on the Law of the Sea.

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The Philippines found, legal arguments to be able

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to bring it within the scope of the law of the sea.

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So China was shocked, and it really took a long time to,

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to respond two or three months really

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before it, figured out

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what its response was gonna be,

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and that that response was basically not to participate,

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to, to say that we're not recognizing it

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and we're not gonna implement it now.

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Uh, it would've made sense at that point to really just say

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as little about it as possible if you're really gonna ignore

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it, then launching a campaign of propaganda about it,

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is, is a strange way to go about ignoring a, a,

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a judicial proceeding that you don't recognize.

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Um, and it was increasingly clear

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as the case went on over three years, between 2013

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and 2016, it was increasingly clear

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that the result wasn't gonna be pretty for China.

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Um, so we found it puzzling from a political, you know,

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political scientists always love a puzzle.

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So we found it puzzling that,

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that China would launch a propaganda campaign on this case

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that it was sort of certain to lose

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and that it said it was gonna ignore.

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Um, and as we got closer

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and closer to the, the final arbitration decision,

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and China really ramped up the propaganda, to,

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to really 11 on the dial,

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at one point 206 articles in the flagship propaganda

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mouthpiece, the People's Daily in the space of two months,

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that's like three a day.

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Uh, so, you know,

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China wasn't doing a very good job from a propaganda point

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of view of ignoring the proceedings.

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So that was the puzzle that, that sort

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of set us up for this study.

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Francis has laid out four broad explanations,

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that are out there in the international relations literature

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to explain, you know,

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large scale propaganda campaigns like this.

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And the point that we were making theoretically was actually

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it's a bit of a mere culpa

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'cause in our own work we've kind of set these up

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as competing alternative explanations in the past.

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But when you look at it closely,

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and particularly through the lens of this case, it turns out

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that, you know, multiple explanations along these lines can

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all be present at the same time.

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At least that's what this case seemed to be telling us.

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So on the mobilization side, we saw lots of rhetoric

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of moral denunciation, sort

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of conspiracy theorizing from the PRC propaganda organs,

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like blaming the, the, the, the judge,

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the judge's background, Japanese heritage.

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Uh, it was an American plot,

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basically a making it a huge international

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anti-China scandal, so as to try to ensure

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that the Chinese people didn't believe in the proceedings.

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Um, so that's, that's, a kind of motivation,

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a mobilizational type of motivation.

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'cause it's about trying to,

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keep the public's belief in the, in the state's claim,

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higher than it, they fear that it

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otherwise would've been if they'd have been, you know,

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allowed to, to have sort of, un unfiltered, kind

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of information about the case.

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Um, but it was also very emotive

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and sort of mobilizing rhetoric that China used,

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mobilizing those regime allies,

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both internally like this kind of keyboard warriors

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to shout down anybody who, might have, might have been,

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inclined to say in an internet setting

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or on social media that maybe the Philippines has a point

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or that the nine dash line maybe wasn't, wasn't

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so compatible with the UN convention on the Law of the Sea.

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Um, and also to, to kind of project an image

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to international audiences.

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And that's where the second type of explanation,

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the signaling explanation comes in,

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because it was basically about mobilizing.

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It was very clearly about mobilizing those,

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regimes supporters to speak out in defense

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of the Chinese government's position,

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to international audiences.

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This was really clear from one of the social media campaigns

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that the state media kind of got behind,

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which was literally about sort of denouncing,

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denouncing the arbitration in two languages.

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The main slogan was Nhe Jte, who cares?

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That means the South China Sea arbitration, who cares?

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Uh, you know, the use

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of those two languages in the one slogan kind of depicts

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how the multiple audiences were in play there.

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Uh, and we saw other pretty compelling evidence

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that not only domestic audiences,

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but also international audiences were part

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of the CCP propaganda organs thinking, thinking here

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of the number of articles that were translated into English,

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even though they didn't, they weren't that really, you know,

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compelling when once you,

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once you translate PRC propaganda into English,

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it becomes much less sort of persuasive.

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But nonetheless, they wanted that voice

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out there very clearly.

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Uh, otherwise they wouldn't have translated

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so many of the articles.

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Um, another one was, in terms of what,

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what they wanted international audiences thinking about it.

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Um, the PRC officials throughout the campaign were

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consistently referring to the strength of the feelings

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of the Chinese people.

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Basically referring to that, that logic

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that Francis mentioned

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before of hands tying of, saying

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to the international interlocutors, look,

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we've got domestic constraints here to,

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to take into account,

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and maybe even, you know, don't push things too far

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because the situation could get even more, dangerous if,

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for example, the United States tried

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to back the Philippines in actually implementing the, the,

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the findings of this, arbitration, ruling.

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There's a couple of other explanations from the domestic

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angle, which I'll kick over to Francis for.

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I can jump in to talk about how,

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the rationale diversion

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and ification has played out in this case.

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So about diversion, there were a number

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of economic problems such as the stock market turbulence

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that started in the summer

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of 2015 persisted throughout 2016, economic growth slowed

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to a 25 year, low.

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And at the time there were a significant number

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of laying off of workers that led to a surge

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of workers protests.

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In 2015 and 2016, we show a graph in our paper,

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and around the same time, very rarely we observed a couple

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of direct challenges were criticisms

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to Xi Jinping's policies

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and even demanding for his recognition,

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and the state media sensor coverage on all of these

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domestic problems, especially the stock market nose dive in

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the summer of 2015.

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Although there's no direct confirmatory evidence

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for a diversionary logic,

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but at least these evidence that I've just talked about

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makes a diversionary motive

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for the campaign highly plausible.

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And about ification nationalist sentiment had risen

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to a level on the verge of losing control.

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The state propaganda, on the one hand,

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echoed the strong public sentiment

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with a very abrasive rhetoric to shorten the psychological

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distance between the public and the state.

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And the state also uses the harsh rhetoric

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as a posturing device to deflect nationalistic criticism to,

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to say to the public, look at us, we are posturing for,

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sorry, we are taking up a, a, a highly,

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harsh heart line, foreign policy position.

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And at the same time, the propaganda also worked hard

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to instill reason

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and rational calculations

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to support a moderate foreign policy.

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Ironically, at the same time,

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and this is exemplified in the state media's calling for

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rational patriotism, saying

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that true patriotism should be good

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and useful for the country, and encouraging tolerance

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and calm in contrast to blind imposes extreme behaviors

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that endanger social

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and political stability, which translate in the Chinese

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context, of course, the survival of the CCP.

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And so to summarize that, we are seeing a convergence

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of all four explanations in this one single case.

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It's obviously very important to develop

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and improve an evidence-based

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and social scientific approach

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to analyze China's propaganda outputs.

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Given the strict importance of China's rise

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and US-China rivalry,

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and the increasing prevalence of authoritarian regimes

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and elevated popularism and nationalism across the world.

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One implication of our study is

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that authoritarian propaganda campaigns may have life cycles

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for future research.

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It could be useful to explore the possible sequencing

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of these motivations during the cycle

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of a foreign policy propaganda campaign.

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So one does, one motivation happens

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maybe at an earlier stage,

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and another motivation might happen at a later stage.

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And if some of these happens simultaneously,

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it would be helpful to study in detail how they reinforce

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or counteract each other.

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And although our analysis is limited to authoritarian,

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regimes with strong, highly sophisticated institutionalized,

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countries,

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but, it's, it's reasonable to believe

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that our rationals could travel to, democracies.

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Uh, but to what extent can these apply

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to democracy democratic countries?

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Um, it's, it's a possible future study topic.

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Uh, more importantly, I think more relevant is, is,

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these recent more recent media campaigns on the fat issue,

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between the US China

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and South Korea, the media campaigns on US China trade War

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in 2018, on the origin of the Coronavirus,

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during the pandemic, the debate between the United States

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and China, the War War,

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and, Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in 2022.

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So it'll be interesting to see how our theory can travel

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to explain all of these more recent media campaigns.

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Just to add the, last,

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the campaign last year over the Fukushima,

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wastewater release, has been very interesting to watch

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and has opened up a lot of those same sort

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of puzzling questions of, you know,

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this does need an explanation.

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Why is China making such a big deal out

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of this at a time when, you know, tensions

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with the United States are so high?

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And you would think that actually, and by

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and large, over the last few years, China,

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under Xi Jinping has placed a,

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a certain emphasis on stability in relations with Japan.

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So why now at this time, as of, you know,

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the second half of last year, why, why choose

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to make such a big deal outta that?

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And I think the, we'll only really get the answer

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by doing the kind of, sort of backbreaking,

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laborious and granular study of the content of the campaign,

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that we've tried to do here in

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relation to the arbitration.

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It's kind of a long-winded process,

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but I, I, you know, the answer might be out there.

00:00 - First of all, we were looking at a debate in comparative politics about the purposes of authoritarian regimes, propaganda. In a general sense, a very interesting debate has been going on for a few years, about the extent to which, you know,

00:14 - intuitively it would be about persuasion. but then another side of that debate really argues that it's more about intimidating the public by deluging them with sort of outrageous propaganda and ultimately de demonstrating the state's power to sort of shove propaganda down their throats and thereby transmit a message that you shouldn't challenge our power. 'cause the state is really very powerful. So it's ultimately not about persuasion.

00:41 - and we thought that debate is, is very interesting. But, but our view is that, you know, based on the case of China, authoritarian regimes are probably more ambitious than that. It's not just about sort of staying in power, and that authoritarian regimes can use propaganda for other purposes, mobilizing their allies, communicating to international audiences, maybe trying to take the moral high ground in an international dispute. so that was one debate.

01:08 - And the other was really between international relations scholars like us who look specifically at the propaganda behavior on foreign policy issues. Is it proactively sort of state led for the state's purposes, like signaling or diversion, or is it kind of more reactive to public opinion and basically oriented towards containing nationalist sentiment? The case that we looked at was the Philippines versus China

01:32 - arbitration in the South China Sea, which China launched a massive propaganda campaign about, the background was, I, I think your listeners will probably be quite familiar with the South China Sea issue in general. but in 2013, the Philippines launched this arbitration case under the, UN convention on the Law of the Sea, after China seized control of Scarborough Shoal, one of these, mid-ocean features that,

02:01 - the Philippines previously considered itself to, control. So the Philippines purpose was really to try to delegitimize the nine dash line claim that China had been sort of using, ambiguously to, demarcate the area that it was claiming sovereign maritime rights over, to basically get a ruling from international legal jurists that this was contrary to the 1982 UN convention on the Law of the Sea, which China was a signatory to.

02:29 - And so it was the Philippines. now China, actually didn't think this was really a, a plausible strategy for the Philippines. they thought that basically this type of litigation had been ruled out by its own, declaration in 2006 that it, it didn't accept any of the, dispute resolution, annexes in the UN convention on the Law of the Sea. The Philippines found, legal arguments to be able to bring it within the scope of the law of the sea.

02:57 - So China was shocked, and it really took a long time to, to respond two or three months really before it, figured out what its response was gonna be, and that that response was basically not to participate, to, to say that we're not recognizing it and we're not gonna implement it now. it would've made sense at that point to really just say as little about it as possible if you're really gonna ignore it, then launching a campaign of propaganda about it,

03:25 - is, is a strange way to go about ignoring a, a, a judicial proceeding that you don't recognize. and it was increasingly clear as the case went on over three years, between 2013 and 2016, it was increasingly clear that the result wasn't gonna be pretty for China. so we found it puzzling from a political, you know, political scientists always love a puzzle. So we found it puzzling that, that China would launch a propaganda campaign on this case

03:52 - that it was sort of certain to lose and that it said it was gonna ignore. and as we got closer and closer to the, the final arbitration decision, and China really ramped up the propaganda, to, to really 11 on the dial, at one point 206 articles in the flagship propaganda mouthpiece, the People's Daily in the space of two months, that's like three a day. so, you know,

04:17 - China wasn't doing a very good job from a propaganda point of view of ignoring the proceedings. So that was the puzzle that, that sort of set us up for this study. Francis has laid out four broad explanations, that are out there in the international relations literature to explain, you know, large scale propaganda campaigns like this. And the point that we were making theoretically was actually it's a bit of a mere culpa

04:40 - 'cause in our own work we've kind of set these up as competing alternative explanations in the past. But when you look at it closely, and particularly through the lens of this case, it turns out that, you know, multiple explanations along these lines can all be present at the same time. At least that's what this case seemed to be telling us. So on the mobilization side, we saw lots of rhetoric of moral denunciation, sort of conspiracy theorizing from the PRC propaganda organs,

05:06 - like blaming the, the, the, the judge, the judge's background, Japanese heritage. it was an American plot, basically a making it a huge international anti-China scandal, so as to try to ensure that the Chinese people didn't believe in the proceedings. so that's, that's, a kind of motivation, a mobilizational type of motivation. 'cause it's about trying to, keep the public's belief in the, in the state's claim,

05:37 - higher than it, they fear that it otherwise would've been if they'd have been, you know, allowed to, to have sort of, un unfiltered, kind of information about the case. but it was also very emotive and sort of mobilizing rhetoric that China used, mobilizing those regime allies, both internally like this kind of keyboard warriors to shout down anybody who, might have, might have been, inclined to say in an internet setting

06:06 - or on social media that maybe the Philippines has a point or that the nine dash line maybe wasn't, wasn't so compatible with the UN convention on the Law of the Sea. and also to, to kind of project an image to international audiences. And that's where the second type of explanation, the signaling explanation comes in, because it was basically about mobilizing. It was very clearly about mobilizing those, regimes supporters to speak out in defense

06:34 - of the Chinese government's position, to international audiences. This was really clear from one of the social media campaigns that the state media kind of got behind, which was literally about sort of denouncing, denouncing the arbitration in two languages. The main slogan was Nhe Jte, who cares? That means the South China Sea arbitration, who cares? you know, the use of those two languages in the one slogan kind of depicts

07:01 - how the multiple audiences were in play there. and we saw other pretty compelling evidence that not only domestic audiences, but also international audiences were part of the CCP propaganda organs thinking, thinking here of the number of articles that were translated into English, even though they didn't, they weren't that really, you know, compelling when once you, once you translate PRC propaganda into English, it becomes much less sort of persuasive.

07:28 - But nonetheless, they wanted that voice out there very clearly. otherwise they wouldn't have translated so many of the articles. another one was, in terms of what, what they wanted international audiences thinking about it. the PRC officials throughout the campaign were consistently referring to the strength of the feelings of the Chinese people. Basically referring to that, that logic

07:52 - that Francis mentioned before of hands tying of, saying to the international interlocutors, look, we've got domestic constraints here to, to take into account, and maybe even, you know, don't push things too far because the situation could get even more, dangerous if, for example, the United States tried to back the Philippines in actually implementing the, the, the findings of this, arbitration, ruling.

08:22 - There's a couple of other explanations from the domestic angle, which I'll kick over to Francis for. I can jump in to talk about how, the rationale diversion and ification has played out in this case. So about diversion, there were a number of economic problems such as the stock market turbulence that started in the summer of 2015 persisted throughout 2016, economic growth slowed to a 25 year, low.

08:51 - And at the time there were a significant number of laying off of workers that led to a surge of workers protests. In 2015 and 2016, we show a graph in our paper, and around the same time, very rarely we observed a couple of direct challenges were criticisms to Xi Jinping's policies and even demanding for his recognition, and the state media sensor coverage on all of these domestic problems, especially the stock market nose dive in

09:20 - the summer of 2015. Although there's no direct confirmatory evidence for a diversionary logic, but at least these evidence that I've just talked about makes a diversionary motive for the campaign highly plausible. And about ification nationalist sentiment had risen to a level on the verge of losing control. The state propaganda, on the one hand, echoed the strong public sentiment

09:45 - with a very abrasive rhetoric to shorten the psychological distance between the public and the state. And the state also uses the harsh rhetoric as a posturing device to deflect nationalistic criticism to, to say to the public, look at us, we are posturing for, sorry, we are taking up a, a, a highly, harsh heart line, foreign policy position. And at the same time, the propaganda also worked hard to instill reason and rational calculations

10:17 - to support a moderate foreign policy. Ironically, at the same time, and this is exemplified in the state media's calling for rational patriotism, saying that true patriotism should be good and useful for the country, and encouraging tolerance and calm in contrast to blind imposes extreme behaviors that endanger social and political stability, which translate in the Chinese context, of course, the survival of the CCP.

10:45 - And so to summarize that, we are seeing a convergence of all four explanations in this one single case. It's obviously very important to develop and improve an evidence-based and social scientific approach to analyze China's propaganda outputs. Given the strict importance of China's rise and US-China rivalry, and the increasing prevalence of authoritarian regimes and elevated popularism and nationalism across the world.

11:15 - One implication of our study is that authoritarian propaganda campaigns may have life cycles for future research. It could be useful to explore the possible sequencing of these motivations during the cycle of a foreign policy propaganda campaign. So one does, one motivation happens maybe at an earlier stage, and another motivation might happen at a later stage. And if some of these happens simultaneously,

11:41 - it would be helpful to study in detail how they reinforce or counteract each other. And although our analysis is limited to authoritarian, regimes with strong, highly sophisticated institutionalized, countries, but, it's, it's reasonable to believe that our rationals could travel to, democracies. but to what extent can these apply to democracy democratic countries? it's, it's a possible future study topic.

12:15 - more importantly, I think more relevant is, is, these recent more recent media campaigns on the fat issue, between the US China and South Korea, the media campaigns on US China trade War in 2018, on the origin of the Coronavirus, during the pandemic, the debate between the United States and China, the War War, and, Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in 2022. So it'll be interesting to see how our theory can travel to explain all of these more recent media campaigns.

12:47 - Just to add the, last, the campaign last year over the Fukushima, wastewater release, has been very interesting to watch and has opened up a lot of those same sort of puzzling questions of, you know, this does need an explanation. Why is China making such a big deal out of this at a time when, you know, tensions with the United States are so high? And you would think that actually, and by

13:14 - and large, over the last few years, China, under Xi Jinping has placed a, a certain emphasis on stability in relations with Japan. So why now at this time, as of, you know, the second half of last year, why, why choose to make such a big deal outta that? And I think the, we'll only really get the answer by doing the kind of, sort of backbreaking, laborious and granular study of the content of the campaign, that we've tried to do here in

13:45 - relation to the arbitration. It's kind of a long-winded process, but I, I, you know, the answer might be out there.

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