Who Speaks for the Party? Chinese State Signaling and State Media Hierarchy

• In Event: Political Communication in China

Abstract

Scholars and policymakers are increasingly reliant on public sources to understand the Chinese government’s intentions behind its foreign policy. While these observers of Chinese foreign policy have long considered all Chinese state media to be created equal, including outward-facing English-language media, existing theories of international politics suggest that the Chinese government is incentivized to misrepresent its true intentions by leveraging its control over media outlets and any information asymmetry. Which Chinese government-sponsored outlet, if any, reliably conveys China’s true intentions? Drawing on Chinese archival materials, we argue that People’s Daily, the most authoritative of all Chinese government-sponsored news outlets, is more representative of the true intentions of the Chinese government compared to other widely cited foreign-facing government-sponsored outlets like Global Times. We test this argument through the first systematic high-quality human-coded multilingual content analysis of Chinese messaging across various government-sponsored outlets in the context of coercive threats towards Taiwan, to the best of our knowledge. We show that Global Times’ messaging is highly noisy and that only People’s Daily’s coercive messaging predicts actual escalation measured in terms of intrusion of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone.

Authors

• Jackie S.H. Wong, Princeton University

• Zenobia Chan, Georgetown University

• Noel Foster, U.S. Naval War College