Transnational Impact of Chinese Propaganda

• In Event: Governing Information in China: Effects at Home and Abroad

Abstract

China frequently disseminates its propaganda beyond its national borders, targeting individuals of Chinese descent to build a narrative of a larger Chinese nation led by the People's Republic of China. We experimentally test the transnational effects of Chinese propaganda on four outcomes: (1) support for democracy versus authoritarianism, (2) individual predispositions towards democratic countries and the West, (3) support for China's use of force domestically and internationally, and (4) inter-ethnic relations in the targeted country. We conduct an experiment on 1,500 participants of Chinese and non-Chinese ethnic backgrounds in Malaysia. We find that Chinese propaganda had close to no impact on Chinese ethnics but marginally improved non-Chinese's perception of the PRC and its international goals. These effects, however, did not appear to undermine inter-ethnic relations in Malaysia.

Authors

• Minh Duc Trinh, Purdue University

• Jeremy Siow, University of Oxford

• Tony Zirui Yang, University of Oxford