The Indirect Effect: Hidden “Relay Stations” Amplify Chinese State Messaging

• In Event: Chinese and Russian Information Warfare

Abstract

Why do revisionist states invest so much in outlets consumed by so few? A growing literature on Chinese and Russian info ops highlights the effects of content from their state-sponsored media outlets, such as Global Times and RT (e.g. Foster and Chan 2022; Kao 2021). Yet these outlets also exaggerate their audience size and suffer from negative reputations in their target states (Foster 2021). If the target audiences do not consume content from these outlets, how do they influence their target audiences?

We argue for the indirect effect of “relay stations” on target audiences. Building on extensive fieldwork on the case of Chinese info ops in Taiwan, we find that local, more trusted news outlets are the channel through which revisionists spread their messaging, acting through two distinct mechanisms: direct citations of revisionist state media content and content appropriation.

We demonstrate the existence of these two mechanisms using an original multilingual dictionary of terms for detecting direct citations and supervised natural language processing models to measure argument similarity across a comprehensive registry of major media outlets in Mainland China, Russia and Taiwan. Focusing on the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the invasion’s implication for Taiwan, our content analysis shows that Taiwanese outlets like China Times relay talking points after Russian and Mainland Chinese government-sponsored media outlets.

Following on our content analysis, we take advantage of Taiwan’s January 2024 presidential election and employ a team of research assistants on the ground conducting interviews with Taiwanese voters to test our initial findings on local Taiwanese relay stations. We then lay out extensions for the multilingual dictionary and supervised natural language processing models well beyond the case of Taiwan, including the case of local relay stations in Estonia based on ongoing fieldwork, and conclude by outlining a theory of global info ops.

Authors

• Noel Foster, U.S. Naval War College

• Zenobia Chan, Georgetown University