China’s influence abroad is often described as either attractive or coercive, but Maria Repnikova argues it is usually some of both. In Competing for Soft Power, she draws on fieldwork in Ethiopia to show how China uses three tools at once: tangible enticement, ideational persuasion, and censorial power, which shapes how China is discussed by controlling what information people can get. What she finds on the ground is a decentralized effort. Bureaucrats chase their own targets, and Ethiopian officials and journalists negotiate, reinterpret, and sometimes quietly push back. China, she finds, promotes its success story more than it exports a model, and America’s retreat opens a door for Beijing without guaranteeing that anyone walks through it.
Maria Repnikova is a scholar of China’s political communication. Her research focuses on media-state relations in China, including political persuasion and critical journalism; Chinese soft power and public diplomacy, especially in Africa; and comparisons between China and Russia. She speaks fluent Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish.
Dr. Repnikova is an Associate Professor in Global Communication and the William C. Pate Chair in Strategic Communication at Georgia State University. In the past, she was a Wilson China Fellow and a Wilson Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. She received her doctorate (DPhil) in Politics at the University of Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar.
Georgia Pollard: In your book, Competing for Soft Power, you move away from the soft power versus sharp power binary and focus on three mechanisms: tangible enticement, ideational persuasion, and censorial power. What does this approach let us see that the other labels miss?
Dr. Maria Repnikova: China’s approach, the way that I characterized it, includes both co-optive and more coercive elements, and it really cuts across this binary of soft and sharp power. Soft power tends to assume enticements, primarily in terms of values, culture, and so forth, and sharp power has a more malign intent attached to it. However, my fieldwork showed me that there was really a combination of different ways in which China endeavors to engage local elites, in particular, that aren’t necessarily fitting into those frameworks.
These strategies of engagement includes attraction through material means, or tangible enticement: something very practical, like access to education and resources. It also includes persuasion through ideals, values, and norms, and some restrictions on how China is talked about and how stories about China are disseminated on the ground. There’s a definite element of containing or guarding China’s image, but neither the sharp power nor the soft power approach captures the multifaceted nature of how Chinese diplomacy appears to work.
GP: You described China’s image-making as both deliberate and improvised, guarding its image quite closely. Is that unevenness a weakness of the system, or part of how it operates?
MR: That’s a great question in terms of where this really comes from. I think this fragmentation is more of an outcome of the system. The implementation is very decentralized, with a multiplicity of actors involved in these various initiatives. That isn’t unique to China, but in the Chinese case there are just so many different branches of this diplomacy, from volunteers coming from specific universities, to Chinese language teachers, to journalists, to diplomats, and all kinds of semi-state actors on the ground.
The bureaucrats working within specific systems are also often guided by internal metrics that are distinct from the high-level, grand narratives of improving China’s image. For instance, they might be guided by simply holding a certain number of events or appearing productive on the ground, but not necessarily evaluated in building relationships or successfully shaping public perceptions. So I think these two characteristics, the decentralized nature of the whole system and the metrics guiding the bureaucrats and the so-called soft power practitioners, can translate into quite a bit of disjointedness in how we end up witnessing the Chinese image-making project.
GP: In your book, you didn’t really find a coherent export of a China model, but rather extensive efforts to legitimize China’s path. How should scholars and policymakers rethink the China model framing, particularly given the case studies you used?
MR: The China model framing often creates an impression of a very coherent, strategic China with a model, almost like a blueprint it intends to export. It’s important to recognize that China is increasingly interested in showcasing its experiences and success stories as a way of legitimizing its power. But at the core of it appears to be witnessing and promoting China’s success, rather than incorporating or shaping an export of a model.
The distinction here is nuanced. On one hand, there’s definitely an effort to show off what China has accomplished. But for now, I don’t think there’s a coherent model being produced within China and exported to other countries. That said, I want to qualify that certain governance spheres might be more prone to export, or to very concrete sharing of expertise. For instance, in the context of exporting surveillance technology, Chinese companies also offer training that may enhance repressive capabilities. There is also excellent work done by Sheena Chestnut Greitens and her co-authors on China’s police trainings. But when it comes to officials more broadly learning about China’s political and economic governance, I found, at least from my experience, that there is no concrete model being introduced to them.
This gives us two things to think about. First, we should be a little more cautious about what we claim China is doing. If we call it a model, it provokes a different, much more alarmist set of responses, because exporting a model is a big deal. How do we respond to that? What does it mean for the Global South, and for the role of the US and the West more broadly?
At the same time, we shouldn’t disregard how much effort China puts into showing itself off, and we should focus on what that actually implies. Rather than fixating on alarmist realities that might not exist, we can look at the more nuanced approaches we’re witnessing and what they mean. I think what they mean is that many of the participants in training, and many visitors, might change their perceptions of China. They might soften how they see it. In the book I describe how they soften their views of the Chinese political system, and some come away thinking it might be more democratic than they anticipated.
And why does it matter? Well, because the very idea of democracy might get stretched to the point that it loses its meaning. China says its a democracy, and the US is a democracy. What does it mean to actually have a democratic system? And how do we do democratic governance training in the future when China itself says it’s a democracy? I think we’re experiencing something a little more murky, less unequivocal, but nonetheless very significant, because Perceptions may change through these experiences, but that doesn’t mean these countries will import a specific model from China.
GP: This isn’t a question I’d written out, but it reminds me of a conversation I recently had with one of my former academic directors in Shanghai. He described how students and tourists who come to China often see a curated image, whether through soft power on social media or through the activities in their academic program. Do you feel the narratives China disseminates abroad match what foreign visitors experience when they come to China itself?
MR: I think the narratives might be quite similar. There’s a lot of emphasis on China’s economic success story, with rural governance in particular often elevated as a key illustration of success. There’s also a lot of talk about technology: China as extremely high-tech, with impressive contemporary governance and infrastructure. There are increasing forays into Chinese culture, whether contemporary culture, video games, or animation, which gets promoted in recent narratives about China as well.
But witnessing China and experiencing this spectacle directly is arguably more persuasive than simply sharing narratives through media. In part, that’s because Chinese state media has very little uptake. People don’t really treat it as their primary reference point, even on China, and it’s not very popular, so its narratives might never reach the audience. But the narratives on their own may also be less convincing than being able to witness, and participate in, the Chinese success story. That’s why there’s so much investment in attracting more foreigners to China, whether on organized tours or as regular tourists, students, or exchange scholars. There’s a lot of initiative to showcase what China is about, but as you rightfully put it, it’s a curated experience. Making sure it’s carefully choreographed, and shows only the best parts of China, is at the heart of this type of tour.
GP: Why did you choose Ethiopia in particular as your critical case, and which of your findings do you expect to be applicable to other countries?
MR: To me, Ethiopia offered an unusually favorable case for potential Chinese influence, particularly in the diplomatic arena, because there was already so much fertile ground for it. When I was doing my research, over 600 Chinese companies were operating in Ethiopia, and it was the second-largest loan recipient from China. There were also very strong political ties, built gradually, between the Chinese Communist Party and Ethiopia’s main political party, which used to be called the EPRDF and is now the Prosperity Party. And, of course, the African Union being based in Addis Ababa elevates Ethiopia’s importance to China as a gateway to the rest of the continent.
So it appeared to be a potentially more favorable case. But even here, I discovered so many frictions and tensions in negotiations with China, which I would argue apply anywhere. Even in the case more likely to succeed, you still see frictions that highlight some limitations of Chinese image-making more broadly.
As for how this applies elsewhere, there are two angles. On the one hand, we can take the frictions and think about them on a larger scale. This is a project that is, at the very least, partially successful, and the limitations uncovered here would likely apply in other cases that are less favorable for China. On the other hand, the mechanisms themselves, the strategies from tangible to ideational to censorial, could be studied across different contexts. It would be interesting to compare Ethiopia with Kenya or Brazil, for instance, much more democratic contexts where there’s so much more public contestation of China. Would China still practice similar levels of censorship and facilitate similar engagement with its ideals and values, or would we see much more public negotiation and pushback? I think that would be fascinating to explore.
I also think those core tenets, the combination of the ideational, tangible, and censorial, are likely to apply in many contexts, in part because they reflect China’s domestic reality. At home, the promotion of China’s legitimacy often combines some propaganda, some persuasion, and censorship, along with a lot of effort to perform as legitimate, which shows the system delivering something tangible to its own citizens. So we see some of the same playbook materialize globally.
GP: In Ethiopia in particular, you noted that elites request, negotiate, and sometimes disregard Chinese offerings. Why do you think they have this sense of agency, and why is this agency so often missing from analysis of China and Africa?
MR: I think that agency is increasingly revealed and studied in the context of Chinese economic encounters with African countries. We see and hear a lot about agency in that context, but less when we look at the so-called soft power diplomatic encounters. In part, that’s because we tend to overfocus on China itself, sometimes overestimating its influence, and look less at how it’s actually received. When reception is studied, we often look at public opinion polls. How are people responding to China? Favorably, unfavorably? You don’t really capture agency through that, because you can only see a more binary response.
But in the context of my study, I looked more specifically at how the different groups of people targeted by these initiatives engaged with what was being offered to them, whether ideals, censorial pressures, or practical offerings. Across the board, I found a lot of agency in recreating this relationship and reshaping Chinese power on the ground. Some asked for a better deal, more scholarships, or more favorable conditions, for instance, when a Confucius Institute initiative was involved. Others considered which norms seemed explicable and relatable to an Ethiopian audience, and which did not.
Take the win-win idea, the benevolence piece that China promotes. So often it’s not seen as authentic. A lot of these officials would push back, at least privately, on the idea that win-win is a framework that represents China and Africa. They saw China as the more powerful actor, and the relationship as, at the very least, a partial win for Africa and more of a win for China. That’s how they would characterize it.
And then, of course, there’s censorship, where there’s also an effort to rationalize it as beneficial to Ethiopia. The thinking is that protecting this relationship is better for Ethiopia in the long term than publishing very critical things about China. Across the board, there are very subtle ways in which this dynamic gets reconfigured. That’s something I found, maybe not surprising, but very important to highlight. It was also interesting to think about agency as more than just resistance. We often think of agency as simply pushing back, resisting China. But it’s not really resistance in the pure sense. A lot of it is also complicity, very subtle negotiation, and reconfiguration that isn’t quite explicit.
If you look only at resistance, you might conclude that they aren’t really resisting at all: they’re accepting everything, going on the trips, taking up all kinds of initiatives, the material ones, and they’re censoring. But from a different perspective, there’s a complicit yet very active effort to make this relationship work better for Ethiopia, to make sure the balance shifts, at least slightly, toward Ethiopia. That makes us think more carefully about what agency even means when a very powerful actor enters a less politically powerful country.
GP: We’ve talked a little bit about censorship in Ethiopia. In your book, you show that Ethiopian officials and editors took part in self-censorship on China. How does this work in practice, and how does it differ from direct coercion?
MR: This is a great question. I’ll give some examples of how it works in practice, then say a little about where it comes from and how it differs from coercion.
In practice, Chinese actors on the ground care a great deal about publicity for their initiatives, especially externally. When something is announced or newly launched, they want it to be very publicly visible. So their Ethiopian collaborators, who might be public relations officials from different ministries, communication officials, or journalists, publicize or co-publicize these initiatives. They organize press conferences arranged so that China looks favorable, and they invite journalists who will ask favorable questions. In effect, they are complicit in setting up a very public celebration of what China is doing on the ground.
When it comes to further writing about these initiatives as they progress, the publications mostly emphasize positive stories. They write pieces that celebrate, congratulate, or in some ways affirm Chinese influence in Ethiopia. So there’s a lot of self-censorship as well. In many of these interviews, journalists and editors admitted that they’re not allowed to publish something negative, or not willing to risk it.
Part of this response is to domestic pressures: an editor may not want negative stories, or he may respond to regulatory policies that say any major trading partner should be presented in a positive light. But part of it also responds to China. If you publish something negative, it might upset China, and China might react in a way that affects the Ethiopian economy or society. So it comes both from internal self-censorship and from some fear of repercussions on the Chinese side.
What’s different about coercion is that it’s direct, forceful control over how someone narrates something. In this dynamic with China, there are a few cases where Chinese actors, especially locally based ones like entrepreneurs and people from the semi-private sector, try to coerce Ethiopian journalists, especially those doing investigative reporting, into not publishing a negative story. Coercion can take the form of bribes or threats: offering a certificate or a lot of money, or threatening them with something like, “Hey, your government is watching you, be careful.” All kinds of coercive tactics, in both narratives and actions.
But for the most part, this control and containment is very subtle. Say an Ethiopian journalist wants to write a story about China, even a positive one. After the launch of an event is over, the Chinese side typically doesn’t respond to inquiries, so the journalist gets no information and no access. Controlling information access is one of the core dimensions of guarding China’s image: if you don’t provide information, how can anyone write a story? There’s no story to tell. We can debate whether that’s subtle coercion or something else, but I see it as fitting under censorial power, because limiting information access is a form of control. As a result, these journalists are more inclined to be complicit. Even if they want to write the story, information access is so challenging that it doesn’t make sense to attempt it.
So, this strategy is not quite direct coercion, but there is definitely containment and controlled information access, which in turn shapes and reinforces self-censorship among local media practitioners. However, this isn’t true only for Ethiopian media practitioners, who of course work in a very state-controlled media environment. Other scholars have studied similar dynamics elsewhere in Africa, including Kenya, and found that journalists there also struggle to get information from China across the board. This is a big challenge. Even if you try to write something interesting and multidimensional about China, information access will be a major impediment.
GP: That was one of the parts of the book that stuck with me most: the information access. If you do not have the data or the information, there is no story.
MR: This was one of my favorite parts to write. I added this part late in the project. I kept coming across the theme of information and control in different interviews, especially in my latest fieldwork, and I thought, this is really interesting, because it is part of the story. If you can’t write about it, how are you supposed to create a story? There’s no narrative if there’s no access. So part of the approach is not only to tell the story but to contain how it’s being told. That came through most from the Ethiopian side. When I asked how they write about China, over and over they emphasized the subtle forms of censorship.
It’s also something we hear about in discussions on China’s transnational repression, which typically targets diaspora groups, where China is repressing its own people. Here it’s not really repression. It’s something much more subtle: just not giving information. I found that very intriguing.
GP: Did you find similar cases amongst other case studies? I know you focused on Ethiopia, but do you feel like there are other countries where the information access problem was really similar?
MR: There’s a scholar, Hangwei Li, who is based in Germany right now. She wrote a few pieces that I also cited in this chapter, dealing with other African contexts, and she found similar dynamics in terms of information access and control. She even interviewed some Chinese embassy representatives and other actors I didn’t get to access as much in my research. They told her they don’t share information because they’re so worried about how it will be reinterpreted, misinterpreted, and redirected in local discourse. Basically, the risk of not sharing is lower than the risk of sharing. A big story is wonderful, but if your information sharing leads to a slightly negative story, you might face all kinds of repercussions within the system. You might be demoted or criticized. So it’s not worth it to share.
This also reminds me of China’s domestic context. In March 2024, China cancelled the premier’s annual press conference following the National People’s Congress, breaking with a tradition that existed for three decades. These press conferences were always highly choreographed, with questions vetted in advance. But even this highly pre-censored press conference was eliminated. To me, this growing domestic sensitivity is important to take into consideration in thinking about China’s global censorial practices. The two patterns are interconnected.
GP: Another point of interest to me was that both Ethiopian participants and Chinese practitioners looked toward the West as a benchmark of success or a destination. Did this surprise you at all? And what does this mean for how we understand South-South influence?
MR: It did surprise me a bit. I didn’t expect to think about the West that much during this fieldwork. I thought it was just going to be about China. As we think about media narratives of Chinese influence, China being so powerful and so influential, I didn’t expect to encounter so many narratives, discussions, and curious comments about the West on either side. I had assumed this would be a more bilateral story.
But throughout these encounters, it was very evident that the West, a very broad category, or the imagination of the West, featured prominently. In part because I’m coming from the US, the United States featured quite strongly in some of these discussions, but so did Western Europe and Canada, along with the idea of Western liberal democracy or Western culture. It often came up in a very imaginary form. This imagination of, and desire to access, the West was evident on both sides. Chinese practitioners thought of the West as the final destination, the mark of success. For a diplomat or journalist, a posting in the US or Western Europe is very prestigious, and it means you’ve really accomplished a lot in your career. Ethiopian officials were trying to improve their qualifications, get a PhD, or build some new capacity, and when they wanted capacity-building training, Western destinations were seen as the markers of quality. So on both sides, there was a quality aspiration toward the West.
It showed up in cultural consumption too, in some really ironic everyday stories of Chinese Confucius Institute directors consuming Hollywood films or Western music, and the same on the Ethiopian side. They weren’t consuming each other’s culture. They were mediating the encounter through Western culture, which I thought was really interesting, and maybe in some ways expected, but still quite surprising to me.
GP: Do you feel like China could ever replace the US and the West as that kind of cultural pillar for countries to look toward when it comes to quality metrics or development aspirations?
MR: Your question contains two themes. The first is cultural pillar, which I associate more with popular culture, aspiration, and imagining a place you might eventually want to live. That means aspiring to move somewhere because the culture is attractive, or because you can picture yourself as part of that culture or context. I think that’s much harder for China to accomplish, for several reasons. One is that the language is extremely difficult, and English is still very much the dominant global language. Without linguistic competency, which very few people still have, it’s harder for the nuances and varieties of Chinese culture to break through.
Then there is the issue of migration. China isn’t imagined as a migration endpoint. It’s a place to study, to visit, to experience, and then you go back to your country. Some people still move there, setting up businesses or staying long-term, but I think it’s very hard for someone from Ethiopia to imagine becoming Chinese. By contrast, you can imagine becoming an American if you come to America and stay long enough, even if it’s not that long. You might start to identify as an American, and even as a particular type of American. Many Ethiopians who study in the US identify with a specific state. They’ll say, “I’m an Oregonian” or “I’m a New Yorker.” They adopt the identity of a local state or city because they really feel they could belong there, and not just for the short term. I found that intriguing.
Chinese culture is definitely making strides. We’re seeing more of it go global, but it’s still not at the level of Western cultural exports, or even South Korea or Japan. There’s also a lot more familiarity with Turkish popular culture in Ethiopia, like the films and soap operas being exported. I saw them being watched everywhere in public spaces. You see much less attention paid to Chinese short dramas, although that may change with time. Those trends seem a little difficult to overturn.
The development story and development aspirations are a bit different, because they’re less about culture and more about a certain kind of success story. Something that struck me in my interviews is that China was often referred to as “the future.” That doesn’t necessarily mean good or bad; it just looks futuristic. When you go to China, you experience the architecture, the technology, the cashless society, and the way China has moved far ahead of, arguably, the rest of the world in some of these domains. It feels like, wow, this is the future. It’s very modern, and very different from anywhere else you might visit. At the very least, it’s comparable to major cities. Shanghai is comparable to New York, but in many ways it functions better. It’s more fluid somehow, and more livable.
So in that sense, yes, there is something aspirational about it. But it’s so far ahead that it’s almost hard to imagine how you could become China. You look at it and think, wow, this is possible, but how do you incorporate that in your own country? And going back to the question of the model, if there’s no model to mimic and no blueprint, then it looks intimidatingly exciting, but you don’t quite know how to infuse that story, or that developmental paradigm, into your own country.
GP: Your book challenges the claim that China is replacing the West in the Global South. But given recent shifts in US diplomacy, and a Pew Research poll showing that China is now viewed more favorably than the US in a majority of countries, has your view of the competition changed since the book was published?
MR: We definitely have to be mindful of the shifts in US diplomacy. But the way I see it, American retrenchment can create some openings for China, and an opening is not the same thing as successful influence. I hope part of this book’s contribution is to encourage more caution in attributing influence to an opening.
The common logic is: the US withdrew, China is the major power, therefore it will succeed, and there’s almost nothing left to compete on. It’s already taking over. I think that can be a fallacy, for three reasons. First, as the book shows, there are many inconsistencies in how China itself engages in image-making. Second, there’s a great deal of pushback, negotiation, and reinterpretation of China on the ground. Third, even if US power is changing, that doesn’t mean people no longer imagine or aspire to engage with the US.
If we dismiss the US as already gone, a policymaker might conclude there’s no point in doing anything, because China is already winning. I don’t think that’s the case. If you ask a young person in Ethiopia today whether they’d want to come study here, or have a fellowship or exchange experience, I think most of them would say yes. So there’s still a lot of space for competing, at the very least by offering an alternative experience or showing interest, engagement, and investment, even though our overarching geopolitics have changed.
The bigger point is not to assume that US absence automatically produces Chinese attraction. China, like the US, is seen as a major power but also a very complicated one, which people may aspire to but also resent and fear. Just because an opening exists doesn’t mean China automatically takes over, and that’s something we should be cautious about.
GP: I think that’s a narrative that isn’t often said out loud, and I’m glad that you touched on that in the book. Sometimes we can be very doomist and pessimistic when it comes to openings for influence, but the reality is that, like you said, if those openings aren’t taken advantage of, it does not necessarily mean that China is having direct, overpowering influence.
MR: That’s right. It’s not just immediately accepted just because the US is not there.
GP: I have one final question for you. What shifts are you watching now since your book was released? Where do you feel your framework should be tested next?
MR: There are a couple of things I’m watching. Some relate directly to this project, and some are newer ideas for new projects. The first is the importance of China’s technological power to its image-making and appeal. We hear so much about China’s AI and US-China competition in that domain. What will that look like, and how will it show up through the mechanisms I outlined? There’s an element of tangible enticement, in providing access to Chinese AI models and technologies. There’s also something ideational: what are those models conveying, and what are they communicating about China in particular? Arguably, there is something ideational about AI. And then there’s a censorial question: what can be asked or discussed? So I’m thinking about how these three facets apply to the AI and digital technology questions at the heart of US-China competition.
I’m also thinking about the withdrawal of US diplomacy, and whether it simply leads to more acceptance of China or whether China is taking advantage of the space. At least until recently, I was surprised, or maybe not so surprised, but intrigued, to see that China hasn’t taken over many of the areas the US abandoned, USAID projects, for instance. We don’t see China automatically coming in and taking over what was left behind, but rather continuing on its own trajectory. In fact, alongside the US withdrawal, China is also diminishing its lending to developing countries, because it has become unsustainable to lend and build these big BRI infrastructure projects. So it’s interesting to observe what China is doing on its own terms versus in response to the US. How much of it is a reaction? Does China care about taking over, or does it want to quietly remain very engaged and, as a result, influential? It doesn’t have to do more or completely change its strategy. That’s something else I’m observing and thinking about.
I’m also thinking about other actors entering this space, including Turkey, Russia, and India. I haven’t done much empirical work on this, but I think we often get stuck in the binary of the US versus China. What about these other rising powers? How do their strategies differ from China’s? Some of them are semi-autocratic or highly authoritarian, so what is their approach? Are they competing with each other, or imitating each other?
I’m also fascinated by the afterlife of some of these Chinese projects, beyond the image-making diplomacy: the infrastructure projects, the BRI itself. It now seems to be in a strange mode. It’s not quite decline, but something is transforming. The peak of the BRI has passed, so what happens to these sites and projects once it has? Are they abandoned? Do they become localized? We seem to talk about them less once the excitement vanishes, and we don’t quite know what’s going on. In Ethiopia, I found that many of these projects worked less well as the years passed. Some of the trains stopped running, and people stopped talking about the project. It was really interesting to see this temporal effect on Chinese influence in these spaces. Suddenly it’s past its prime, and then what happens? That’s not quite clear.
Those are some of the things I’m intrigued by. I’m also very intrigued by Chinese efforts, both official and unofficial, to understand the rest of the world at this moment of increasing Chinese influence, and to categorize it. Think of the African studies centers and area studies centers opening and thriving across China. There’s an effort to make the world legible to China, not only to impact the rest of the world but also to understand and grapple with different countries and categories, like the Global South versus the Global North. Which regions and countries are prioritized by China? What are young Chinese people trying to study and learn about? Are they interested in learning Swahili, Amharic, or Russian? This research would teach us not only how China tries to shape the world, but also about how its encounters with the world are changing China.