Reshaping China’s Global Image
About this Event
In-person Panel Discussion
Reshaping China’s Global Image: The Uneven Results of Its Soft Power Initiatives
This event is co-hosted with the School of Social and Political Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
Over the past two decades, as China’s economic power has grown, the Chinese state has invested heavily in promoting trust and goodwill abroad and reshaping global narratives about China through a range of soft-power initiatives. But how successful has this project been? And what factors shape its outcomes? Drawing on new research grounded in diverse empirical contexts, three leading scholars of China's soft power and political communication—Jonathan Hassid, Maria Repnikova and Minglu Chen—address these questions. Together, their work shows that China’s image-shaping efforts have produced uneven results, varying across different domains of cultural production and across different regions of the world.
About the speakers
(Chair) is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies at University of Technology Sydney. A fellow of Australian Academy of the Humanities since 2016, she is now the Deputy Director of Australia-China Relations Institute, UTS. She has written on China’s soft power initiatives and “going global” strategies, including China’s public diplomacy efforts through diasporic media. Her latest work on these topics includes WeChat and the Chinese Diaspora (2022) and Digital Transnationalism: Chinese-language Media in Australia (2023).
is the Associate Dean (Student Affairs) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. She is an associate professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences and the Director of the China Studies Centre’s Local China Project. Her research focuses on social and political change in China, especially the interaction between entrepreneurs and the state, local governance, and women’s political participation. Her work has been published in leading academic journals, including The China Quarterly, The China Journal, and The Pacific Review.
is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Iowa State University and Lucken Faculty Fellow (2024-2029). After completing his PhD in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, he served as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the China Research Centre of the University of Technology Sydney. He has published extensively on the Chinese media, Chinese politics, and symbolic politics in the Journal of Chinese Political Science, China Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Communication, Journalism, Asian Survey, and elsewhere.
Maria Repnikova is an expert on Chinese political communication, an Associate Professor in Global Communication, and the inaugural William C. Pate Chair in Strategic Communication at Georgia State University. She is the author of the award-winning book, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism (Cambridge 2017), as well as the recent, Chinese Soft Power (Cambridge Global China Element Series) and the forthcoming, Competing for Soft Power: China’s Image-Making in Africa (CUP). Her public writings have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Atlantic, as well as in many academic journals. Other than working on China, Repnikova does comparative work on information politics in China and Russia. Dr. Repnikova holds a doctorate in politics from Oxford University where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She is a recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the Wilson Fellowship (2020-2021).
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