Research Seminar: Chinese Soft Power

This talk introduces the key themes from a new Element book.

Chinese Soft Power is the first book in the new Cambridge Elements Global China series. While Western media tend to depict China’s soft power efforts as ineffective and even dangerous, the Chinese government continues to invest in promoting its image globally. Rather than definitively proclaiming Chinese soft power as either a success or a failure, Maria Repnikova examines China’s complex and often contradictory soft power performance. She shares the official visions for various projects and dissects how they actually work. Chinese initiatives are at once ambitious and deliberately adaptive to local contexts, and yet they remain contested and perceived with mixed credibility, especially amongst external audiences.

Maria Repnikova is an Assistant Professor in Global Communication at Georgia State University. She is an expert in Chinese political communication, including critical journalism, propaganda, cyber nationalism, and most recently China’s soft power campaigns, especially in the African context. Dr Repnikova has published widely in both academic presses and journals, as well as in international media like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. She is the author of the award-winning book, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism (Cambridge University Press 2017). She is currently working on her third book on Chinese soft power in Ethiopia. Dr Repnikova holds a DPhil (PhD) in Politics at Oxford University where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

Please contact mediaresearchsupport@leeds.ac.uk before 12pm on 2nd February to request an invitation.