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Soft Power

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Media

Andrew Grant on China’s Response to the Nepal Floods on BBC News

August 27, 2026

Andrew Grant (University of Tampa, USA) was recently featured in a BBC News interview discussing the devastating floods in Nepal and China’s response in the aftermath of the disaster. Watch the interv...

Central Asian Agency: from the Shanghai Five to the SCO

August 21, 2026

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is usually traced to the 1990s “Shanghai Five” process and read as a product of strategic convergence between China and Russia. Yet its other participants, ...

Media

Shaoyu Yuan on China’s Soft Power at the 2026 World Cup in The Washington Post

July 17, 2026

Shaoyu Yuan (New York University, USA), a researcher with Mapping Global China, recently published an opinion piece in The Washington Post examining the growing presence of Chinese brands and technolo...

China’s Belt and Road must adapt to survive a hotter world

February 26, 2026

Originally published at Dialogue Earth https://dialogue.earth/en/climate/chinas-belt-and-road-must-adapt-to-survive-a-hotter-world/ under the Creative Commons BY NC ND licence.

Cityzenship: How Are Cities - not Nations - Remapping China’s International Education and Returnees

February 20, 2026

Studying abroad is often described as a journey between countries: leaving China, going to a host country, usually a “developed” western country, then returning. This brief argues that, for many Chine...

China’s Digital Diplomacy in Kazakhstan: A Study of Instagram Posts from 2024 to 2025

January 4, 2026

China’s global rise has crossed an inflection point. Where once the People’s Republic sought to create alternative institutions and multilateral alliances (e.g., the Shanghai Cooperation Organization,...

Symbolic power and the reception of Chinese narratives on the China–Pakistan economic corridor: adaptation and contestation

December 22, 2025

The emphasis on “discourse power” and “telling the China story” has been central to China’s international engagement over the past decade. While existing scholarship has critically examined the projec...

Beyond trade? Chinese private capital under the African Continental Free Trade Area

November 6, 2025

Since the early 2000s, imports from China have largely substituted imports from Europe; since the 2010s, Chinese firms are also localizing production activities in African economies. Increasing Chine...

Conceptualising autocracy promotion as commercialisation: marketising narratives and Chinese responses to central Asian protests

September 11, 2025

In recent decades, the global rise of autocracies has spurred scholarly investigations into why and how these regimes support one another. This article advances these debates by addressing the underth...

Book

Memoirs of a Confucius Institute Director, Volume 1

August 23, 2025

As China’s flagship platform for cultural diplomacy and international engagement, the global expansion of Confucius Institutes has been accompanied by growing controversy—particularly in the West. Thi...

Flexible embeddedness: how Chinese lead firms internationalise in Africa

August 12, 2025

The ‘rise of the South’, and particularly that of China, has promoted lively debates around the centrality of Southern firms in shaping the contours of twenty first century economic globalisation. Thi...

A New World Cop on the Beat? China’s Internal Security Outreach Under the Global Security Initiative

August 6, 2025

Global outreach by China’s internal security agencies is expanding, and now plays an important, yet overlooked role in the overall foreign and security policy of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). ...

Is China Really in the Driver’s Seat for BRI Projects in Africa?

March 19, 2025

The article “Is China Really in the Driver’s Seat for BRI Projects in Africa?” argues that Chinese involvement in Africa’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is often portrayed too simplistically as a top...

Security without Exclusivity: Hybrid Alignment under U.S.-China Competition

February 1, 2025

This article explores an emerging dynamic in the international system: Countries across the world are engaged in simultaneous security cooperation with both China and the United States. China and the ...

Can China Lead Global AI Governance?

January 7, 2025

Why AI Governance? The rapid development of AI has created a series of governance challenges that need to be tackled. To start with, the development of AI is going to transform future employment and w...

From play to power: china’s video games as instruments of soft power

November 25, 2024

This paper investigates the burgeoning role of video games as a strategic instrument of soft power, with a particular focus on China’s utilization of the gaming industry to extend its cultural and pol...

A tale of two ports: relational power in COSCO’s European port investments

November 19, 2024

China’s increasing presence in international port ownership and management has excited political anxieties among Western commentators based on a geopolitical framing that equates this internationalisa...

Closing the sub-frontier: corridorising Tibet and the social life of pervasive security

November 19, 2024

Western China’s border provinces’ domestic economic corridors are positive spaces that erase the negative spaces of the frontier. Frontiers, understood as spaces of incomplete sovereign control, threa...

China's Foreign Police Training: A Global Footprint

November 13, 2024

Global outreach by China’s internal security agencies is expanding. As China’s Global Security Initiative externalizes a concept of security focused on domestic stability and regime protection, the Pe...

Goodbye, Wolf Warrior: charting China's transition to a more accommodating diplomacy

September 9, 2024

- China has abolished its previous wolf-warrior diplomacy and is increasingly adopting a softer diplomatic tone, primarily driven by internal economic challenges such as a slowing economy and the need...

De-risking, re-balancing and recentralising: Intra-state relations in Chinese-backed transport infrastructure projects in Europe

August 31, 2024

China's Belt and Road Initiative is the most visible manifestation of the country's wider internationalisation efforts in which infrastructure connectivity projects are central. Existing spatialised n...

Knowledge Transfer Synergism between China and Africa: a case study in ethiopia’s manufacturing sector

August 9, 2024

Since 2000, China–Africa relations have expanded beyond trade and finance to include growing emphasis on knowledge sharing and industrial capacity building, particularly through the Forum on China–Afr...

Corridors, chokepoints and the contradictions of the Belt and Road Initiative

March 22, 2024

In popular, scholarly, business and governmental conceptualisations, ‘corridors’ are identified as fundamental components of connectivity and central to the China-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). H...

Tracing China’s diplomatic transition to wolf warrior diplomacy and its implications

November 18, 2023

This study investigates the evolution of China’s diplomacy, specifically its transition from a peaceful and low-profile approach to the assertive and confrontational wolf warrior style, and its implic...

China Planet: Ecological Civilization and Global Climate Governance

June 8, 2023

This article critically examines China’s concept of “ecological civilization” and its growing influence in global climate governance. While praised by some Western environmentalists as a decisive alte...

China’s Digital Footprint Grows in the Middle East & North Africa

June 8, 2023

The article China’s Digital Footprint Grows in the Middle East & North Africa discusses how China’s Digital Silk Road (DSR) — the digital component of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — is expanding...

‘Germany’s China City’: Iron Silk Road Terminal of Duisburg

June 8, 2023

Over the past decade, Duisburg has emerged as a prominent European node in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), despite being a mid-sized, post-industrial city facing structural economic challenges...

Beyond the BRI: the volumetric presence of China in Nepal

March 23, 2023

This paper conceptualizes ‘presence’ to analyse the volumetric growth of Chinese investment and development in Nepal from 2014 to 2021 in material, territorial and discursive terms. From physical expe...

China’s Minimalist Global Military Posture: Great Power Lite?

February 17, 2023

What explains the mismatch between China’s vast economic presence, significant diplomatic engagement around the world, and its miniscule global military posture? China’s global defense footprint – as ...

The Impact of China's AIIB on the World Bank

January 27, 2023

The World Bank, under the stewardship of the United States, stands out as the global leader among international development organizations. Does China's establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Invest...

‘Constructing’ heritage diplomacy in Central Asia: China’s Sinocentric historicisation of transnational World Heritage Sites

January 2, 2023

As the ancient Silk Road began acquiring new centrality in China’s soft power strategy in the mid-2000s, so did heritage diplomacy, which developed as an engagement tool for fostering relations with C...

China’s 16+1 Format in Crisis – Not Yet an Obituary

September 5, 2022

The article “China’s 16+1 Format in Crisis – Not Yet an Obituary” analyzes the current state and challenges of the 16+1 cooperation format, a diplomatic and economic initiative launched by China to de...

Chinese Soft Power

February 18, 2022

This Element presents an overarching analysis of Chinese visions and practices of soft power. Maria Repnikova's analysis introduces the Chinese theorization of the idea of soft power, as well as its p...

Power of blank spaces: A critical cartography of China's Belt and Road Initiative

October 26, 2021

A variety of maps depict a usefully approximate but inexact network of roads, rails, sea lanes and other infrastructures to represent something called China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). And yet, ...

Adaptive governance along Chinese-financed BRI railroad megaprojects in East Africa

January 20, 2021

As part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China is increasingly investing abroad and has become an important country for development financing. Many commentators have expressed concern that the c...

Below the Belt? Territory and Development in China's International Rise

August 8, 2020

China's internationalization has been heralded by some as a new era of South–South cooperation. Yet such framings of development are pitched at an abstract space of the ‘global South’ which conceals m...

Trans-Himalayan power corridors: Infrastructural politics and China's Belt and Road Initiative in Nepal

March 11, 2020

This article examines the shifting dimensions of Chinese infrastructural aid in Nepal, focusing on the politics of anticipation and enunciation that shape Nepali perceptions of Chinese-facilitated dev...

Crossing Khorgos: Soft power, security, and suspect loyalties at the Sino-Kazakh boundary

January 31, 2020

As China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) development projects deepen connections across Eurasia, the Sino-Kazakh border has been rematerialized in a manner that complicates the exercise of Chinese BR...

Book

Sovereignty in China: A Genealogy of a Concept since 1840

July 26, 2019

This book provides a comprehensive history of the emergence and the formation of the concept of sovereignty in China from the year 1840 to the present. It contributes to broadening the history of mode...

China’s double body: infrastructure routes and the mapping of China’s nation-state and civilization-state

February 4, 2019

In contemporary China, there are two cartographies that underlie geographical imaginations of China’s political, economic, and cultural nature. The first is the geobody, a bordered notion of the state...