A summary of the event on the CCICD’s social media accounts said the webinar aimed to address the ineffectiveness of messages targeting international audiences because it adopts the same tone as those aimed at domestic audiences, which foreigners do not find convincing.
“There is no distinction between external and internal propaganda, and external propaganda has become like internal propaganda. It is a challenge and a pain for the current international communication work,” it said.
“China is never short of good stories. But why do so many narratives that tell a good China story end up being cliched or fail to deliver the message?”
One speaker citied the documentary Journey of Warriors, a joint collaboration between Tencent and the Discovery Channel. Photo: Weibo
CCICD was formed in 2021 to publish and promote books about the Communist Party and its key documents.
It said one conclusion from the online discussions was that storytelling was more effective when it focused on individual stories or targeted specific audiences rather than trying to tell a grand story about China.
“The most important point is whether foreign audiences could relate to [the stories] emotionally,” It said.
The event also heard warnings against copying Western narratives or endorsing criticisms of China.
In 2013 President Xi Jinping urged media to “tell China’s stories well” and to enhance the country’s “international discourse power” by crafting narratives about the country’s peaceful rise.
China is also willing to invest a large amount of money to spread its message, for example by hiring a big screen in New York’s Times Square to broadcast its message since 2011.
However, amid increasing tension between China and the West, and the rise of “wolf warrior” diplomacy – named after a series of highly nationalistic action films targeted at domestic viewers – a number of surveys have shown that Western perceptions of China have become increasingly negative.
Clarke – who won Oscars in 1989 and 2014 for documentaries on a cancer patient and a mother detained in a Nazi prison camp – said: “China has been the subject of a lot of negative publicity in the West for the last 10 years. What I am trying to do is to counter that negative publicity, not by telling the happy and good stories in China but by simply telling the truth of what is happening here.”
Clarke’s film Better Angels featured ordinary Americans and Chinese people. Photo: Handout
The webinar is part of a project called Image Possibilities Co Production Plan launched last year to sponsor international collaboration and produce documentaries about China.
The project is co-hosted by China International Communications Group, Discovery Channel, the Fujian Provincial Administration of Radio and Television, Fujian Media Group, Tencent and video-streaming platform Bilibili under the guidance of various government departments, including the State Council Information Office.
