Competing for Soft Power: China’s Image-Making in Africa

On Thursday October 29, the Asia Policy Program will host a public book talk on Competing for Soft Power: China’s Image-Making in Africa with author Dr. Maria Repnikova, an expert on Chinese political communication and a scholar of information politics in China and Russia.

Dr. Repnikova’s book reveals the ambitious but disjointed display of Chinese diplomatic influence in Africa. Specifically, it identifies the core mechanisms of China’s image-making: tangible enticement, ideational promotion, and censorial power. The in-depth fieldwork in Ethiopia further demonstrates China’s uneven image-making. Chinese messengers can improvise official agendas and Ethiopian recipients strategically appropriate and negotiate Chinese power. Counterintuitively China’s engagement with Africa has also reinforced a shared longing for the West as a professional destination and standard setter. Challenging the popular claims about China as replacing the West in the Global South, therefore, this book showcases China’s impressive strategies, along with the inconsistencies in its influence-wielding, as well as the looming shadow of the West in mediating Sino-African ‘soft power’ encounters.

Dr. 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. Dr. Repnikova 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. In the past, she was a Wilson Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center (2020-2021), a visiting fellow at the African Studies Center at Beijing University (2019), and a post-doctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication (2014-2016).