China’s International Communication Strategy Faces Growing Pains Despite Rapid Expansion

China’s ambitious push to reinvent its international communication strategy, initiated under President Xi Jinping in 2018, is encountering significant structural challenges despite its rapid numerical growth, according to a recent assessment published in the journal International Communications.

The strategy, which the Chinese Communist Party still refers to as “external propaganda,” has moved beyond traditional state media giants like Xinhua and CGTN to leverage local and regional networks through a nationwide system of International Communication Centers (ICCs). These centers, which now number more than 200 across China’s provincial, municipal, and county levels, were established to “tell China’s story” through localized cultural and regional narratives.

However, a cover story in the latest edition of International Communications, published by the China International Communications Group under the Central Propaganda Department, identifies deep structural problems threatening the effectiveness of these centers. The article, authored by scholars Huang Dianlin and Cheng Bingshun, highlights three key challenges facing the ICC system as it attempts to boost China’s “international discourse power.”

Resource imbalances and poor coordination plague the network from top to bottom, according to the authors. The centers depend heavily on government budgets rather than market revenue, potentially leaving them vulnerable when regional finances tighten. This suggests that policymakers may have unrealistically assumed these propaganda outlets would become commercially viable.

Geographic disparities further complicate the situation. Eastern coastal regions dominate professional talent, mature content production chains, and industry resources, while central and western areas face severe shortages. The provincial-municipal-county hierarchy suffers from blurred roles, with county-level centers burdened beyond their capacity while provincial centers handle excessively detailed work.

Another critical issue is content redundancy. Regions with similar cultural and tourism resources produce nearly identical material, creating what the authors describe as “serious homogenization” that wastes resources through redundant competition rather than creating distinctive appeal.

Platform mismatches present another significant challenge. ICC operators, typically from traditional broadcast and print media backgrounds, produce content following conventional media logic that fails to adapt to international social media platforms and audiences. Distribution strategies generally mirror traditional one-way publishing approaches, ignoring the interactive social features of platforms like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter).

The tension between propaganda goals and creating viral content leaves many centers with little motivation for creative innovation. Most centers adopt formulaic “Discover + place name” branding patterns with overlapping content styles that harm their chances of algorithmic promotion and weaken user loyalty.

Weak evaluation systems further constrain effectiveness improvement. Current assessment metrics focus on superficial indicators like follower counts, views, and likes, failing to capture deeper measures of content reach, user emotional identification, attitude change, or behavioral influence. This shallow evaluation system prevents centers from accurately understanding what overseas audiences actually need and prefer.

The result, according to the authors, is that ICC international communication easily falls into the trap of “talking to oneself,” unable to move from quantitative expansion to real quality improvement. What remains unspoken in the analysis is that ICCs have made little genuine attempt to understand foreign audiences, reflecting a fundamental tension in “external propaganda,” which assumes one-way communication.

The scholars propose solutions centered on better “coordination” across three dimensions. They suggest cross-regional collaboration to pool resources through “mega-region” models grouping provinces with similar cultural backgrounds and development levels. They also recommend clarifying roles across administrative tiers, with provincial centers focusing on strategy and training while municipal and county centers concentrate on localized content production.

Behind this assessment lies an unspoken contradiction: the authors essentially call for ICCs to act like credible and relevant media organizations to attract and serve audiences—precisely what they cannot do under a system prioritizing Party-approved messaging over audience engagement.

The study concludes that local ICCs stand at a critical turning point from “quantitative expansion” to “effectiveness enhancement.” However, achieving high-quality development will be challenging for these centers, which are generally operated by propaganda officials rather than media professionals.

Even if China’s ICCs fall short of genuine engagement with foreign audiences, the flooding of the global information space with government-directed messaging could impact information integrity, particularly on China-related news, in ways that are difficult to predict. The industrial scale at which this project is being pursued means that observers globally must take this trend seriously, despite its current limitations.