Join us to hear Joshua Kurlantzick discuss his new book, "Beijing's Global Media Offensive" in our newest webinar.
Zoom
May 24, 2023 | 12:00 PM PST
The World Affairs Council of Orange County & Global Santa Fe present:
Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World
featuring Joshua Kurlantzick
A Zoom Webinar event
Date & Time:
Wednesday, May 24, 2023
12 pm PST
Location:
Zoom
Tickets:
Free for members and students
$10 for non-members
Thank you to our co-sponsor, Global Santa Fe! Our moderator, Jim Falk, is the Programs Chair at Global Santa Fe!
Thank you to our co-promoter, Phoenix Committee on Foreign Relations (PCFR)!
Speaker Bio:
Joshua Kurlantzick
Twitter handle: @JoshKurlantzick
Joshua Kurlantzick is senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is the author, most recently, of Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign To Influence Asia and the World. Kurlantzick was previously a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he studied Southeast Asian politics and economics and China’s relations with Southeast Asia, including Chinese investment, aid, and diplomacy. Previously, he was a fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy and a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy. He is currently focused on China’s relations with Southeast Asia, and China’s approach to soft and sharp power, including state-backed media and information efforts and other components of soft and sharp power. He is also working on issues related to the rise of global populism, populism in Asia, and the impact of COVID-19 on illiberal populism and political freedom overall.
Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World is an analysis of how China is attempting to become a media and information superpower, seeking to shape the politics, local media, and information environments of both East Asia and the world.
Since China’s ascendancy toward major-power status began in the 1990s, observers have focused on its economic growth and expanding military. China was limited to projecting power through information and media. That has begun to change. Beijing’s state-backed media has been overhauled and expanded. At a time when many democracies’ media outlets are consolidating due to financial pressures, China’s largest state media outlets, like the newswire Xinhua, are modernizing, professionalizing, and expanding in an attempt to reach an international audience. Overseas, Beijing attempts to impact local media, civil society, and politics by having Chinese firms buy up local media outlets, expanding China’s social media giants, and controlling the wireless and wired technology through which information flows.
In Beijing's Global Media Offensive, Joshua Kurlantzick focuses on how this is playing out in both China’s immediate neighborhood—Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand—and the United States. He traces the ways in which China is trying to build an information and influence superpower, but also examines the conventional wisdom that Beijing has enjoyed great success with these efforts. While China has worked hard to build a global media and information superpower, it often has failed to gain from its efforts, and has undermined itself with overly assertive, alienating diplomacy. Still, Kurlantzick contends, China’s media, information and political influence campaigns will continue to expand and adapt, helping Beijing export its political model and protect the ruling Party. An authoritative account of how this sophisticated and multi-pronged campaign is unfolding, Beijing's Global Media Offensive provides a new window into China's attempts to make itself an information superpower.
Link to learn more about Joshua's book and purchase: https://www.cfr.org/book/beijings-global-media-offensive
Moderator Bio:
Jim Falk
Jim Falk, president emeritus of the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth, retired in March 2021 after serving as the organization’s president for two decades. Jim co-hosts Perspectives Matter, a McCuistion Program, on KERA-Dallas (PBS). Now residing in Santa Fe, New Mexico he is member of the Board of Global Santa Fe where he chairs the program committee. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and honorary consul of Morocco for the states of New Mexico and Texas.
Jim has had the privilege of interviewing many prominent politicians, scholars, authors, and diplomats including James Baker, Condoleezza Rice, Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, Mike Pompeo, Leon Panetta, David Petraeus, Susan Glasser, Peter Baker, William Barr, Richard Haass, Michael Beschloss, Michael Lewis, Jeremi Suri, and Susan Shirk.
His interest in travel and global affairs grew from high school years spent in Tunis where he attended a French lycée. He is a graduate of Washington and Lee University and earned his MA in Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia specializing in international law and Middle East politics.
