The Art of State Persuasion: China's Strategic Use of Media in Interstate Disputes

Why do nations actively publicise previously overlooked disputes, and why does domestic mobilisation sometimes fail to lead to aggressive policy?

The Art of State Persuasion explores China’s strategic use of state propaganda during crises, revealing why certain disputes are amplified while others are downplayed. This variation depends on the alignment, or lack thereof, between Chinese state policy and public opinion. When public sentiment is more moderate than the government’s foreign policy objectives, a “mobilisation campaign” is initiated. Conversely, when public opinion is more hawkish, a “pacification campaign” is deployed to mollify public sentiment.

Frances Yaping Wang is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colgate University. She was previously an Assistant Professor at the Singapore Management University, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s International Security Center, a Minerva-United State Institute of Peace Scholar, a predoctoral fellow at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies of the George Washington University, and a senior editor at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received her PhD from the University of Virginia.