by Donald M. Bishop
America’s public diplomacy—the planned presentation of the American people, society, government, and policies directly to publics in another country, aiming to increase understanding, mutuality, support, agreement, and cooperation—best thrives in open societies. It struggles in authoritarian states, particularly those led by a single party that claims to possess a unique blueprint for creating a more perfect society. China is such a party-state, as are North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba, and as the Soviet Union and its satellites, Nasser’s Egypt, and Saddam’s Iraq were.
Party-states oppress dissent with prisons, gulags, re-education, threats, disappearances, or roving abortion vans. They have their own newspapers, radio, and television to indoctrinate their populations. They instruct media in what may or may not be reported and discussed. The Party deforms people by limiting speech and thought and by insulating them from foreign, meaning free, information. Radio jamming was once a method; now they police and sometimes block the internet.
My Foreign Service career included leading public diplomacy in China, first as the American embassy’s deputy public affairs officer from 1997 to 2000 and then as the public affairs officer from 2003 to 2006. At the turn of the millennium there was a promising period of “engagement,” now replaced by Chinese distancing, hindrance, and even hostility to US information, media, cultural, education, and exchange initiatives.
Engagement: Practical, Active, Busy
In the late 1990s, the embassy took its lead from President Clinton. “This pragmatic policy of engagement, of expanding our areas of cooperation with China while confronting our differences openly and respectfully—this is the best way to advance our fundamental interests and our values and to promote a more open and free China.” This premised China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001. In 2005, the Bush administration’s deputy secretary of state, Robert Zoellick, called for China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system.
It was an active time. American companies established joint ventures. The American Chambers of Commerce thrived. The Foreign Commercial Service and the Foreign Agricultural Service busily promoted US exports. Sister ties between Chinese and American cities and universities expanded. Thousands of young Americans studied Chinese at their universities, worked for joint ventures or Chinese companies, and taught English. Working with Chinese counterparts were US agencies as diverse as the Federal Aviation Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and the Coast Guard.
And US public diplomacy—conducted by the press and cultural sections at the embassy and the five consulates in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Shenyang, and Wuhan—was fully “engaged.”
Frequent visits of administration principals (especially President Clinton’s nine-day visit in 1998 and visits by President Bush and by members of his cabinet) kept the information unit busy with press conferences, translation and circulation of speeches, photo-ops and photo sprays, media availabilities, and background briefings.
From the Supreme Court, Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke at law schools; the Minnesota Bar organized moot court sessions for law students; and with China’s top law school we sponsored translations of American law textbooks into Chinese.
The press and cultural sections co-sponsored speaker programs at universities and policy institutes, supported conferences by China’s American Studies Association and published a magazine, Jiaoliu. The International Visitor Leadership Program and several fellowships allowed Chinese to meet American counterparts, and the number of Chinese studying in the US multiplied.
Several years of hard negotiations in the late 1970s and early 1980s had re-established the Fulbright Program in China, and by century’s end American and Chinese Fulbrighters taught, studied, and researched both ways. Lest anyone think the program allowed Chinese to gain access to sensitive research at American universities, Fulbright grants for Chinese scholars were only for American Studies.
In 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II, we co-sponsored V+60 events and conferences in Beijing, Chongqing, and Kunming. The theme of my own speeches was “We were friends then; we must be friends now.” The gray-haired Flying Tigers, Hump Pilots, and Doolittle Raiders who came to China for the events all agreed. So did the elderly Chinese who had worked with them during the war.
Party-State Restrictions on Public Diplomacy Programs
This was “soft power” in action, but the Chinese government and the Communist Party had levers to assure that our programs would not undermine China’s character as an information-denied society, a controlled society, a society only as “open” as permitted.
There were always boundaries on our programs. We could program on “rule of law,” but no Chinese partner would co-sponsor a program on human rights. Any discussion of “the three T’s”—Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen—would provoke an angry Chinese response.
Visits by administration principals could break through some of this control. Schedules always included press conferences with both the Chinese and international press. By local convention, the first question was always asked by People’s Daily. That flagship party newspaper would report the event in a way that conformed to the Party’s line, and the “state owned” Xinhua News Agency would report it the same way. The international press asked good questions and reported the news to international audiences, but if an American official’s answers did not conform to the Party’s position, they were not reported in China. Indeed, no US principal’s remarks were ever published unedited or unredacted. Their remarks were cleansed before they were printed.
No program that questioned China’s tyrannical one-child policy was allowed. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, at the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, had said: “It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.” No part of her speech was ever published in China.
Ambassador Clark T. Randt—admirably—never gave a speech without mentioning human rights cases, but those comments were never reported in the media. When they were in Beijing, President Bush and Secretary of State Rice always attended a Chinese church service on Sunday, but their visits were untold in China. I was with former President Carter at Beijing University. During a Q&A with students, in his mild way he witnessed for Christ, but only those students in the room heard his testimony.
Three tiers of Party “reference” publications circulate foreign news articles to restricted readerships. Occasionally, I would see a copy of the lowest level “Reference News.” Its coverage of news was spotty, and translations of opinion pieces were rare. Even this “intra-party intelligence bulletin” would not contravene the Party’s censorship of foreign news.
Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening” had given US administrations the hope that “engagement” could foster a more liberal China. But Deng provided a different, internal counsel to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): “Hide your strength, bide your time.”
The Role of China’s Foreign Affairs Offices
The boundaries on US public diplomacy in China were placed by “Foreign Affairs Offices” (waiban) in every university, think tank, company, organization, province, or city. Our press and cultural sections could communicate with a mayor, government department, dean, or professor only through the waiban.
China’s universities knew that visits by foreign scholars, diplomats, or speakers could enrich the experience of their faculties and students, but a school’s Foreign Affairs Office guarded against any discussion of forbidden concepts. There were permissions and refusals—usually communicated to us as bu fangbian, “it’s not convenient.”
We did what we could. When I visited Xinjiang with other public diplomacy officers, the province’s waiban scheduled our visit carefully, ensuring we saw mostly Han rather than Uighur Xinjiang. We were taken to museums and snowy lakes, and folk dancers performed for us. I was prepared to speak of US-China engagement in areas like aviation and mining safety, but the only opportunity was at a roundtable with officials from local Foreign Affairs Offices. After we finished, the province waiban chief admitted “we’ve not been aware of this bilateral cooperation before.” Though our visit had virtually no “reach,” it was a small but necessary step toward other programs in the future, we hoped.
On a visit to Tibet, the Foreign Affairs Office arranged for us to see the Potola and the sights of Lhasa, and we were hosted for dinner, but the only meeting I had was with their Foreign Affairs Office. They saw no value in receiving English teaching materials.
Looking back on this period of engagement, I judge exchanges and promotion of study in the US were the more valuable public diplomacy programs. Speakers at law schools and the translation of law textbooks enlarged the thinking of China’s legal community. Subnational exchanges between American and Chinese cities and universities had great potential, but the Chinese took advantage of the American participants’ lack of background on China.
New Limits on Public Diplomacy Programs under Xi Jinping
In 2012, the year Xi Jinping became general secretary of the CCP, “Document Number Nine” was circulated, but not made public. It defined seven threats. Two were neoliberalism (meaning economic liberalization, privatization, and marketization) and historical nihilism (undermining the history of the Chinese Communist Party and questioning “reform and opening” and “socialism with Chinese characteristics”). The other five were the West’s idea of journalism, Western constitutional democracy, civil society, universal values, and freedom of the press.
Later, when the Party judged the 2019 demonstrations in Hong Kong were covertly supported by the US, the bans became stronger. China’s “wolf warrior diplomacy” – a confrontational style by its diplomats and spokespersons in official statements – began soon afterwards.
I’m told by successors that US public diplomacy in China faces many more restrictions. For example, Foreign Affairs Offices, once only carefully obstructionist, now reject outreach from the embassy and consulates, so programs are only conducted in our own spaces. We offer International Visitor grants, but few Chinese agree (or few are given permission) to travel. China once supported many Confucius Institutes at universities in the US, but a proposal to establish a dozen American Cultural Centers co-hosted at Chinese universities was disallowed.
Foreign Service colleagues have shared recollections of public diplomacy in the two decades after I left China. They report increasing Party vigilance over events at the embassy and consulates. Attendees might be harassed at the entrance, and some have been asked by police to “drink tea” – signaling they should not attend such events. Requests to schedule events at outside venues are routinely deemed “inconvenient.” Online events are monitored. China’s designated “America experts” have become afraid to interact with the embassy, and even “safe” cultural events (music, dance, etc.) are off-limits if the US government is involved.
“We terminated the Fulbright program when it became clear that the Chinese would not allow even token academic exchanges,” a former colleague added. “American researchers and professors couldn’t get placements, the Chinese refused to allow an open selection process, and Chinese alumni could not even hold their own alumni gatherings . . . the goals of the program were too compromised to use the Fulbright label anymore.”
Another colleague told me that China has become “rigid, locked down, and unfriendly to the outside world.” NGOs have been brought under Party control; accepting funds from overseas is now forbidden. The Ford, Gates, and other foundations have shrunk their presence in China, and many American universities are cancelling their programs.”
An Unpromising Future for Public Diplomacy
Looking back, I was public affairs officer during the glory days of engagement. Twenty years later, the signs are adverse. Many judge that a “divorce” is underway. The number of American students in China has shrunk to a few hundred. Young Americans no longer think of working in China to launch their careers. China’s “Great Firewall” has restricted internet access.
The radio, television, satellite, and web programs of the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia—which provided uncensored news not available through China’s state-controlled media in Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan, and Uighur—are no more.
The Chinese know, better than we do, that elements of national power are as much informational as military, diplomatic, and economic. They write of “discourse power.” They deploy informational power while we diminish it. Where we withdraw, they enter. China’s leadership is increasingly explicit about ending American leadership in the world, and their curtailment of US public diplomacy and exchanges is one more sign of their intent.
During the author’s 31-year career as a public diplomacy officer in the US Information Agency and the Department of State, he served at nine posts in East Asia, South and Central Asia, and Africa, including seven years in China. He was formerly president of the Public Diplomacy Council, and he taught at Marine Corps University in Quantico.