ABSTRACT
This chapter uses both locales to build a roadmap for a comprehensive analysis of China’s sharp power in a broad sense. Beijing has long been fiercely devoted to a form of media warfare it calls ‘great foreign propaganda’, aimed at directing international media outlets to ‘tell China’s story well’. The quintessential feature of Beijing’s influence operations is providing material incentives to local collaborators in return for political ends, often in the guise of innocuous commercial exchange. China sees Taiwan and Hong Kong as lying within the radius of its ‘core interest’, and it practices blatant political manipulation of both. Beijing has constantly engaged in a battle over the ‘proper naming’ of Taiwan. China seeks to intervene in foreign media to effect censorship. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, it primarily employs three types of control: equity control, buyer’s commercial control and cross-border online censorship.
