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Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World
By Joshua Kurlantzick: Oxford University Press, 2022. Joshua Kurlantzick works at the Council for Foreign Relations, which according to its mission statement is a thinktank dedicated to international questions facing the United States. The book fits neatly into the ever-expanding China threat genre. These works have proliferated in the past decade, usually written by staunch… Continue reading
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Digital Civilization in the Making (part 3)
The culture-technology imaginary in China In the global imagination the idea of China is reflected in various ways. Outside the PRC, many see a rising economic superpower, a threat to western democracy. Others see a land of exquisite culture and art, traditional practices like kung fu, acupuncture and Tai Chi. Chinese products can be found… Continue reading
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All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: China and the New World Order
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the west achieved territorial and economic dominance on a global scale. Western supremacy was reflected in modern communications infrastructure (the postal telegraph, satellite TV, and the internet), in technological innovation (electricity, nuclear power), and in the legitimacy of its institutions (intellectual property). Continue reading
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In the New Era, what’s new is old.
Industrial transformation has accelerated China’s rise as a global power. In the New Era, which was officially recognised in the Chinese national constitution in 2017, the narrative of national rejuvenation is writ large: it underpins the Community of Shared Future, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and China’s various soft power campaigns. Cultural and… Continue reading
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Soft Power: Rising in the East, and Setting in the West?
In 2020, the South Korean film, Parasite won the Academy Award for the best film. The following year the award went to Nomadland, directed by a Chinese native, Chloe Zhao. In 2023, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, a story about a displaced Chinese migrant in America took out all the major cinematic awards. From being… Continue reading
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Digital Silk Roads: a model for a community of shared future
The Belt and Road Initiative (or BRI), describes the overland corridors that connect Western China with Europe via Central and South Asia. Initiated in 2013 by Chinese President Xi Jinping, the BRI idea also includes the maritime routes that link China’s southern provinces to Southeast Asia and beyond. The symbolic legacy of this ‘initiative’ is… Continue reading
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Chinese culture and the power of digital platforms
Michael Keane/Haiqing Yu (originally published in Pearls and Irritations) Despite massive investment in soft power by the Chinese Party-state over the past decade, the influence of China’s culture in Southeast Asia and Australia remains relatively weak. These are some of the findings of an Australian Research Council funded study, called Digital China: from Cultural Presence… Continue reading
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Digital Civilisation in the Making (Part 2)
The Future of the Creative Industries or the Creative Industries of the Future? The digital revolution is changing the way people communicate. More significantly, the algorithmic curation of peoples’ decisions to consume and view content raises important questions about the future of the creative industries. In the past policy makers were primarily concerned with the… Continue reading
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Soft power, confirmation bias and illusions of grandeur
The term soft power is common in international relations but hardly familiar in suburbia, where it is easily confused with washing powder. Like one’s washing, soft power can fade. While the term has appeared in an enormous number of journal articles, book chapters and op-eds over the past three decades, mostly celebrating and comparing nations,… Continue reading
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The Two Cultures
The two cultures: what have we learned so far? In 1959, an English writer CP Snow instigated a fierce academic debate by arguing that scientists in the UK would benefit from a closer understanding of the work of their colleagues in the humanities, and vice versa. Snow believed that the technological age was dawning and… Continue reading
About Me
I am an independent scholar with a background in Chinese media and culture. I have authored or edited 20 books since 2001. These are listed under research.
Michael Keane 