China's soft power collides with the hard realities of the Russo-Ukrainian War: A conversation with Maria Repnikova
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2022
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Maria Repnikova, assistant professor of global communications at Georgia State University, who recently published a short book under the Cambridge Elements series called Chinese Soft Power. A native Russian speaker who also reads and speaks Chinese, Maria has been a keen observer of China's response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and offers her perspectives on Chinese media coverage of the war and the impact of China's pro-Russian tilt on Beijing's soft power ambitions. She recently co-authored a piece in The Atlantic arguing that China's apparent pro-Russian position is about one thing only: the United States and China's opposition to American unipolar hegemony.
4:25 – Definitions of soft power: Joseph Nye's and China's
8:49 – The Chinese discourse on soft power: three major schools
14:09 – How talking about soft power allows the airing of hard truths
23:24 – Chinese soft power in the global South
37:49 – How badly has the Russo-Ukraine War eroded Chinese soft power?
41:44 – How Russian media has been talking about China since the invasion of Ukraine began
44:50 – Why China's pro-Russia lean is really all about America
54:40 – Is Russia's media style the future of Chinese media? On the "RTification" of Chinese media
A full transcript of this podcast is available on SupChina.com.
Recommendations:
Maria: Prototype Nation by Silvia Lindtner; and an anti-recommendation for the show Inventing Anna, which is streaming on Netflix
Kaiser: Season 5 of the show The Last Kingdom; and the sequel to Vikings, called Vikings: Valhalla. Both are on Netflix.
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Transcript
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| 0:45.7 | That's audible.com slash Wondery UK. Welcome to the Cynical podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China produced in partnership with SUPChina. |
| 1:05.0 | Subscribe to SUPChina's Daily Access Newsletter to keep on top of all the latest news from China from hundreds of different news sources or check out all the original writing on our website at sup china.com. We've got |
| 1:16.5 | reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers and trackers, regular columns, and of course |
| 1:22.4 | a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations to its ingenious |
| 1:29.1 | entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China's |
| 1:33.8 | Xinjiang region, to the tectonic shifts underway as China rolls out what we call the Red |
| 1:39.8 | New Deal. It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping |
| 1:45.7 | the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor. I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, |
| 1:52.6 | North Carolina. If you listen to last week's show with Evan Feigenbaum, which I recommend you do, |
| 1:58.1 | because he was just an outstanding guest, you'll know that I intend to do a few more shows on the topic of China's response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. |
| 2:06.9 | I do intend to get back to the thinking about China series at some point and have some of those planned already, as well as some episodes that have not much to do at all with politics or war or with other weighty |
| 2:18.2 | and depressing matters. |
... |
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