China is becoming the first country since the USSR that could challenge the US-dominated world order. China spends a huge amount on public diplomacy to influence international opinions, as much as $8 billion per year on direct outreach or four times the figure of the US. A main goal of China’s public diplomacy efforts is to “tell the China story” well. We examine how “telling the China story” does in the Global South. We focus on state-sponsored educational programs. The Chinese government enrolls students from the developing world in well-funded graduate programs in elite Chinese universities. The aim is to nurture the next generation of political and business elites who would develop positive attitudes toward the Chinese economic and governance models, and who would contribute to foreign policy making in their home countries. We detail China’s public diplomacy in this area, evaluate impact on attitudes toward China’s economic and governance stories, and identify policy implications against the backdrop of the ongoing US-China competition.

Yue Hou is an Assistant Professor in the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting scholar at Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. Her research interests include political economy, authoritarian politics, and identity politics, with a regional focus on China. Her first book, the Private Sector in Public Office: Selective Property Rights in China (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics, 2019), addresses the long-standing puzzle of how China’s private sector manages to grow without secure property rights.