Has the Chinese government led by Xi Jinping dramatically increased anti-foreign propaganda in its official media over the past year? The New York Times made this argument in a widely cited article on Nov. 11. It cited as evidence a Nov. 9 article in the Christian Science Monitor which claimed that as of the end of October, articles referencing foreign-related “hostile forces” in the Communist Party organ, the People’s Daily, had “nearly tripled” in number over the same period in 2013. Both articles have circulated in social media, with at least 137 tweets referring to one or the other piece as of the end of November. Drawing explicitly on these two media reports, some pundits on East Asian issues have reproduced this meme of rapidly rising officially sanctioned anti-foreignism (for example here and here) as did the New York Times itself on Nov. 27. This meme feeds into an larger emerging narrative about a rising newly assertive China challenging the U.S.-dominated global order.
But is this particular meme accurate? To assess the claim of a recent surge in anti-foreignism in official propaganda, I looked at the frequency of articles that referenced foreign-related “hostile forces” (敌对势力) in the People’s Daily across time through to the end of November. Specifically, I counted articles that referenced the following commonly used terms: “Western hostile forces” (西方敌对势力), “external hostile forces”(境外敌对势力), “foreign hostile forces” (国外敌对势力and外国敌对势力), “international hostile forces”(国际敌对势力), “internal and external hostile forces” (境内外敌对势力), and “domestic and foreign hostile forces”(国内外敌对势力). (This list of terms was used in the Christian Science Monitor’s analysis, and I thank its Beijing correspondent, Peter Ford, for sharing it).
I then normalized these frequencies by monthly average. I combined the first five terms into a category of “purely foreign” references, and the last two into a category of “internal and external” references. The terms in these categories should, in principle, exclude any references to purely internal hostile forces. In order to check the historical trends in such references, I looked back to the Deng Xiaoping era and started at a high point in U.S.-China relations in 1988, just before the Tiananmen crisis in 1989. This allowed me to observe the trends across four different leaders and to compare periods where U.S.-China relations were relatively stable with those that have been considered more unstable.
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