Branding the Regime: China’s Soft Regime Promotion in the post- Reform Era

Little evidence suggests that the rising China is engaged in regime promotion as did historical cases. Given the seeming non-finding, what has China been actively doing to influence other regimes? How does it do it? Why does China’s approach to regime promotion assume the particular form? This dissertation argues that China indeed does not promote its regime in the conventional sense – to proselytize its regime and instigate regime change abroad. Instead, China engages in “soft regime promotion” – the active dissemination of knowledge about its regime aimed primarily at branding the regime as successful, competent, and peculiar. In the current system, the low status of an authoritarian regime poses an existential challenge to its legitimacy and survival. Thus, status pursuit is a crucial motive behind soft regime promotion that is under-studied in the existing literature. China’s soft regime promotion corresponds to the status enhancement pathway of social creativity: it targets a reference group to its advantage, the developing countries; it shelves the factor of regime type and attaches importance to issues of state governance; and it puts a premium on the role of the state as well as a competent ruling party. China’s soft regime promotion is rooted in the regime’s self-understandings. Absent a coherent regime ideology, the Communist Party of China has come to enshrine itself as the defining feature of the regime and boasted about its achievements in governing China. China’s ideological status quo not only precludes the proselytizing of a wholesale model, but also shapes the “space of possibilities” in which agents of regime knowledge transfer “improvise” varied knowledge about the Chinese regime. China specifically engages in the conspicuous giving of regime knowledge – hosting training and exchange activities for elites from developing countries. This is done through two major channels: in the name of the state, China hosts degree education programs and training programs under the banner of foreign aid; and in the name of the Party, various formats of exchange activities have been held. Within and across both channels, variations are found in the regime knowledge transferred and the dynamics of principal-agent relationships.

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