Is China Selling Its Democracy Overseas, and Are Europeans Buying?

Abstract

Since 1978, China has consistently taken a pragmatic approach in its overseas propaganda to avoid ideological confrontation with the West. However, as China’s influence grows, this tradition has shifted. The West now criticizes China’s global promotion of its own “democracy”—often depicted in the West as authoritarianism—as an attempt to undermine Western liberal democracy. This raises a question: Is China exporting democracy through its overseas propaganda? We conduct a discourse analysis of China’s democratic propaganda in France during the Xi Jinping era. Employing quantitative analysis, we challenge the prevailing argument that geopolitical safety is the primary driver of China’s overseas propaganda. Instead, we find that the primary goal is to address the growing demand for democracy among the Chinese. In a framework of descriptive, defensive, and aggressive dimensions, we show that the underlying motivations behind China’s overseas democratic propaganda sit within the first two dimensions.