We are seeing two sides of the same coin, both Manqiangrexue and Wangxi are right. While amongst this forum and china generally, we know U.S. government posture is largely expected given China represents the only fully credible challenge in both economic and political spheres to America in recent history. One school of thought says as long as China continues to do whats "right" (which I genuinely believe is mostly "stay the course"), it can out-develop, out-build, out-think the US so we no longer need conflict, but that the competition between the US and China is no longer relevant, to the same extent as the current relationship between US and UK.
I don't believe this outcome will not be actually possible or take much longer without the Chinese government (and by extension, the Chinese people) engaging in "broad-based competitive media" (seriously we should stop using the word "Propaganda" when describing china's media presence in the west). The reason for this is that global discourse is still primarily Anglo-centric, and even if we are to simply ignore direct US "competitive media", other countries around the world and their citizens (namely non-aligned nations like Germany and South Korea) are still disproportionately influenced by Anglo-based vs Chinese-based media. China is also not at the stage where it can completely rely on domestic capabilities in the sciences/economics to further its development, therefore to out-develop, out-build, and out-think we still rely on the ability to influence non-Anglo nations through english media.
Put another way, lets evaluate the effectiveness and contribution to China's development of two unrelated but essentially parallel projects "CV Shandong" vs the Xinhua's "lego video of China vs US with COVID". From a different perspective, both do exactly the same thing, they are government projects to increase comprehensive national power vs the US. For the sake of the argument, lets say CV Shandong had an ultimate price of $5BN including airwing, and the meme video cost $100K(all in USD). Do we believe the ROI for CV Shandong is 50,000 times the value of the "lego meme"? Before objecting to this somewhat absurd comparison... yes I understand the difference between CVs and youtube (...for the record I believe 7-8 CV's is the minimum level China requires to maintain base-line national security by the mid-century). I would say every production of of pop-culture/soft asset by China influences in slight ways the french, germans, koreans, italians... to become increasingly reluctant to follow a "washington consensus", and that over many sustained years, can influence their reluctance/openness when it comes to technical/scientific collaboration with China. Developing the point further, an effective strategy on facebook/twitter/youtube WILL someday help china build directly or indirectly CVN-008 (or whatever it may be..), since China will reach the point where we can use a French logistics subsystem or an Italian AI within the naval aircraft, just like the Americans do now, so that we don't need to build every subsystem from scratch.
I have no doubt in the Chinese governments ability to hit technological/economic milestones. If China states in its next 5-year plan it will develop competitive EUV that will allow China to go sub-4 nm for ICs chip by 2025, I know damn well there is the money, the people, and science to do it. You would be a fool to believe otherwise. But I have also been following this forum for over 14 years, I know many old-timers of chinese background on this forum have amazing jobs and incredible disclipline/tenacity that if I were to ask many of you to save enough money to become a millionaire in 5 years, most of you could do it (... provided I could convince you the worthiness of such a goal). But if I were to ask you to become a comedian and be able to make 200 white people laugh at a bar in downtown Houston and gave you 5 years of practice to do it; this would be a nigh impossibility for many of us.
And this is the same problem China will face in the next 10 years. Building an domestic space station independent of the ISS, having a 5G network, independent widebody C929 aircraft... these are the easy stuff. What China needs in the next 5-year plan is to build that "broad-based competitive media". And this will be hard not because it costs inordinate amounts of money, but because it requires a totally different mindset and approach than what the government is used to delivering for the people since the early 80's. I will be the first person to say I only have the foggiest of ideas how to do this. But unlike when I asked forum members to either go become a millionaire or become funny and popular, in the realities of national development, China won't be able to become truly prosperous without being able to engage the western world convincingly, whether through pop-culture/humor/ability to influence global opinion.
And for the forum, lets replace "propaganda" with "broad-based competitive media". RT never calls its discourse propaganda, if anything it provides an "alternative view". We all know context matters in the west, and we can do our part to help influence this discourse, even here at SDF.
