Manchester China Institute

This conversational event will draw on key points from Dr. Repnikova’s latest book, Chinese Soft Power (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which unpacks China’s visions and practices of soft power both domestically, and internationally. Analysing a variety of soft-power mechanisms, the research traces both their official motivations and how they operate across global contexts.

The talk will continue by examining how soft power carries different meanings in China, and how its application should not be seen through a binary lens of success or failure. Instead, the speaker would argue that we should treat Chinese initiatives as ambitious in scale and adaptive to local contexts, but also as contested or perceived with mixed credibility by global audiences.

About the Speakers

Maria Repnikova is an Associate Professor in Global Communication at Georgia State University. This year she is also a non-residential Wilson China Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. She received her doctorate (DPhil) in Politics at the University of Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

Dr. Repnikova specialises in media-state relations in China, including political persuasion and critical journalism; Chinese soft power and public diplomacy, especially in the African context, and China-Russia comparisons.

Peter Hays Gries is the Lee Kai Hung Chair and founding Director of the Manchester China Institute at the University of Manchester, where he is also Professor of Chinese politics. He studies the political psychology of international affairs, with a focus on China and the United States.

He is the author of The Politics of American Foreign Policy: How Ideology Divides Liberals and Conservatives over Foreign Affairs (Stanford, 2014) and China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy (California, 2004), and co-editor of State and Society in 21st Century China (Routledge, 2004) and Chinese Politics (Routledge, 2010). He is also on the editorial boards of the leading academic journals in three fields, The China Quarterly, Political Psychology, and Nations & Nationalism.