Authoritarian Propaganda Campaigns on Foreign Affairs: Four Birds, One Stone, and the South China Sea Arbitration

Abstract

Why do authoritarian states sometimes play up dangerous international crises and embarrassing diplomatic incidents in domestic propaganda? Is it to mobilize, threaten, divert, or pacify? Recent studies in comparative politics have focused on regime legitimacy and stability as key drivers of authoritarian propaganda practices, leaving aside other possible motivations such as mobilization of the regime's domestic allies or strategic signaling aimed at foreign audiences. Foreign policy analysts, meanwhile, have emphasized international dimensions of the propaganda behavior of China - the contemporary world's most powerful and technologically sophisticated authoritarian state - but have often mistakenly framed complementary theories as competing alternative explanations. This article argues that once the multiple domestic and international audiences for authoritarian propaganda are brought into view, many supposedly competing explanations turn out to be logically compatible and, in many cases, mutually reinforcing. We identify four sets of explanations - mobilization, signaling, diversion, and pacification - first showing how they fit together logically, before illustrating their convergence in the PRC's otherwise puzzling high-intensity propaganda campaign in 2016 over the Philippines vs. China arbitration on the South China Sea.