Frontier influencers: the new face of China’s propaganda

Executive summary

This report explores how the Chinese party-state’s globally focused propaganda and disinformation capabilities are evolving and increasing in sophistication. Concerningly, this emerging approach by the Chinese party-state to influence international discourse on China, including obfuscating its record of human rights violations, is largely flying under the radar of US social media platforms and western policymakers.

In the broader context of attempts by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to censor speech, promote disinformation and seed the internet with its preferred narratives, we focus on a small but increasingly popular set of YouTube accounts that feature mainly female China-based ethnic-minority influencers from the troubled frontier regions of Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia, hereafter referred to as ‘frontier influencers’ or ‘frontier accounts’.

Despite being blocked in China, YouTube is seen by the CCP as a key battlefield in its ideological contestation with the outside world, and YouTube’s use in foreign-facing propaganda efforts has intensified in recent years. Originally deployed on domestic video-sharing platforms to meet an internal propaganda need, frontier-influencer content has since been redirected towards global audiences on YouTube as part of the CCP’s evolving efforts to counter criticisms of China’s human rights problems and burnish the country’s image.

Alongside party-state media and foreign vloggers, these carefully vetted domestic vloggers are increasingly seen as another key part of Beijing’s external propaganda arsenal. Their use of a more personal style of communication and softer presentation is expected to be more convincing than traditional party-state media content, which is often inclined towards the more rigid and didactic. For the CCP, frontier influencers represent, in the words of one Chinese propaganda expert, ‘guerrillas or militia’ fighting on the flanks in ‘the international arena of public opinion’, while party-state media or the ‘regular army’ ‘charge, kill and advance on the frontlines’.

The frontier accounts we examine in this report were predominantly created in 2020–21 and feature content that closely hews to CCP narratives, but their less polished presentation has a more authentic feel that conveys a false sense of legitimacy and transparency about China’s frontier regions that party-state media struggle to achieve. For viewers, the video content appears to be the creation of the individual influencers, but is in fact what’s referred to in China as ‘professional user generated content’, or content that’s produced with the help of special influencer-management agencies known as multi-channel networks (MCNs).

For the mostly young and female Uyghur, Tibetan and other ethnic-minority influencers we examine in this report, having such an active presence on a Western social media platform is highly unusual, and ordinarily would be fraught with danger. But, as we reveal, frontier influencers are carefully vetted and considered politically reliable. The content they create is tightly circumscribed via self-censorship and oversight from their MCNs and domestic video platforms before being published on YouTube. In one key case study, we show how frontier influencers’ content was directly commissioned by the Chinese party-state.

Because YouTube is blocked in China, individual influencers based in the country aren’t able to receive advertising revenue through the platform’s Partner Program, which isn’t available there. But, through their arrangements with YouTube, MCNs have been able to monetise content for frontier influencers, as well as for hundreds of other China-based influencers on the platform. Given that many of the MCNs have publicly committed to promote CCP propaganda, this arrangement results in a troubling situation in which MCNs are able to monetise their activities, including the promotion of disinformation, via their access to YouTube’s platform.

The use of professionally supported frontier influencers also appears to be aimed at ensuring that state-backed content ranks well in search results because search-engine algorithms tend to prioritise fresh content and channels that post regularly. From the CCP’s perspective, the continuous flooding of content by party-state media, foreign influencers and professionally supported frontier influencers onto YouTube is aimed at outperforming other more critical but stale content.

This new phenomenon reflects a continued willingness, identified in previous ASPI ICPC reports,¹¹ by the Chinese party-state to experiment in its approach to shaping online political discourse, particularly on those topics that have the potential to disrupt its strategic objectives. By targeting online audiences on YouTube through intermediary accounts managed by MCNs, the CCP can hide its affiliation with those influencers and create the appearance of ‘independent’ and ‘authoritative’ voices supporting its narratives, including disinformation that it’s seeking to propagate globally.

This report (on page 42) makes a series of policy recommendations, including that social media platforms shouldn’t allow MCNs who are conducting propaganda and disinformation work on behalf of the Chinese party-state to monetise their activities or be recognised by the platforms as, for example, official partners or award winners. This report also recommends that social media platforms broaden their practice of labelling the accounts of state media, agencies and officials to include state-linked influencers from the People’s Republic of China.

1. Fergus Ryan, Ariel Bogle, Nathan Ruser, Albert Zhang, Daria Impiombato, Borrowing mouths to speak on Xinjiang, ASPI, Canberra, 7 December 2021. Fergus Ryan, Ariel Bogle, Albert Zhang, Jacob Wallis, #StopXinjiang Rumors: the CCP’s decentralised disinformation campaign, ASPI, Canberra, 2 December 2021,https://www.aspi.org.au/report/stop-xinjiang-rumors. ↩︎