The Struggle for Minds and Influence: The Chinese Communist Party's Global Outreach

This paper addresses a largely overlooked actor in China's foreign relations, the International Department of the Communist Party of China (ID-CPC). Using publicly available documentation, we systematically analyze the patterns of the CPC's external relations since the early 2000s. Building on an intense travel diplomacy, the ID-CPC maintains a widely stretched network to political elites across the globe. The ID-CPC's engagement is not new; but since Xi Jinping took office, the CPC has bolstered its efforts to reach out to other parties. We find that party relations not only serve as an additional channel to advance China's foreign policy interests. Since President Xi has come to power, party relations also emerged as a key instrument to promote China's vision for reforming the global order. Moreover, China increasingly uses the party channel as a vehicle of authoritarian learning by sharing experiences of its economic modernization and authoritarian one-party regime. The cross-regional analysis of the CPC's engagement with other parties helps us to better understand the role of the CPC in Chinese foreign policy-making, pointing to a new research agenda at the intersection of China's foreign relations, authoritarian diffusion, and transnational relations

Networking with Chinese Characteristics: China’s party-to-party relations in Asia

China recently articulated its ambition to shape the regional and global order and to share the lessons of its own experiences with one-party rule. One of the key actors tasked with implementing this shift in Chinese foreign policy is the International Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP-ID). The CCP-ID maintains the kind of collaborative network that is hypothesized to be a channel of policy diffusion and learning. Offering a first exploration of this under-researched aspect of China’s foreign policy, this chapter systematically compares the activities of the CCP-ID in five of China’s close neighbors to better understand the patterns of interaction and, even more importantly, the topics and content of engagement. Party-to-party relations are used for both promoting China’s foreign policy interests as well as diffusing authoritarian practices. Our comparison of the CCP-ID’s activities in Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Mongolia, and Japan suggests that these objectives and the CCP’s cooperation strategies vary considerably across countries, regime types, and domestic power structures