Lecture

Shannon K. O’Neil is vice president, deputy director of studies, and the Nelson and David Rockefeller senior fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is an expert on global trade, supply chains, Mexico, Latin America, and democracy. Dr. O’Neil has lived and worked in Mexico and Argentina. She was a Fulbright scholar and a justice, welfare, and economics fellow at Harvard University, and has taught Latin American politics at Columbia University. Before turning to policy, Dr. O’Neil worked in the private sector as an equity analyst at Indosuez Capital and Credit Lyonnais Securities.

Dr. O’Neil is the author of The Globalization Myth: Why Regions Matter (Yale University Press, October 2022), which chronicles the rise of three main global manufacturing and supply chain hubs and what they mean for U.S. economic competitiveness. She also wrote Two Nations Indivisible: Mexico, the United States, and the Road Ahead (Oxford University Press, 2013), which analyzes the political, economic, and social transformations Mexico has undergone over the last three decades and why they matter for the United States. Dr. O’Neil is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and a frequent guest on national broadcast news and radio programs. She has often testified before Congress and regularly speaks at global academic, business, and policy conferences.

Dr. O’Neil is a member of the board of directors of the Tinker Foundation. She holds a PhD in government from Harvard University, an MA in international relations from Yale University, and a BA from Yale University.

Joshua Kurlantzick is senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is the author, most recently, of Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign To Influence Asia and the World. Kurlantzick was previously a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he studied Southeast Asian politics and economics and China’s relations with Southeast Asia, including Chinese investment, aid, and diplomacy. Previously, he was a fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy and a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy. He is currently focused on China’s relations with Southeast Asia, and China’s approach to soft and sharp power, including state-backed media and information efforts and other components of soft and sharp power. He is also working on issues related to the rise of global populism, populism in Asia, and the impact of COVID-19 on illiberal populism and political freedom overall.

Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World is an analysis of how China is attempting to become a media and information superpower, seeking to shape the politics, local media, and information environments of both East Asia and the world. Since China’s ascendancy toward major-power status began in the 1990s, observers have focused on its economic growth and expanding military. China was limited to projecting power through information and media. That has begun to change. Beijing’s state-backed media has been overhauled and expanded. At a time when many democracies’ media outlets are consolidating due to financial pressures, China’s largest state media outlets, like the newswire Xinhua, are modernizing, professionalizing, and expanding in attempt to reach an international audience. Overseas, Beijing attempts to impact local media, civil society, and politics by having Chinese firms buy up local media outlets, expanding China’s social media giants, and controlling the wireless and wired technology through which information flows.

In Beijing’s Global Media Offensive, Joshua Kurlantzick focuses on how this is playing out in both China’s immediate neighborhood—Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand—and the United States. He traces the ways in which China is trying to build an information and influence superpower, but also examines the conventional wisdom that Beijing has enjoyed great success with these efforts. While China has worked hard to build a global media and information superpower, it often has failed to gain from its efforts, and has undermined itself with overly assertive, alienating diplomacy. Still, Kurlantzick contends, China’s media, information and political influence campaigns will continue to expand and adapt, helping Beijing export its political model and protect the ruling Party.

An authoritative account of how this sophisticated and multi-pronged campaign is unfolding, Beijing’s Global Media Offensive provides a new window into China’s attempts to make itself an information superpower.

On Monday, October 16, 2023, the World Affairs Council of Orange County hosted a Zoom webinar on the Israel-Palestine conflict and the October 2023 developments.

Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb, Professor of Media Studies at CSU San Bernardino & Dr. Daniel Segal, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and History at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges, spoke about the atrocities committed in Israel and Gaza, provided historical context to the long-standing conflict, and addressed the issue of misinformation in certain media outlets.

Thank you to our speakers for agreeing to share their knowledge on such short notice–we are grateful to you both. Thank you to our attendees who tuned in for this webinar and participating with your questions.

We hope to see you all at an upcoming World Affairs Council of Orange County event!