China's Great, Baffling Failure: Public Relations

It’s no secret that China is moving into position as a global superpower, writes James Fallows in the Atlantic, and this only further highlights its leaders’ baffling inability to understand how the country is viewed from the outside—and how to change those opinions for the better. Officials just don’t understand “the crass value of cultivating the press,” he writes.

China’s PR problem stems from leaders’ lack of understanding of foreign opinion. Worldly Chinese citizens get it, and exhibit it in business and academia every day. But the insular nature of the party and the way leaders rise through the ranks means “the closer Chinese officials are to centers of political power, the less they know what they don’t know about the world.” (More China stories.)