The discourse of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and trio of global initiatives implies that the country’s geopolitical interests are firmly global. Nonetheless, in recent years Chinese scholars and intellectuals have increased their attention on the periphery of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). For many PRC scholars, this is presented as a course-corrective to earlier efforts to improve China’s position and status in “far away” places around the globe—efforts that in Western countries have produced weak results or backfired. The turn to its periphery can also be understood as an effort by China to reimagine its borderlands as geopolitical spaces that will serve as natural stepping stones between the consolidation of domestic frontier territories and long-term goals of extending China’s great-power influence around the world. From this viewpoint, control of China’s periphery is seen as a testing ground for the country’s global power.

In October 2013 and April 2025, Xi Jinping convened special meetings on China’s periphery. In his 2025 speech at the Central Peripheral Work Conference, he emphasized the importance of creating a “peripheral community of a shared future” (周边命运共同体). While development and a large assortment of “mutual” projects are presented as key to the establishment of this community, there is also a strong emphasis on finding a basis in cultural commonalities expressed via terms such as “affinity” (亲) and “tolerance” (容). Such shared traits are seen as attributes of populations on either side of the border that must be cultivated to strengthen peripheral states’ ties to China. These attributes will then become the foundations of a peripheral community that will serve China’s geopolitical interests and is responsive to “China’s new era foreign discursive system,” which, in line with Xi’s calls for building Chinese-centered narrative and conceptual frameworks, ensures that positive stories about China and its benevolent deeds are told, heard, and further disseminated.¹ Such a peripheral propaganda program can help counter Western influence, thereby helping establish China’s stepping stones to greater world influence. At the heart of this approach is the concept of “peripheral communication” (周边传播)—an emerging field of study and action pioneered by the Peking University scholar Lu Di that seeks to control the discourse about China in the countries proximate to its borders.

This essay examines approaches to peripheral communication current in contemporary Chinese writing. The issues addressed include why the periphery has become a concern, where it has been located, what its relation is to China’s border provinces, and possible solutions to resolving what might be called the peripheral communication question.

Peripheral Communication

As noted above, a key figure in the study of peripheral communication is Lu Di, director of the Center for Peripheral Communication Research at Peking University. Established through a national grant in 2017, the center had by 2023 produced 30 postgraduate degrees and its affiliated scholars had published over a hundred academic articles. The concept has also reached English-speaking audiences through translations on the Global Times and the website www.zhoubianchuanbo.com. The peripheral communication framework has been used not only in communication studies but also in political science, geography, and ethnology. At China’s nationalities universities, where scholars often research development and society in borderland regions, the concept has also proved popular. Articles cited in this essay come from scholars in these fields, some of whom, like Chen Si, have backgrounds at Peking University.

Lu began to publish on the concept of peripheral communication in 2015 with the aim of solving the following communicative and political dilemma: “If China neither understands nor can influence its neighboring countries and regions, then how can it influence Asia and the world?”² According to Lu, Western states have infiltrated China’s natural periphery, places whose peoples have been subject to Chinese influence for ages. Peripheral communications scholars Liu Yuan and Chen Si argue that China has focused too little attention on these regions, and in the meantime Western countries have emotionally alienated China’s neighboring states through the narratives they spread.³ This has prevented the populations of neighboring states from embracing China as they otherwise naturally would. For Lu, what is needed is a theory of communication that can help China expand its influence in its periphery.

Lu describes a law of peripheral communication comparable to the laws of physics that govern natural phenomena such as thermodynamics, light, and energy. Like the world’s climatic zones, there is a gradual transition process from the generative center to peripheral sites.⁴ When Lu and other writers discuss Japan and the Korean Peninsula, the Chinese written script and Confucian traditions are cited as historical proof of “center to edge” dissemination of Chinese culture on neighboring countries. Other states, such as Mongolia, have historically been subject to a tributary system and thus Chinese political culture. But the Sinocentrism of peripheral communication is more complicated; it also relies on a notion of a multiethnic Chinese identity called 中华民族 (Zhonghua minzu) that contains peoples as diverse as Koreans, Tibetans, and Uighurs. These peoples populate the Chinese borderlands and, despite their differences with other Chinese ethnic groups, have been integrated with the Chinese cultural center over time.

Tibetans, Uighurs, Kazakhs, Mongolians, and many other groups that are counted within the Zhonghua minzu do not live neatly within Chinese borders. In the distant past, as well as in the present, their modes of life, languages, and religious practices have bled over borders rather than abruptly stopping at them. For contemporary China, as in other states, this reality is often a security concern. Through the lens of peripheral communication, however, the mobility of “cross-border ethnicities” (跨境民族) can be turned into a resource rather than a liability. They can serve as effective people-to-people transmitters of Chinese culture. The familiarity of clothes, food, language, and other shared culture between the ethnic groups in China and their co-ethnics in neighboring states can serve to bridge the periphery. These commonalities warm hearts, readying them for the reception of state-crafted narratives about the benevolence of Chinese-style modernization and the supposed shared Asian values it embodies.

Spaces of the Frontier and Periphery

Lu Di’s conceptualization of the periphery is relative. He initially translated “周边传播” as “surrounding communication.” In naturalistic analogies informed by classic geopolitics, he prefers a radial conception of communication, whereby influence either grows or decays in relation to its emitting center.⁵ Nonetheless, Lu’s understanding of “surrounding” is qualified. Sea-locked Australia has its periphery in the Pacific Islands, and the United States, given its hegemonic domination, has made the whole world its periphery. A non-bordering country like Singapore can be counted among China’s surrounding space as it shares Confucian commonalities, but Lu and other writers are careful not to allow the periphery concept to lose its spatial moorings.

In practice, sharing a border with China is very important for peripheral communication work. Looking to the countries directly adjacent to China, peripheral communications scholars have invented gradations such as the “close periphery” (近周边) and the internal/inner (内) and external/outer (外) peripheries. As Lu has explained, peripheral communication is “conducted on both sides of the jurisdictional boundary between sovereigns.”⁶ Two key takeaways follow from this view. First, from the perspective of a long history of cultural influence, there is little meaningful difference between the internal and external periphery. The impact of the Chinese center on Shigatse, Tibet, or Kathmandu, Nepal, is viewed as only a manner of degree; its expression and realization in the present moment ultimately hinges on geopolitical control of the “discursive system” and the senses of affiliation that result. Second, the communication practices that are effective in China’s domestic borderland regions can be applied across the border. By creating ethnically suitable media and enabling members of domestic ethnic groups to be carriers of Chinese messaging, dissemination of China’s discursive system ought to be easier.

Little wonder that scholars that focus on development in China’s border-adjacent regions have been animated by Lu’s concept of peripheral communication. This research paradigm allows for an extension of social science research (and resulting political activity) on social stability and cultural adaption from China’s own “ethnic work” to be adapted and extended as “peripheral work” to neighboring states.⁷ This is apparent even in the spatial logic of the periphery. Rising in popularity in the late 2000s, recent writings on frontiers (边疆) in China have sought to locate a “scientific” basis for frontiers and to solve the problem of the domestic frontier through development. The frontier question is essentially one of how to reduce external meddling and interference, particularly among ethnic groups in borderland provinces (such as by the so-called Dalai clique in Tibet). The economist Yang Minghong has mapped out different degrees of frontier as distanced from the center of inner China. For him and other writers, securing the frontier is imperative for national security.⁸ Stability is accomplished through stamping out the infiltration of foreign elements who instigate separatism from offline and online spaces. Once control can be asserted over these spaces, barriers to emotional attachment to the Chinese motherland will be reduced.

As border-facing domestic territories that are the focus of social development policies, the frontier concept can be seen as analogous to China’s “internal peripheries.” As described above, the difference between internal and external peripheries is only a manner of degree. Across the periphery, “anti-Chinese Western forces” and their alleged political puppets, such as favorite bugbear the Tibetan Government in Exile, are seen as having successfully spread negative narratives about the realities of developmental progress in China’s internal periphery and its motivations and goals in neighboring countries.

One activity that demonstrates the importance that the Chinese government attaches to the connection between peripheral communication and frontier control is the construction of border villages near China’s international boundaries. Since 2021, the construction of border villages (边疆村) has become common across China. The development of border villages is often framed by government reports as a collaborative effort by all levels of the provincial government to organize and tidy up villages near international borders. The goal of constructing a “new frontier” (新边疆) based in “Chinese-style modernization” is partly to create narratives that can be spread through neighboring states as a counter to negative allegedly Western-designed narratives. For example, in an article in Ethnicity Today, a party secretary in a Yunnan border village is quoted as stating the following: “With every passing year, our border residents’ lives are getting better. When foreign friends come and interact with people here, they are very envious: So this is how Chinese farmers live! Today they are very envious and in the future they will become even more envious.”⁹

Constructing the Peripheral Community of a Shared Future

In peripheral communication, spreading a positive narrative about China is key. This is supposed to allow peripheral populations to realize their connection to China and clear the way for the establishment of a “peripheral community of a shared future.” Lu Di emphasizes the importance of a wide variety of people and things that operate in peripheral communication, ranging from formal institutions to tourists to publicly visible places and objects like roads and buildings. For Lu and his colleagues, everything can disseminate a narrative and “everything has a periphery.”¹⁰ Various forms of new media and informal communication are important for building deep relations between populations on both sides of the border and ultimately with the Chinese center.¹¹ The intimate emotional and psychological aspirations of this theory should not be overlooked; terms translatable as empathy, emotional connection, romance, and even predestined love are regularly used to evoke the sort of relationship that peripheral peoples ought to feel toward China. When Xi Jinping stresses “affinity” as one of the key concepts of peripheral diplomacy, he is drawing attention not just to familiarity but to the deeper familial bonds through which China claims a natural preeminence over these countries.

Peripheral communication seeks to move away from dependency on higher-level messaging, such as that achieved through diplomacy or official media. Seeking “edge to edge” dissemination between the internal and external periphery, Chinese places, people, and regional institutions play a key role in communication. Authors enumerate Chinese-based regional media organizations that ought to deepen their connections with foreign counterparts. They also sketch out strategies for building emotional connections with their audiences. A recent article by professors Peng Cui, Zhao Liya, and Liu Yang on peripheral communication with Kazakhstan highlights the specific cultural traits that can be used to “accurately communicate Chinese stories in combination with the cultural background of Kazakhstan in ways that the audience likes to hear and see…. Kazakhstan’s traditional motifs and colors can be used to localize communication content, thereby improving audience reception and participation.”¹²

Writers have also stressed the value of organizing or co-organizing cultural events such as film festivals, Chinese holiday celebrations, and Confucius Institute programming. Chinese-established storefronts in the external periphery can serve as “foreign propaganda front-lines” (外宣前沿阵地) that subtly spread pro-Chinese narratives. For example, in an article on the China Xizang Bookstore in Kathmandu, professors Liao Yunlu and Xie Weimin discuss how the store activates foreign minds, foreign mouths, and foreign pens to spread good stories about Chinese development in Tibet. The bookstore aspires to attract café-seekers in a crowded shopping neighborhood, where they will buy coffee (and see Chinese tea, thereby visually absorbing an element of Chinese culture) and shoot TikTok videos. The goal is to “promote the deep embedding of Chinese cultural elements into the scenes of local daily life” in Kathmandu.¹³ The bookstore is run by a government-linked office in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, where it is viewed as directly competing in the “front-line” with the Dalai Lama and Western-backed Tibetan exile narratives for the attention of Nepalese and Western visitors. Notably, this geopolitical front-line is not at China’s border, but in the capital of a foreign country.

The struggle over the discursive system also works through peripheral place names. For years Chinese publications have used the term “Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau” to refer to the Tibetan Plateau. While this may make sense from the Chinese perspective—the vast geological plateau mainly comprises two such subnational regions—many outside China see this as an attempt to dilute the status and idea of Tibet by reducing it to the second half of a dashed term. Nevertheless, the Chinese term for geographic, cultural, and political Tibet—Xizang—has long been translated into English as Tibet. This is changing, however. In Nepal, typically nonpoliticized cultural events such as the high-profile Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival have become “front-lines” in peripheral communication. Chinese co-organizers from a communications research center partly based at Sichuan University promoted a set of films called the “Xizang panorama.” The use of the name Xizang, as well as the glossy narrativization of contemporary Tibet in the films, triggered controversy and the canceling of some planned film showings.¹⁴

Such toponymic shifts create confusion about the intent behind the new names and the extent of political coordination. Yet Liao and Xie’s paper explains how the decision to translate the Kathmandu bookstore’s name as “China’s Tibet Bookstore” rather than “Chinese Tibet Bookstore” was deliberate.¹⁵ China’s Tibet denotes a structure of national belonging, while Chinese Tibet has connotations of a range of contested historical and cultural issues. Over the last year, in line with wider changes, the sign in front of the store was suddenly switched to “China’s Xizang Bookstore.”

Recently there have also been calls to increase the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to expand China’s influence in its periphery. In pitched language, the scholars Liu Yuan and Chen Si have highlighted the emergent “cognitive war” or “cognitive competition,” in which the minds of peripheral peoples are the battlefield. Authors call for training language learning models on peripheral cultural commonalities so that dynamic AI-generated content can be continuously produced. Creating “an algorithmic propaganda model of human-machine co-governance” can “enhance the dissemination and influence of Chinese discourse.”¹⁶ The automation of the cultivation of the close periphery can thus be left to data centers. From this view, the stepping stones of China’s geopolitical expansion will be built with AI.

To conclude, peripheral communication seeks to create a new discursive environment in which peripheral populations are accepting of valuations and narratives created in the Chinese center and adapted in China’s internal peripheries for external consumption. The vectors of communication dissemination are much more diverse than conventional propaganda practices have allowed and much more suitable to the contemporary geopolitical situation of peripheral competition. Lu Di explains: “The essence of peripheral communication theory and practice is ‘control,’” and “if China can’t even handle its own ‘periphery’ then how can it penetrate the ‘periphery’ of its adversaries?”¹⁷

---

Andrew Grant is Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of History, Geography, and Legal Studies at the University of Tampa.

---

IMAGE CREDITS

Banner illustration by Nate Christenson ©The National Bureau of Asian Research.

 

ENDNOTES