This chapter introduces our global dataset of autocratic propaganda, which contains over eight million articles from 65 newspapers drawn from 59 countries in six major languages. By population, our dataset encompasses a set of countries that represents 88\% of all people who live under autocracy. After collecting this propaganda, we measured its content. We employ computational techniques to identify the topics of each article; count the number of references in each article to the autocrat, ruling party, and opposition; and measure the valence of propaganda with dictionary based semantic analysis. The key idea is that some words have an intrinsic positive or negative sentiment. This conception of propaganda -- as spin, not lies -- accords with how scholars and practitioners have long understood it. As a baseline for comparison, our dataset includes state-affiliated newspapers from democracies. To scale our measures of propaganda, we develop a Fox News Index: how Fox News covers Republicans relative to Democrats.

Propaganda entails narratives: topics covered, omitted, and the account of current events that constitutes history’s first draft. This chapter focuses on domestic narratives. Three issue areas are most salient: the economy and public goods provision, politics, and sports. To capture narrative subtleties, we adapt a measure of semantic distinctiveness from computational linguistics. Where autocrats confront no electoral constraints, we find, their propaganda apparatuses trumpet their democratic credentials, yet omit the stuff of democracy, like electoral campaigns and the opposition. They cover a general, unnamed “opposition” rather than the actual opposition, which would undermine absurd claims of universal support and help citizens coordinate around protest leaders. We observe none of these tactics where autocrats confront electoral constraints, but neither do we observe them systematically denigrating their opposition rivals, since doing so would undermine credibility. Constrained autocrats acknowledge policy failures: fuel crises, vaccine shortages, and persistently high infant mortality. They acknowledge that the government has failed to adequately invest in national sports.

This first section provides an overview and analysis of the full Quantitative Report which follows.

Southeast Asia’s growing economic linkages with and dependence on China for investment have generated political opportunities and strategic concerns in equal measure. However, recent discussions have tended to focus on infrastructure projects, especially those associated with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This narrow focus can be misleading, and an understanding of the fuller picture of Chinese investments in Southeast Asia is necessary for those seeking to understand its significance and impacts. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is not a new player in this game, having had a longer history of providing investment and aid in this region, particularly in support of independence struggles and civil and regional conflicts during the Cold War. After 1990 and reflecting Beijing’s economic reform and internationalization strategy, Chinese investment in Southeast Asia picked up gradually across varied sectors. Prior to President Xi Jinping’s unveiling in 2013 of what has come to be called BRI, Southeast Asia had already seen a turning point in the growing significance of Chinese investments during the global financial crisis in 2008/9.

This report is part of a research project that examines China’s investment in Southeast Asia, aiming to provide a regionwide, multi-sectoral analysis that allows comparisons and facilitates policy calibration and focus. In this quantitative report, we present the baseline quantitative survey and analysis of key changes in Chinese investments in Southeast Asian economies over the most recent fifteen years, from 2005 to 2019, for which comparable data is available.

By “investment”, we refer to Chinese investment, project financing, and service provision in the region. The CGIT dataset that our report relies on captures the two key forms of Foreign Direct Investment (mergers and acquisitions, and greenfield investment), as well as other forms of cross-border investment flows associated with Chinese investments in Southeast Asia. Construction contracts, in particular, often accompany Chinese overseas investment and are a form of trade in services that can be even more significant than FDI.

1.1 Regionwide Trends

Foreign investments in Southeast Asia (SEA) originating from China grew twentyfold during this fifteen-year period. This trend is more marked when we define foreign investments as including both ownership acquisition of specific enterprises, and service provision (such as construction contracts).

A1. Selection of Datasets on Chinese Investments in Southeast Asia

This report surveys key changes in Chinese investments in SEA economies since the mid-2000s (following from the Chinese government’s 1999 “Going Global” strategy). To achieve this research objective, we examined various databases on Chinese overseas investments, including:

• • China Global Investment Tracker (CGIT) database;

• • ASEAN Statistical Yearbooks;

• • Foreign direct investment (FDI) data compiled by the World Bank;

• • FDI data compiled by the International Monetary Fund (IMF);

• • FDI data compiled by the Asian Development Bank;

• • Statistical Bulletin of China’s Outward FDI released by China’s Ministry of Commerce;

• • Data on China’s outward direct investment released by China’s Bureau of Statistics;

• • Global Chinese Official Finance Dataset, 2000–2014, Version 1.0; and

• • China Global Energy Finance database.

We eventually decided to use the CGIT database as the primary data source for this project for three reasons. First, unlike other datasets on Chinese investment which are either too aggregated or too segmented, CGIT provides up-to-date data on Chinese investments in each SEA country by industrial sector over a reasonably long period, from 2005 to 2019 (as at the time when data analysis first commenced in early 2020). This allowed us to examine the industry-specific trends and patterns of Chinese investments in every SEA country over the past fifteen years and to compare the features of Chinese investments across SEA countries. Section A of this Appendix explains how we selected and classified industrial sectors for this project. Second, the CGIT database includes two broad types of Chinese investments—transactions involving Chinese acquisition of asset ownership, and Chinese provision of services, in SEA countries. These two classifications enabled us to further disaggregate the relative spread of types of investments across SEA countries and industrial sectors. Third, the CGIT database provides additional information about investors and other transaction parties, facilitating our identification of specific Chinese investments that were of significance or particular interest. The CGIT database is a public dataset compiled and published by the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation in the United States.

However, it is important to note that the CGIT database only tracks “large” investments worth at least US$100 million.

2.1 Overview of Chinese Investments in Southeast Asia, 2005–19

Absolute Scale

Overall, foreign investments in SEA originating from China exhibited a general upward trend between 2005 and 2019, rising approximately twentyfold during this fifteen-year period. This trend is evident across different datasets that use differing measures of foreign investments (see Figure 9). Foreign direct investment is a commonly used measure of cross-border investments that captures foreign acquisition—by both state-owned entities and private entities—of ownership of target enterprises in destination countries. Data from ASEAN’s Statistical Yearbooks show that Chinese FDI to SEA grew exponentially from just over US$500 million in 2005 to roughly US$10 billion in 2018, peaking at US$13.7 billion in 2017. A broader measure of foreign investments would take into account cross-border transactions that involve not only ownership acquisition but also service provision. The CGIT database adopts this broader measure of foreign investments to track “large” Chinese overseas investments (those that are worth at least US$100 million). According to the CGIT database, Chinese investments in SEA soared from US$1.3 billion in 2005 to nearly US$31 billion in 2019, peaking at US$33.5 billion in 2018. A closer look at the trend of Chinese investments in SEA reveals that Chinese investments in SEA experienced its first phase of rapid expansion between 2009 and 2011, right after the end of the global financial crisis, and a second phase of rapid increase between 2014 and 2017, following the official announcement of Beijing’s BRI. Indeed, the vast majority of very large (at least US$1 billion) Chinese investments came after the advent of the BRI in 2013 for all SEA countries except Vietnam and Myanmar (as indicated in red and pink on Figure 10). However, between 2018 and the time of writing (late 2021), this growth appears to be slowing down or even declining modestly.

Relative Importance

Despite the substantial surge in the absolute amounts of Chinese investments in SEA between 2005 and 2019, the relative importance of Chinese FDI—as compared to other sources of FDI in SEA—did not increase as significantly. While China’s share of total FDI in SEA more than doubled—from an average of 3 per cent in 2005–10 to an average of 7 per cent in 2011–18—China had yet to establish itself as a dominant foreign investor in SEA. Table 1 displays annual FDI flows into ASEAN from 2005 to 2018.