NurAI is the product of a collaboration between Zetrix, a Malaysian digital services company, and DeepSeek, the latter company sending a team to help build NurAI on the foundation of a DeepSeek model. Zetrix pitches their LLM as a third way between Western and Chinese LLMs, “which often lack alignment with Islamic values and the development priorities of the Global South.” 

It could prove difficult, however, for this model to escape the development priorities of the institution that brought Zetrix and DeepSeek together: the Guangxi provincial government. 

Guangxi’s efforts represent China’s most concerted effort yet to export its domestic AI products overseas, in this case to ASEAN economies in Southeast Asia. The province has substantial financial resources at its disposal through a mixture of private equity and state support, and has already established “China-ASEAN AI Innovation Cooperation Centers” in Laos, Malaysia and Indonesia. While it remains to be seen whether the Malaysian center will attract customers at scale, the responses given by NurAI on a variety of topics suggest this and other centers in the region will play a key role in aligning AI with the values of the Chinese state.  

How did Guangxi come to play such a central role in China’s regional AI ambitions? 

Guangxi’s Goals

During a 2023 inspection tour of Guangxi, Xi Jinping told provincial leaders to leverage their strategic location on the border with Southeast Asia to play “a pivotal role” in connecting China to ASEAN nations. The provincial government took that directive to heart. Writing in Seeking Truth, the CCP’s main theoretical journal for ideology, Guangxi Party Secretary Liu Ning declared this August that the province serves as China’s “international gateway to ASEAN” and would play a central role in creating “a China-ASEAN community of common destiny” through AI development.

Guangxi is positioning itself as both a research hub for integrating Chinese AI into daily use across ASEAN nations and a distribution channel for Chinese AI products throughout Southeast Asia. The phrase “R&D in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou + Integration in Guangxi + Application in ASEAN” appears repeatedly in official statements. To support these ambitions, the province has assembled substantial financial resources: the Bank of China pledged 30 billion RMB (4 billion dollars) over five years, private equity firms committed 18 billion RMB (2.5 billion dollars), and a special fund stands at 3.3 billion RMB (463 million dollars).

The provincial government has reached out to eight ASEAN nations and enlisted multiple Chinese universities and enterprises, while pledging to train specialized AI models tailored for Southeast Asian countries. The center has already played host to signing ceremonies with multiple ASEAN businesses looking to utilize Chinese AI, as well as a tour spot for contingents of journalists from the region.

Guangxi also has a long-standing goal in shaping the region’s opinions on China, and seems to view AI as a part of this. Guangxi’s latest five-year plan lists both its AI expansion projects and the improvement of an “international communication system” as two strategies to create a China-ASEAN “community of common destiny.” In a Chinese context, “international communication” (国际传播) refers to state-backed efforts to bolster positive messaging about China abroad. AI and propaganda are presented here as two sides of the same coin, both serving the broader goal of bolstering Chinese influence in the area. 

Malaysia’s Manifestations

The whole purpose of the Guangxi provincial government’s plan is to take the Chinese AI brand on tour. It has moved fast on this, launching international branches of the China-ASEAN Center in at least three different countries, including Laos (even before the Nanning center was built) and Indonesia. But its Malaysian branch has been the most active so far, opening in April on the outskirts of Malaysia’s capital, a joint venture between Zetrix and an investment company owned by the Guangxi provincial government. The former provides liaison opportunities with the Malaysian government and local compliance advice for products from companies seeking to expand in the region, including Alibaba, Huawei and DeepSeek. According to Zetrix, Guangxi’s provincial government has provided 10 billion RMB (1.4 billion dollars) for this joint venture. 

Zetrix brings existing relationships with both Chinese companies and the Malaysian government. It runs the Malaysian government’s digital services platforms, while also signing a Memorandum of Understanding in 2021 with CAICT, a key Chinese tech industry alliance under the central government. The center seems to have been just one part of a set of deals between the two sides to generally improve China-Malaysian connections: the center’s first project had nothing to do with AI, but instead utilized Zetrix’s position in government services to align digital ID checks between Malaysia and Guangxi, aiding cross-border exchanges. 

Zetrix’s NurAI model is also envisioned by its designers for use as a government service in future, with Malaysia’s deputy prime minister attending the model’s launch in August. He gave NurAI a clear sign of government support, saying it was a “prime example of how we can harmonise religion and technology for the benefit of the ummah [Muslim community] and the advancement of the nation.”

NurAI acts as a medium for carrying Chinese propaganda, the bot currently yielding guided answers on a variety of China-related topics, including China’s international reputation, religious freedoms, political system and territorial claims. However it is not clear how much of this is intentional on the part of NurAI’s Malaysian developers: some answers exhibit dramatic irregularity across multiple prompts, sometimes yielding an answer firmly aligned with Chinese official narratives, while yielding international viewpoints in others.

There is also evidence that the model’s answers on more sensitive topics have been recently corrected. During CMP’s testing two weeks ago, a question on China’s human rights reputation yielded information sourced solely from Chinese government narratives across multiple prompts, including a statement from a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson about how 120 countries supported China’s human rights policy. The answers consistently cited an article from Indonesia’s Antara News Agency, which entered into a content exchange agreement with Chinese state media in May this year. However, testing conducted on December 11 using the same question yielded much more balanced answers, which included information from CNN and VOA. 

What does seem to be intentional is NurAI’s reinforcement of localized interpretations of human rights. For example, NurAI was asked for advice on how to protect the rights of members of Malaysia’s LGBT community. Same-sex relationships are a criminal offense under Malaysian law. The model advised them to “draw closer to Allah” by reforming their sexual orientation, noting the Quran forbids same-sex relationships. The model lists their rights in a state-centered format, including the right to medical treatment, security, and education. But the individual’s freedom of expression is noticeably absent. 

A consistent feature of the CCP’s rationale for its international communication strategies is the idea that the country must break free from narratives and ideas it considers Western-centric, including definitions of human rights that emphasize individual freedoms which have historically challenged state power. NurAI shows that Chinese AI models can become a way for states in the Global South to advance conceptions of human rights that prioritize collective social order and state-defined morality over individual liberties — a vision more aligned with Beijing’s own governance model.

The post The Chinese Province Reshaping AI in Southeast Asia appeared first on China Media Project.

International communication centers, or ICCs, are sprouting across China like mushrooms after the rain. According to some estimates, more than 200 such centers now operate nationwide, including 29 at the provincial level and, increasingly, at the city and county levels. Jing’an County’s new center — Yichun’s third — boasts somewhat unaccountably that its overseas social media platforms have attracted followers from over 70 countries and regions, with a reach exceeding 30 million people. This sounds more like bluster for the sake of political point-taking close to home than a realistic assessment of impact.

The center says it will “deepen local characteristics, shape communication brands,” and push content bearing “Chinese temperament, Jiangxi style, Yichun charm, and Jing’an characteristics” to the world. But is anyone in Yichun thinking about, well, the audience?

Whatever the case, this push locally to amplify China’s voice internationally has intensified dramatically during the past five years. Since the Chinese Communist Party first conceived a soft power push nearly two decades ago under Hu Jintao, China’s leadership has obsessed over achieving greater global influence. Central to this effort has been developing “discourse power” — huayuquan (话语权) — commensurate with China’s comprehensive national power.

Under Xi, external propaganda has since August 2013 been combined with the softer-sounding notion of “telling China’s story well,” while framed toward Party officials in language redolent of the Cultural Revolution as a global “public opinion struggle.” By May 2021, speaking at a Politburo study session, Xi stated clearly that international discourse power was essential to creating “a favorable external public opinion environment for our country’s reform, development, and stability.”

Xi frames this as addressing what he calls the “third affliction” — the “suffering of criticism” from Western discourse hegemony, following Mao’s defeat of foreign aggression and Deng’s victory over poverty. In this worldview, the CCP’s legitimacy cannot be secured at home without dominance in the global information space.

Since 2018 Xi’s approach to this goal of greater “discourse power” has been a strategy that we have called at CMP “Centralization+” — essentially the idea that central-level propaganda resources like China Media Group, China Daily and Xinhua must be augmented by leveraging the strength of local and regional media groups and other actors. The strategy employs centralized messaging control while distributing operational capacity across provincial, city, and county-level actors — the most prominent of these being so-called international communication centers (国际传播中心). These local centers launch branded online platforms as well as social media accounts on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and X, generally with zero visibility about their state-run identity, flooding information spaces with content tailored to specific regions and languages.

In some cases, these centers can be well-resourced and effective. Clear examples can be found particularly along China’s southern border, where a handful of provincial-level ICCs are focusing their energy on Southeast Asia. These include the Guangxi International Communication Center, which aims to “tell the story of China and Guangxi to the outside world, and serve to build a closer China-ASEAN community with a shared future,” and the Yunnan South Asia and Southeast Asia ICC, which held at least eight international events between July and November this year (one drawing more than 500 participants from 110 countries).

But Yichun’s third ICC demonstrates how, when centralized ambition meets local implementation, the results can seem comically out of proportion. The Jing’an International Communication Center (靖安国际传播中心), which according to the official release will be “led by the Jing’an County Propaganda Office and operated by the Jing’an County Convergence Media Center,” promises to amplify “Jing’an’s positive energy.” But the tiny office, with its shiny new signboard, seems a caricature of the grandiose goals set out by Xi Jinping during a Politburo study session in late 2013, when he spoke of “strengthening the capacity for international communication and carefully constructing an external discourse system.”

When hundreds upon hundreds of counties across China each have their own international communication center taking to Facebook and Instagram and boasting millions of global fans from “England, France, Italy, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan,” who are they really communicating to? And who are they kidding?

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The framework agreement between China Daily and the Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee’s Propaganda Office was signed in the provincial capital of Xi’an on August 18, with China Daily Editor-in-Chief Qu Yingpu (曲莹璞) and Shaanxi Party Committee Standing Committee member Sun Daguang (孙大光) presiding over the ceremony.

Sun highlighted that the provincial party committee’s recent plenary session passed opinions on accelerating the construction of a “culturally strong province” (文化强省), which include new deployments for international communication work. He described China Daily as “a main force in our country’s international communication.”

Representing his outlet, Qu outlined its role in implementing President Xi Jinping’s directives and the party’s policies, stating the organization is “promoting systematic changes and building a more effective international communication system” (推动系统性变革，构建更有效力的国际传播体系).

The partnership reflects President Xi Jinping’s broader directives to remake China’s external propaganda efforts, including his call during a collective study session of the Politburo in May 2021 to present China as “credible, lovable and respectable” (可信、可爱、可敬) to international audiences. Xi has emphasized the need for China to enhance its global narrative power and improve its international image through coordinated messaging between central and local authorities.

Part of this strategy has brought about the nationwide formation of a growing network of international communication centers (国际传播中心), or ICCs. These leverage local media groups and focused local narratives, with the aim of expanding China soft power efforts from the bottom outward. But the partnership between Shaanxi province and China Daily is also a reminder of how important well-funded central-level state media remain to China’s external propaganda efforts.

The China Daily agreement with Shaanxi this month establishes cooperation in content supply. The two sides have also committed to expanding international communication channels, which could mean co-running accounts on major overseas platforms like Facebook and Instagram that are blocked in China. As talent is a persistent shortcoming at the provincial level and below, they have also agreed to build international communication talent teams, as well as strengthen youth international communication and exchange.

This framework mirrors similar partnerships China Daily has established with other provincial authorities as part of a coordinated strategy to localize international messaging efforts and support local jurisdictions — and even universities (see table above) — that are often less familiar with global media dynamics.

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Provincial propaganda officials have lauded the online portals as new forms of “citizen-based external propaganda” (人人外宣), and state media have suggested they mark an innovative departure from previous top-down approaches to global communication. But the sites, and the plans announced alongside them, have the same underlying flaw as all external media communication conceived by China’s leadership in the name of “enhancing cultural soft power.” The point is power first, never culture. As for “soft,” these initiatives involve aspects of outright deceit that clearly mark them as classic iterations of sharp power.

Backyard Story Furnaces

In their basic concept, Guangdong’s new platforms are echoes of Xi Jinping’s top-down reconfiguration of external propaganda since around 2018, a process accelerating from 2021 onward. That reconfiguration enlists provinces, cities and even counties across the country in a more localized mobilization of messaging — including through a rapidly growing number of “international communication centers” (ICCs). The Chinese Communist Party’s objective is to augment past forms of large-scale and top-down global broadcasting — think CGTN and China Daily — with local voices and narratives.

As the new portals were brought online, propaganda officials in Guangdong hyped what they called an international communication ecosystem in which “everyone can participate and everyone can communicate” (人人可参与、人人能传播). Initially, that might sound like a loosening of state control over international communication, or even an empowerment of grassroots voices. It is not. In fact, it is something starkly familiar — the mobilization by central authorities of local energies, expanding outward and downward by fiat. It is, if you will, the backyard furnace (土法炼钢) approach to external propaganda in the 21st century.

This provincial initiative in Guangdong is premised on a two-fold strategy. First, it aims to make active storytellers of passive audiences, meaning that ordinary Chinese and international creators (such as artists and influencers) can become global communicators by using a built-for-purpose content portal. Second, services for foreign nationals in the province, such as planned cultural exchanges, are to be utilized as communication assets (“服务力”转化为“传播力”) — meaning that the provincial propaganda office has an active plan to exploit foreigners as propaganda resources in the name of service provision.

How exactly will this work?

IP Guangdong is the primary portal for the first of these two approaches. The bilingual creative platform actively solicits submissions from international content creators worldwide. The system aggregates visual materials including photographs, videos, and design elements around eight themes showcasing Guangdong’s economic vitality and cultural achievements. The platform has opened registration, submission, and collaboration functions to global creators, it says, seeking to activate and use creative forces internationally.

Like all four of these new platforms, IP Guangdong is under the direct control of Guangdong’s propaganda office and is operated through its existing state-run media structure. An ICP search for IP Guangdong shows that it is run by Today (Guangdong) International Communication Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of the Nanfang Media Group, the conglomerate under the provincial CCP committee that publishes the official Nanfang Daily newspaper.

Click on the interactive graphic below to view these connections.

A report from the official People’s Daily newspaper claimed earlier this month that IP Guangdong already hosts 712 individual creators and 76 institutional participants. The platform, which enables global registration — and says it offers opportunities for overseas distribution, copyright trading, and exhibition — clearly hopes to become something of an international gathering point for Guangdong-focused content creation. On its Facebook account earlier this month, The South, a rebranding of the former Guangdong Today website, urged its followers to “co-create the world’s next favorite Guangdong story.”

While the platform clearly wishes for international participation, the current contributor breakdown between domestic and foreign participants is not specified, and the draw for international content creators is difficult to imagine. What interest, short of direct payment from the Guangdong government, could content creators possibly have in using this portal over channels like Instagram or TikTok where a truly international reach is possible?

It only makes sense that propaganda authorities in Guangdong have not thought such questions through. Just as local officials in the 1950s fired up their backyard furnaces to please zealous central planners, they have responded not to the needs of audiences and content creators, but to the urgency of political will at the top. It is a recipe for inferior steel, but the slogans of course remain hopeful. “Your video clip is a montage of Guangdong,” read one for IP Guangdong this month. “Your creativity is the new power of Guangdong!” said another, unknowingly fixing the root of the contradiction.

As welcome as the recognition might be in propaganda-think since around 2021 that top-down state propaganda is not paying real dividends among global audiences, the push to mobilize individual voices from the bottom up to serve the larger narrative goals of the state is hardly cute and lovable. It fails, miserably, to understand the root forces that drive individual creativity.

Not to be deterred by a lack of understanding of both creators and audiences, IP Guangdong claims that its initial roster of Chinese contributors includes sculptor Xu Hongfei (许鸿飞), cartoonist Lin Dihuan (林帝浣), and photography association leaders from Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macau, who have been appointed as “special creators” (特约创作者).

Global Ambassadors

While the first aspect of the Guangdong strategy shows a woeful lack of sensitivity toward creative acts and audiences, the second is outright deceptive.

Another of the new portals, INFO Guangdong, is meant to serve as a “service platform” (服务平台) for foreign nationals living in Guangdong. State media claim that the portal will offer multilingual support across government services, legal assistance, investment guidance, and advice on tourism, education, and healthcare. But another aspect of the INFO Guangdong plan is to establish “Foreign Clubs” (外国人俱乐部) within international communities that can be used to organize cultural exchange activities and attract foreign nationals for the purposes of promoting Guangdong and China.

In discussing these plans, the People’s Daily is shamelessly explicit, making clear that the platforms will “use events like ‘Foreigners Telling Stories’ to transform service recipients into communication partners” (将服务对象转化为传播伙伴). This will likely take shape much as media campaigns currently do, with unwitting foreign students or expats participating in events or junkets that allow state media to project chosen narratives with foreign faces onstage and on-screen.

In fact, according to state media coverage of the plans, five “international community service points” (国际社区信息服务点) have already been designated under INFO Guangdong, with foreign business leaders appointed as “Global Ambassadors” (全球推介官) to facilitate integration (融入) so that “all can tell the Guangdong story” (共同讲述广东故事).

This is not — it should go without saying — a role that foreign business leaders should be asked to play as they do business anywhere in China. Nor should city or provincial governments view their provision of basic information services to expatriates, tourists or other visitors as something transactional, to be cashed in for the broader narrative goals of the Party-state.

Ultimately, Guangdong’s latest approach to external propaganda, heeding Xi Jinping’s call to remake China’s global communication, reveals the same fundamental contradiction that has plagued Beijing’s pursuit of “discourse power” for years. Even as China’s leaders recognize the failure of top-down messaging and scramble to harness individual voices, they cannot find the soft spot in soft power because they refuse to loosen their stranglehold on expression itself.

The logic is circular and self-defeating: creativity must serve the leadership, and precisely because it must, it will not. Until China’s leaders can allow genuine individual expression to flourish without political instrumentalization, their myriad localized efforts at external communication will yield nothing more than inferior steel.

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On June 30, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), which operates in nearly 70 countries and ranks among the world’s top oil companies by revenue, announced the formation of the “China National Petroleum International Communication Center” (中国石油国际传播中心) in a ceremony in Beijing. The CNPC said the center, established under the corporation’s newspaper division, aims to implement the “spirit” of the CCP’s Third Plenum back in August 2024, where one of the key messages was the need to “steadily raise the effectiveness of China’s international communication” (不断提升国际传播效能). A readout from the ceremony also paid lip service to Xi as the CCP’s leadership core, suggesting the center would advance “Xi Jinping Thought on Culture” (习近平文化思想).

Officials from the CNPC said vaguely that the center would work to elevate the company’s multimedia communication capabilities, adapting to “new situations and requirements” for international communication work. This last statement was almost certainly a reference to how local Party-state bodies, agencies, universities and enterprises have all been pressed into the national objective of enhancing global communication.

In what could be read as further evidence of how this national drive for ICC creation has nosedived into farce, the CNPC announced that its new center would “tell China’s petroleum story well and spread China’s petroleum voice” (讲好中国石油故事，传播中国石油好声音).

The ceremony was reportedly attended by representatives from 12 central media outlets including the Economic Daily (经济日报) and China Daily (中国日报), both publications directly under the central government, along with media representatives from 23 countries in Africa and the Middle East. According to the CNPC, they included participants from Angola National Radio (安哥拉国家广播电台), Burundi Economic News (布隆迪经济报), the Congo News Agency (刚果通讯社), and Morocco’s 2M Television (摩洛哥2M电视台).

After Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has the second-largest crude oil reserves in Central and Southern Africa. Morocco has substantial shale oil deposits, although it produces only marginal amounts of natural gas, oil and refined petroleum products. Burundi has no domestic sources of coal, natural gas or oil.

Since 2021, hundreds of international communication centers (国际传播中心) have been formed across China’s vast administrative structure, from county-level governments to provincial authorities, all tasked with projecting Chinese narratives to international audiences.

Also last week, the county of Pujiang in China’s coastal Zhejiang province announced the formation of the “Pujiang International Communication Center” (浦江国际传播中心), or PJICC. The county center reportedly plans to make its ten-millennia history as the “origin of rice cultivation” (稻作之源) a focus of its external communication efforts.

China’s leadership is serious about the development of ICCs as a new strategy, and many of these centers are redoubling their efforts online and across foreign social media channels. As such, these developments should be watched closely. At the same time, as the CNPC and Pujiang centers make clear, observers should maintain a sense of perspective — and perhaps also a sense of humor.

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The grand launch ceremony in Rome last month was attended by key Chinese officials including Shen Haixiong (慎海雄), deputy head of China’s Propaganda Department and president of CMG, and Chinese Ambassador to Italy Jia Guide (贾桂德). Top Italian attendees included Giuseppe Valditara, the minister of education and merit in Giorgia Meloni’s current administration, former Deputy Prime Minister and Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli, and Italian Football Federation President Gabriele Gravina.

The festivities were a sufficiently grand display of Chinese foreign policy that they earned a segment on the nightly official newscast on China Central Television, “Xinwen Lianbo” (新闻联播). The series, which began airing on Italian networks on June 26, was timed to commemorate the 55th anniversary of China-Italy diplomatic relations. Networks airing the production included Alma TV, Dona TV, Tourism TV, and Lazio TV, as well as the website of the Milan Financial Daily.

Under what specific arrangements did Italian media agree to broadcast this CMG-produced series? CMP has reached out to several, but has received no responses to date.

Produced entirely by China Media Group (中国中央广播电视总台), the state media conglomerate formed in 2018 through the merger of key media groups including China Central Television, the program showcases what it calls Xi’s “profound thinking” on cultural development and his “deep affection” for preserving cultural heritage. The series visits locations where Xi has worked or inspected, including the ancient capital city of Hangzhou in China’s eastern Zhejiang province, and Dunhuang in Gansu, an outpost on the edge of the once Silk Road that is home to a network of grottoes adorned with Buddhist statuary and frescoes.

While the program, originally produced by CCTV in 2023, ostensibly focusses on China’s cultural legacies, it clearly promotes Xi Jinping as an inspirational political figure leading an inspirational political party into an era of greatness. In line with China’s most recent remodeling of political discourse since the last CCP congress in October 2022, the country’s ancient civilization is portrayed as the root of the ruling party’s power and legitimacy. Shen Haixiong (慎海雄), deputy head of China’s Propaganda Department and president of China Media Group, said at the launch in Rome that Xi’s “broad-minded embrace” stems from his “confidence and cherishing of cultural roots.”

Apparently swallowing the hook, Valditara responded — awkwardly, it must be said, for an EU education minister touting a production overseen by the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department — that Italian audiences were “eagerly anticipating opportunities to understand more deeply the profound foundation of Chinese culture and contemporary China’s vigorous development.” He described Chinese and Italian civilizations, according to coverage in China’s state media, as “brilliant galaxies that complement each other” (意中文明如璀璨星河，交相辉映).

The festivities in Rome, and the program airing across Italian television, are not really about culture at all. They are efforts to push state-led narratives of political legitimacy and civilizational grandeur through geopolitical posturing dressed up as cultural exchange. Officials in Europe and elsewhere should engage with China — but they should know the difference between culture and state-sponsored theater.

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