This study reveals that the impact of China’s RNR policies extends far beyond the country’s geographic and digital boundaries — affecting global internet governance, the autonomy of the Chinese diaspora, and the international digital economy. As discussed below, these findings also suggest certain conventional assumptions about the CCP’s strategic use of Chinese digital platforms may need to be revisited.

Protecting the online domestic discourse, or mobilizing the Chinese diaspora?

By closing off access to Chinese social media for members of overseas communities, the CCP effectively limits an important channel of foreign influence. The CCP has long proclaimed social media to be a battleground on which China should speak with a strong voice and “tell the China story well.”¹ A primary strategy of this approach appears to be focused on maximizing surveillance and data-gathering capabilities, through which collected data can be leveraged for information campaigns to exert control over beliefs and narratives on information spaces and “engineer global consent.”²

The rise of RNR-related access barriers, however, indicates that China’s cyber information strategy is infact multifaceted — with focuses beyond solely foreign influence operations and the mobilization of overseas Chinese. Rather, the CCP seems to balance the risks of an open information exchange with the benefits of successful global information campaigns. As such, the social media apps tested in our research highlight a bigger impact for the extended European region, the MENA, Latin America, and North America, while fewer barriers for users were identified in the Asia-Pacific and Sub-Saharan Africa regions.

From these results it is possible to infer that the CCP has made a conscious choice to draw geostrategic hard access barriers around Chinese social media platforms. Such an approach would limit foreign information penetration from regions deemed to be problematic, while leaving access unrestricted for other regions where the CCP prioritizes keeping open influence channels.

China’s new digital boundaries offer new venues of inquiry, such as, what are the costs of access barrier to China’s digital economy? Do the RNR-related boundaries extend beyond social media apps and coincide with other digital boundaries? And how does this strategy integrate with other foreign influence campaigns and potentially converge with China’s economic or security spheres of influence? These questions, and related lines of inquiry, offer key avenues for future research.

No community in cyberspace?

The variety of regional differences in access barriers identified in this report similarly suggests that China’s cyber sovereignty ambitions have drawn new geostrategic boundaries across the digital globe. Through the implementation of access barriers, China is effectively drawing a new digital border between a sphere of influence and a sphere of bad ideas. For example, users in the Asia-Pacific and Sub-Sahara Africa region scan now sign up for Chinese social apps that users from Europe are barred from accessing. Users in Latin America and the MENA region, on the other hand, are barred from accessing a different set of apps. This approach also appears to undermine China’s cyber diplomacy, which — under the slogan “Common Destiny in Cyberspace” — promotes interconnectivity and intercultural exchange, particularly with countries in the Majority World (referring to countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania that are often underrepresented in global economic and political systems).³ In contrast to these professed anti-colonial and anti-imperialist aspirations, the Atlantic Council (a U.S. think tank) would point out that China instead wants to divide the Global North (developed countries, primarily in the Northern Hemisphere) and the Majority World to secure better access to strategic resources and export markets.⁴

RNR’s unintended side effect: The rise of independent exile media

Interestingly, exclusionary effects stemming from RNR policy implementation may have spurred the surge of transnational independent Chinese online media. Journalists, academics, and activists who have left China and Hong Kong have subsequently started a plethora “diaspora media” (流散媒體) and “exile media” (流亡媒體) projects.⁵ These new platforms, such as those entertained by newly formed communities of exiled Hong Kong pro-democracy activists, allow exiled communities to avoid identifiability, organize, communicate, and even formulate resistance to Chinese online surveillance and censorship. At the same time, these new platforms are now spaces for contestation and are particularly susceptible to influence campaigns and transnational repression.⁶ Host countries should be aware of the current contestation around independent mediafora and offer support to strengthen them against United Front activities.

Social barriers are economic barriers

The findings of this report also invite a revisitation of claims that Chinese platforms can challenge the global dominance of U.S. platforms. If, as some scholars have argued, 107 the CCP operates digital protectionism at home while subsidizing Chinese tech firms to help them crowd out U.S. competitors in other markets, then one should expect the Chinese government to use the policy and regulatory tools at its disposal to support the expansion of these apps — rather than stifle their adoption via RNR-related policies. Yet identification requirements, as revealed in this report, prevent Chinese platforms from fully operating in certain foreign markets. Such limitations are exacerbating, if not partially causing, these apps’ decline in global downloads and therefore limiting their economic value (see Figure 1).