The Chinese Communist Party has long shaped China’s domestic debates and its value system. At the same time, Beijing increasingly acts as an important norm-entrepreneur in international forums and presents itself as an alternative systemic model. 

When China’s leadership uses terms like multilateralism, development or security it employs its own interpretations of them. To understand those, we turn to the Decoding China Dictionary – a tool to decipher the official Chinese narrative.

In this episode of the MERICS China Podcast two of its editors, Katja Drinhausen, Head of Program Politics and Society at MERICS, and Malin Oud, Director of the Stockholm office of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, talk to Johannes Heller-John about China’s discursive power.

The Decoding China Dictionary is compiled and edited by Malin Oud, Katja Drinhausen, Marina Rudyak, David Bandurski and Jerker Hellström. Back on popular demand, the second edition published in March 2023 now covers 26 terms. It is available online here and can be downloaded as PDF here.