The video opens with an aerial shot of a lone China Coast Guard ship at sea on a calm day, as soft, whimsical music carries us into China’s latest propaganda song.
“Azure sky, crystal sea, chasing gulls, blazing sun, patrolling the South China Sea, guarding endless loneliness, endless vastness, and guarding this sea, this peace and harmony.”
The lyrics of the first verse introduce the setting – this is a song about an enlisted member of the coast guard stationed on the disputed sea, thinking longingly about someone he loves back home.
In later verses, he asks her what color the clouds are where she is, what perfume she’s wearing, and if she’s drinking coffee or tea, because he’d like a taste too.
The song, “I Miss You on the South China Sea,” is Beijing’s latest attempt to use popular culture to shape international perceptions of one of Asia’s most contentious maritime disputes, analysts told Radio Free Asia.
The music video was released this month by Chinese state media to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the 2016 international arbitral tribunal ruling that rejected the legal basis of Beijing’s sweeping claims over most of the disputed waters.
Though the video has been released in both Mandarin and English — with the latter seemingly intended to appeal to an international audience — the analysts questioned whether this campaign is likely to resonate beyond viewers and listeners already sympathetic to China.
“China’s state media spends little time actually thinking about how the message will be received elsewhere,” Ed Moon, an independent cross-Strait analyst and founder of intelligence site Strait Signal, told RFA. “Its major focus is on ensuring that the overall message correctly aligns with the official narrative.”
At one point, the singer uses a quantum physics term romantically, telling his beloved that he would cross time and space to prove with her “what quantum entanglement is.”
But despite the apparent awkwardness of the English lyrics, the song attempts to portray China Coast Guard personnel as ordinary people with very real feelings of longing for home and those they love, while their duties have called them far away to the remoteness of the open sea.
Controlling the narrative
The video reflects a broader effort by Beijing to complement official statements with emotionally driven storytelling, as China increasingly seeks to communicate its positions through documentaries, influencers, short videos and other forms of popular media.
“China wants to project its presence in the South China Sea as peaceful, benign and wholly normal. The focus on the human aspect of the coast guard crew members fits this pattern,” Moon said, adding that Beijing’s state media is primarily concerned with ensuring content aligns with the Communist Party’s official narrative rather than persuading foreign audiences.
Within China’s political system, he said, Beijing’s sovereignty claims are treated as historically and factually self-evident, leaving little perceived need to explain them to overseas audiences.
Instead, Moon said, China has increasingly outsourced the task of “explaining” the country to foreign employees working within its media system and to overseas influencers who produce favorable content about China. As a result, English-language state media has become less important than maintaining consistency with Beijing’s messaging.
He also noted a growing emphasis on producing content in both Chinese and English, describing it as evidence of tighter coordination across state media outlets and a renewed focus on overseas Chinese communities, which Beijing increasingly sees as receptive audiences.
The song represents an effort to use culture as a political tool while softening the image of the China Coast Guard, Jason Ng Sze Chieh, a lecturer at INTI International College Subang in Malaysia, told RFA.
“An attempt to instrumentalize culture and popular media, asserting China’s authority to patrol and ‘protect’ the South China Sea,” Ng said. “The music video is the other track: a targeted production built specifically to sell a peaceful image of China.”
Defending Beijing’s interests
Ng said the song consciously rebrands the China Coast Guard as “a benign force rather than ‘Wolf Warrior,’” using themes of intimacy and personal sacrifice while leaving the underlying political message unchanged.
“The message underneath doesn’t change – China is defending its interests, and nothing else,” he said.
Ng contrasted the music video with what he described as another strand of Beijing’s influence strategy – embracing successful cultural works that were not originally created by the state but later align with its messaging.
He said Beijing increasingly pursues “two tracks,” continuing to produce explicitly patriotic material while also co-opting independently produced content that promotes a favorable image of China, particularly among overseas Chinese communities.
“The music video feels like artificial intelligence-generated slop, rendered in the soothing style of Chinese pop and designed to sell the world on China’s ‘peaceful’ intentions,” Ng said, adding that the production’s visuals and even the singer’s voice appeared artificial.
China has increasingly sought to present its coast guard as a professional force maintaining order in what it considers its own waters, even as confrontations with Philippine and Vietnamese vessels have intensified in recent years. Beijing says its actions are lawful and necessary to safeguard its sovereignty, while rival claimants accuse it of intimidation and coercion.
The 2016 ruling by an international tribunal in The Hague found that China’s expansive “nine-dash line” claims had no legal basis under international law. China rejected the ruling and continues to assert sovereignty over most of the South China Sea, where competing claims by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have made the waterway one of the region’s most volatile flashpoints.
Edited by Eugene Whong.
