**Chinese university builds "synthetic population" for shaping foreign propaganda**

> China’s propaganda is often mocked as blunt, loud and tone-deaf. But state-backed researchers are trying to make it more sophisticated. They are building AI systems that model the cultural and political values of foreign audiences, ... China is building an AI system for tailoring its foreign propaganda 18 Sep 2026 | Fergus Ryan ASPI staff SHARE Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to LinkedIn Share to Email Print This Post With Images Without Images China’s propaganda is often mocked as blunt, loud and tone-deaf. But state-backed researchers are trying to make it more sophisticated. They are building AI systems that model the cultural and political values of foreign audiences, simulate how they might respond to events and messages and use those predicted reactions to refine what China says to the world. Among the clearest examples is a system unveiled in April 2026 called Huanyu Zhiying 1.0 寰舆智应 – a name that puns ‘the whole world’ with ‘global public opinion’ –at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. Built from more than 10,000 simulated user profiles spanning a claimed 18 countries, it attempts to model how foreign audiences and media might respond to events and messages. But the system does not merely try to predict what foreigners might think. It is being designed to help formulate what China should say in response. Responses from real Australians helped build its synthetic population. One source of data is Sun Yat-sen University’s survey The World Looks at China, which polled respondents in eight countries – Australia, the United States, Britain, Canada, India, Malaysia, France and South Africa – using samples designed to reflect each country’s demographic composition. The developers say they combined those results with data from the World Values Survey – a long-running international survey of social and political attitudes – and public social-media data to construct Huanyu Zhiying’s simulated foreign users. The World Values Survey asks asks respondents, among other things, to place themselves on a left–right political scale and identify their social class. So picture a synthetic Australian middle-class progressive man, or a Malaysian working-class conservative woman. The developers do not say which 18 countries the resulting profiles cover, or which data source underpins which population. Think of it as a wind tunnel for propaganda. Engineers use wind tunnels to expose prototypes to the forces they will encounter in the real world, revealing weaknesses before the finished product is deployed. Huanyu Zhiying attempts something analogous with political narratives: expose them to simulated audiences, observe where hostility or resistance emerges and adjust the response accordingly. According to the school’s own announcement of the launch, Huanyu Zhiying ‘possesses the dual capability of simulating foreign-media reporting and generating Chinese-side response-discourse text, and can introduce a specified guiding perspective to generate customised content.’ The interface is blunter. The system is labelled, in its developers’ own English, an ‘LLM for global crisis response’, and the last of its five steps generates response copy that conducts ‘public-opinion guidance’ on different issues. In practice, that means one model writes the foreign coverage – think of a fabricated article written in the style of the BBC or Reuters – while the simulated population reads it and reacts. The school says it took an AI model from Alibaba’s Qwen family, and fine-tuned it on foreign coverage of China and Chinese media’s own international reporting. That creates an experimental pipeline in which foreign-media coverage and social-media reactio...

**来源信息**
- **来源**：Hacker News：AI 热帖
- **分类**：ai-products
- **发布时间**：2026-09-19 19:37（北京时间）
- **原文**：[打开原文](https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/china-is-building-an-ai-system-for-tailoring-its-foreign-propaganda)