This talk will introduce a new publication titled “Chinese Soft Power” – the first book in the Cambridge Elements Global China series. Western media routinely depict China’s soft power efforts as ineffective and policymakers treat them as sharp power or as offensive influence operations. Rather than definitively proclaim Chinese soft power as either a success or a failure, Maria Repnikova examines China’s complex and often contradictory soft power performance. She shares the official visions for various projects and dissects how they actually work on the ground. Chinese initiatives are at once ambitious and deliberately adaptive to local contexts, and yet they remain contested and perceived with mixed credibility, especially amongst external audiences.