A November 24 apartment fire in Urumqi, the capital of China’s northwestern Xinjiang province, killed at least 10 people and injured at least nine more.State media in China have been blaming foreign forces and trying to distract viewers, which are typical strategies, said Joshua Kurlantzick, the author of a new book, “Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World.” Chinese media outside the country have had a more interesting response.“They’re not trying to make a major effort to spin it, since it’s pretty hard to spin for foreign audiences,” said Kurlantzick, who is also a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.I started out thinking that China was building a very large disinformation and state media influence apparatus and was becoming fairly successful at influencing the domestic politics and societies of other countries over the past decade, which it hadn’t really focused on doing except in a few places like Taiwan.And what I found is they have had some success, but in reality a lot of the funds and time spent to expand state media, making it credible and wielding disinformation and influence in other countries, has actually not worked and in many cases has backfired.In developing countries, Xinhua is increasingly stepping into the void left by other news wires like the Associated Press, because Xinhua content is free or cheap."