Soft Power from the Outside, Career Choice from the Inside: Understanding Job Attractions of Chinese Media Expats in Thailand

China’s global media expansion is often interpreted as a state-led soft power strategy. Yet little is known about how individual journalists enact this expansion while working overseas for Chinese media organizations. Taking Thailand as an empirical case, this article examines how Chinese journalists assigned to overseas postings come to view their roles as a worthwhile career decision. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Thailand and in-depth interviews with Chinese expat journalists, it argues that alignment with state goals emerges not from ideological commitment, but from personal motivations, career timing, and everyday practical reasoning. The article draws on Bourdieu’s concept of illusio to conceptualize this process as a socially grounded belief that the pursuit is worth investment. Journalists accept overseas postings insofar as these roles make sense within their own trajectories, at once professionally viable and personally meaningful. The findings complement state-centric models of media expansion and offers a framework for understanding journalists’ on-the-ground motivations amid broader transformations in global journalism.