Global Media and Public Diplomacy in Sino-Western Relations

Jia Gao, Catherine Ingram, Pookong Kee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472443984
• eBook ISBN: 9781317127628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Many researchers and China observers would agree that understanding how China pursues global communication is critical for assessing its growing soft power. While soft power as a concept has, in many ways, become almost inextricably linked with the PRC's (People's Republic of China) international diplomacy of the twenty-first century, the specific role of global media within soft power diplomacy and the corresponding influence of Western mediated public diplomacy within China is a lacuna that has remained largely unexplored. Moreover, the different Chinese and Western perspectives on the influence of global media and public diplomacy on Sino-Western relations, and the changing role of global media on this crucial aspect of international politics, have not yet been critically examined.

This volume presents a broad social science audience with recent innovative scholarship and research findings on global media and public diplomacy concerning Sino-Western relations. It focuses on the implicit nexus between global media and public diplomacy, and their actual utilisation in and impact on the shifting relationships between China and the West. Special attention is given to the changing nature of globalised media in both China and Western nations, and how globalised media is influencing, shaping and changing international politics. The contributions delve deeply into both theory and practice, and focus especially upon the analysis of several key aspects of the issue from both Chinese and Western perspectives.

This combination of approaches distinguishes the volume from most other published works on the topic, and greatly enriches our knowledge base in this important contemporary field.

1 Transforming Sino-Western Relations Through Global Media and Public Diplomacy

Jia Gao, Catherine Ingram and Pookong Kee

After more than two decades of unprecedented, rapid growth, China in 2008 overtook Germany as the world’s third-largest economy and second-largest trading nation (Palmer, 2010; Chuang, 2013). It surpassed Japan to become the largest creditor of the US (Niblett, 2009), and overtook the US as the country with the largest number of Internet users (Tong, 2011).

The year 2008 also projected China onto the world stage on a number of other fronts. Its pride in hosting the Olympic Games, the third Asian country after Japan and South Korea to enjoy the honour, was marred by violent riots in Tibet (Finlay & Xin, 2010; Coombs, 2012). Many Chinese expected the global sports event to be an opportunity to showcase China’s achievements since the late 1970s, and to gain international appreciation for its new economic and political standing (Li & Wang, 2009).

However, from the moment Beijing won the Olympic bid, the event was ‘closely linked with the situation in Tibet and China’s perceived lack of human rights’ (d’Hooghe, 2011: 178). Protracted disruptions of the 2008 Olympic torch relay in a number of Western cities and the largely negative coverage of the relay by the Western media exacerbated the outrage of the Chinese general population, especially young and active netizens, against the Western media (Zhu, 2012; Harris & Pease, 2013).

These events prompted a major rethink by Chinese leaders and advisers on its diplomacy and approach to global media. China began to adopt and implement a more vigorous and direct approach towards its global profile and reputation (Sutter, 2012). The policy shift was facilitated by the rapid spread of the Internet, which enabled millions of Chinese to gain greater access to international news and facilitated information flow and exchange within China. While such technological advances have helped to disseminate democratic values and ideas, they have also spread nationalistic sentiments and feelings in China, especially among young Chinese.

The torch relay disruption in Paris, for instance, prompted a call to boycott the French retailer Carrefour in a number of Chinese cities. An online anti-CNN campaign was initiated by Chinese netizens over the allegedly biased coverage of the violent riots in Tibet, and popularised a song titled ‘Don’t be like CNN’ (Jiang, 2012), or ‘Don’t be too CNN’ (Cambie & Ooi, 2009). An unexpected outcome of the popular hostility towards the Western media was an increased alignment of young Chinese with the reaction of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to the West.

China thus embarked on a campaign to shape its image in the international community ‘from negative to neutral to positive’ (Wang, 2008, cited in Sun, 2014: 1894). Considerable resources were allocated for a new ‘soft power’ strategy, including a more nuanced approach to global communication (Wang, 2010: 3). However, the exact role of international media within the Chinese ‘soft power’ diplomacy, and the corresponding influence of Western-mediated public diplomacy within China, remains a largely unexplored field of research. The different Chinese and Western perspectives on the influence of international media and public diplomacy on Sino-Western relations has yet to be critically examined, along with the changing role of global media on this important aspect of international politics.

This edited volume presents recent scholarship and research findings on global media and public diplomacy concerning Sino-Western relations. It explores the link between global media and public diplomacy, and their utilisation in shaping relations between China and the West. The volume examines the changing nature of globalised media in China and a number of Western nations, and how globalised media is influencing, shaping and changing international politics. This introductory chapter provides a theoretical context for the edited volume and previews the chapters that follow.

A Turning Point in Chinese Diplomacy

The year 2008 brought to the fore the tension between ‘critical or negative coverage of China by the Western media’ (Guo, 2011: 171) and the century-old ‘Chinese expectations for an improved international position’ (Zhang, 2002: 18). The nature and degree of the tension in 2008 were unprecedented in the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The tension differed significantly from other events, including the Tiananmen Incident of 1989, when the Western media’s critical coverage of China was welcomed by a high proportion of Chinese youth, intellectuals and activists. In 1989, many Chinese did not share much common ground with the country’s ruling elites.

From 2008, the Chinese government began to institute various changes to its domestic policies and practices. It carried out fewer executions of prisoners and reformed its re-education system, partly in response to criticism by the Western media, governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Pushed by nationalistic hardliners to prioritise the Tibetan issue in its diplomacy, the Chinese government named it as a ‘core issue of Chinese sovereignty’ (Shirk, 2011: 247). Its so-called red-line diplomacy established a boundary of behaviour for foreign powers, utilising the experience of isolating pro-independence leaders of Taiwan in the 1990s and most of the 2000s (Lam, 2012: 203).

The ‘going global’ policy for the Chinese media that commenced in the early 2000s was given a further boost as some US$6 billion was committed to pushing the Chinese media content onto the global media space. As the then CCP leader Hu Jintao said, it was an attempt to secure for China some space in ‘an increasingly fierce struggle in the domain of news and opinion’ (cited in Yee, 2011: n.p.). China has since made a series of ‘hard decisions on soft power’ (Nye & Wang, 2009: 18) which aimed to increase its ‘voice in the world’ and to ‘overcome the Western media dominance’ (d’Hooghe, 2015: 164).

Strategically, China began to quietly move away from its long-standing low-profile policy of taoguang yanghui (‘hide brightness, nourish obscurity,’ or ‘hide one’s capabilities and bide one’s time’),¹ an ancient Chinese saying quoted by Deng Xiaoping in the early 1990s (Zhao, 2010; Horesh, 2014). It embarked on a more proactive role of yousuo zuowei (‘trying to amount to something’, or ‘getting something accomplished’) in its approach to international issues. The latter is the second part of a widely circulated ‘foreign policy guideline’ or ‘diplomatic strategy’ put forward by Deng Xiaoping in his later years (Glaser & Murphy, 2009: 21; Cabestan, 2012: 16). The positional difference represented by the two sayings has become the focus of debates on how China should deal in international relations (Global Times, 29 August 2012).

Over the years, two aspects of the controversy over China’s foreign policy directions have been examined in a number of ways. Zhao suggests that the tension between low-profile policy and ‘diplomacy activism’ reflects the somewhat contradictory view of China as both a great power and a developing country (Zhao, 2010: 357). Glaser and Murphy (2009), on the other hand, identify a China model of soft power for managing international relations, with inherent elements of reactivity and pro-activity.

Three Perspectives on Sino-Western Relations

The tension in China’s approach to foreign relations has given rise to two analytical perspectives on the drivers of China’s foreign policy, its assumptions, characteristics, patterns, trends and effects. The two perspectives can be portrayed as either offensive or defensive. This binary view has been enriched by a third perspective that highlights the interactive nature of China’s policy response (Li, 2007; Kerr, 2008; Kavalski, 2012; Shambaugh & Xiao, 2012; Zheng & Zhang, 2012; Wuthnow, 2013).

The Offensive Perspective

The offensive perspective on Chinese diplomacy can be articulated in a number of ways. However, they share the view of China’s ‘gradually assertive policy’ towards foreign nations (He & Feng, 2012: 103). Others have described it as an ‘increasingly muscular position’ (New York Times, 31 January 2010; Zhao, 2012: 32) or ‘active military diplomacy’ (Sutter, 2000: 23; Godwin, 2011: 122), including an enhanced use of soft power (Gill & Huang, 2006; Scott, 2008; Reilly, 2012).

China’s rapid and full-scale integration into the world economy, and its regained self-confidence, apparent since the late 1990s, are seen by some as clear signs of the imminent return of Chinese expansionism which has cyclically ‘reached paranoid levels’ in the imagination of Western analysts (Marschall, 2008: 108). This particular analysis is largely based on the reading of ancient Chinese history and observations, both systematic and causal, in present-day China.

Historical records of China’s territorial expansions have long been used by proponents of the offensive perspective as proof that ‘China is an aggressor and an expansionist’ (Huang, 1997: 309) that ‘can only be restrained by powerful defensive alliances’ (Lawrance, 2005: 106). Alitto suggests that China’s ‘four-millennia-old cultural continuity’ and ‘its ability to reconstitute itself as the center of the cultural universe’ have to be taken into account in order to understand its ‘aspiration to grow into a large world cultural presence’ (Alitto, 2009: 6).

As a result of such thinking, the old Chinese concept of tianxia (‘under the heaven’) has also been recycled to present ‘a hegemony where imperial China’s hierarchical governance is updated for the twenty-first century’ (Callahan, 2008: 749). The hundreds of Confucius Institutes set up as a global soft power project are interpreted by some observers as China’s expansionist chauvinism (Sun, 2012: 315).

Chinese reactions to Western media discourse on China led to publications such as China Can Say No (Song et al., 1996), Behind the Demonization of China (Li & Liu, 1997) and China Is Not Happy (Song et al., 2008). These works were seen by some Western observers as evidence of a new form of Chinese nationalism. They had admittedly attracted broad domestic political and scholarly attention (Yee & Zhu, 2002; Asia Times, 23 April 2009), and their popularity was also aided by China’s highly commercialised media sector.

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis, occurring at a juncture when China’s prominence as a global player was gaining both positive and negative reactions, could be seen as ‘an important inflection point in the trajectory of international relations’ (Kirshner, 2014: 2). The image of an assertive China was also reinforced by the West’s confidence crisis (Bell, 2008; Blair, 2010; Grimes, 2012), and even gave credence to the ‘Beijing consensus’ as an alternative to the ‘Washington consensus’ (Glaser & Murphy, 2009; Zhang, 2009; Liu, 2011).

The Defensive Perspective

There is a view that China’s initial approach to international relations was one of defence rather than offence or diplomacy activism (Xia, 2003; Zhao, 2010; Jakobson, 2013; Zhou, 2013), tracing its root to the principle of peaceful coexistence as enshrined by the 1955 Afro-Asian conference in Bandung (Marquardt, 2011). In recent state-promoted rhetoric, this approach is characterised by the emphasis on creating ‘a peaceful environment’ for China’s economic reform and modernisation (Zheng, 1999: 117), or ‘a harmonious world’ for China’s ‘peaceful rise’ (Wood, 2012: 1).

The defensive position remains very much the official Chinese policy in its approach to international relations. It highlights the importance of maintaining ‘peace for economic development’ (Zhang, 2010: 9) and the influence of Deng Xiaoping’s low-profile (taoguang yanghui) strategy among China’s political elites. The officials and elites, however, have failed to communicate this stance to the public, as the increasingly commercialised media and various forms of social media promote Chinese nationalistic sentiments and clamour for diplomacy activism.

Some analysts have suggested that the key to ‘China’s national defence policy is to ensure a stable security environment so as to permit the unrestricted development of its economy’ (Kanwal, 2013: n.p.). Lovell (2006) observes that China’s self-protection instinct has been expressed through its Great Wall for longer than two millennia. Through analysing the experience of the Korean War, Sino-Indian War of the 1960s, and the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979, Feng concludes that Chinese leaders had ‘followed the norms of a defensive strategic culture’ (Feng, 2007: 1).

In its own popular discourse, China is increasingly seen and presented as a Daguo (a big country, or a great power) which is big enough and has no territorial ambitions except to hold the land that it now has. As Azfar points out, ‘China is big enough to be a world of its own’ (Azfar, 1974: 3). Although short, simple and frequently repeated by Chinese leaders as an apt description of the Chinese view of its status in the world (Lanteigne, 2005; Glaser & Szalwinski, 2013), the Daguo concept has barely caught the attention of China observers and researchers outside the country.

The Interactive Perspective

Both the offensive and the defensive perspectives about China’s approach to diplomacy are essentially one-sided and share a common flaw in epistemological and methodological assumptio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• About the Contributors
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Transforming Sino-Western Relations Through Global Media and Public Diplomacy
• 2 China’s Soft Power: A Mid-term Assessment
• 3 Towards Increased Diversification and Sophistication: Trends and Issues in China’s Public Diplomacy
• 4 Exercising Public Diplomacy in Domestic Dispute: The Frames of Cross-Strait Relations by the Taiwan Affairs Office During the Chen Shui-bian Administration
• 5 Foreign Capital in the Chinese Media Market After Joining the World Trade Organization: Co-produced Films in Public Diplomacy and Investment Policies
• 6 The Impact of China’s Foreign Policy on War Reporting
• 7 Chinese State-Owned Media Going Abroad: A Case Study of Australia
• 8 When a Rising Giant Tries to Smile: Explaining the Quixotic Quest of China’s Media Diplomacy in Australia and Beyond
• 9 Conservative Popular Journalism, Public Diplomacy and the Search for an Alternative Chinese Modernity: Revisiting the Global Times
• 10 In the Name of the Nation: The Development of China’s International Propaganda From the Late Qing to the End of the Second World War
• 11 Communication and Understanding: A Chinese Perspective on Information Flows in a Converged World
• Index