The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media: Contents and Abstracts

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media

Edited by
Professor Gary D. Rawnsley and
Dr Ming-yeh Rawnsley

CONTENTS

List of tables

List of figures

List of contributors

Members of the Editorial Board

Editorial Note

Acknowledgements


Introduction
Gary D. Rawnsley & Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley


Part I: The Development of the Study and the Structure of Chinese Media


1. (Re)-Focusing on the Target: Reflections on a Trajectory of Studying the Chinese Media
Yuezhi Zhao


2. China, Soft Power and Imperialism
Colin Sparks


3. Evaluating Chinese Media Policy: Objectives and Contradictions
Rogier Creemers


Part II: Journalism, Press Freedom and Social Mobilisation


4. Western Missionaries and Origins of the Modern Chinese Press
Yuntao Zhang


5. Setting the Press Boundaries:  The Case of the Southern (Nanfang) Media Group
Chujie Chen


6. Chinese Investigative Journalism in the Twenty-First Century
Hugo de Burgh


7. From Control to Competition: A Comparative Study of the Party Press and Popular Press
Hsiao-wen Lee


8. Press Freedom in Hong Kong: Interactions between State, Media and Society
Francis L. F. Lee


9. Media and Social Mobilisation in Hong Kong
Joseph M. Chan and Francis L. F. Lee


10. Citizen Journalists as an Empowering Community for Change: A Case Study of a Taiwanese Online Platform ‘PeoPo’
Chen-ling Hung


Part III: The Internet, Public Sphere and Media Culture


11. Politics and Social Media in China
Lars Willnat, Lu Wei and Jason A. Martin


12. Online Chinese Nationalism and Its Nationalist Discourses
Yiben Ma


13. A Cyberconflict Analysis of Chinese Dissidents Focusing on Civil Society, Mass Incidents and Labour Resistance
Athina Karatzogianni and Andrew Robinson


14. Workers and Peasants as Historical Subjects: The Formation of Working Class Media Cultures in China
Wanning Sun


15. An Emerging Middle Class Public Sphere in China? Analysis of News Media Representation of ‘Self Tax Declaration’
Qian (Sarah) Gong


16. Expressing Myself, Connecting with You: Young Taiwanese Females’ Photographic Self-Portraiture on Wretch Album
Yin-han Wang


17. Against the Grain: The Battle for Public Service Broadcasting in Taiwan
Chun-wei Daniel Lin


18. Public Service Television in China
Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley and Chien-san Feng




Part IV: Market, Production and the Media Industries

19. The Changing Role of Copyright in China’s Emergent Media Economy
Lucy Montgomery and Xiang Ren


20. Gamers, State and Online Games
Anthony Y. H. Fung


21. The Geographical Clustering of Chinese Media Production
Michael Keane


22. The Politics and Poetics of Television Documentary in China
Qing Cao


23. Contemporary Chinese Historical TV Drama as a Cultural Genre: Production, Consumption and the State Power
George Dawei Guo


24. Live Television Production of Media Events in China: The Case of the Beijing Olympic Games
Limin Liang


25. Negotiated Discursive Struggles in Hyper-Marketised and Oligopolistic Media System: The Case of Hong Kong
Charles Chi-wai Cheung




Part V. Chinese Media and the World


26.  Internationalisation of China’s Television: History, Development and New Trends
Junhao Hong and Youling Liu


27. Decoding the Chinese Media in Flux: American Correspondents as an Interpretive Community
Yunya Song


28. Chinese International Broadcasting, Public Diplomacy and Soft Power
Gary Rawnsley


Chinese Glossary: Selected Chinese Names and Terms

Chinese Dynasties at a Glance

Index



CHAPTER ABSTRACTS


1. (Re)-Focusing on the Target: Reflections on a Trajectory of Studying the Chinese Media
Yuezhi Zhao


In the context of China’s rapid transformation in a turbulent global system since the late 1970s, to study the Chinese media is to shoot at a target that appears easy to focus on at first sight, but is in actuality rather elusive. On the surface, the target appears static as there has not been any radical transformation in the basic structure of the Chinese media system after more than thirty years of reform. Upon closer examination, however, the target has both undergone dramatic mutations in its shape and shed much of its original colour. Moreover, in the context of a highly unstable and rapidly evolving global order, the target has not only repeatedly defied conventional expectations in terms of the direction of its movement, but also is realigning its geopolitical  relations with other objects and streams of flow in the global media universe. Which direction to look at? What does the target look like at a particular moment? What lenses to use and how to aim? What kind of shooting guns do we have in hand and are they adequate for the purpose? No less important, isn’t it the case that the shape and colour of the target, our ways of approaching it, even the very language we use to define and describe it, very much depends on who we are and where we stand as scholars? Finally, beyond the imperative of surviving the academic curse of publishing or perishing, what is this analysis for? This chapter re-examines the author’s own academic endeavour in the field. It is an exercise of intellectual self-reflectivity and it discusses both the substantive and methodological issues involved in studying the Chinese media.


2. China, Soft Power and Imperialism
Colin Sparks


This chapter is primarily concerned with developing an approach that facilitates the understanding of the international cultural impact consequent upon China’s rise. The author compares two major approaches — soft power vs. cultural imperialism — from the point of view of their utility in helping us understand current developments. It begins with a brief statement of the two positions and makes some comparisons between their claims. It then considers them from the point of view of their ability to illuminate a number of key problems raised by the role of culture in international relations. These approaches, both developed with the US experience very much in mind, are shown to be lacking in some important dimensions necessary to explain current developments. Neither on its own is sufficiently developed as to provide an adequate theoretical framework to study the contemporary situation. In response to these shortcomings, an attempt is made to use these insights to develop a theoretical framework that is adequate to solving the problems presented by the distinctive features of the Chinese case.


3. Evaluating Chinese Media Policy: Objectives and Contradictions
Rogier Creemers


In recent years, there have been great changes in the Chinese media environment which have been mainly driven by technological and commercial developments. Social media have flourished, the film sector has expanded and commercial television stations have grown ever more successful. However, in China’s particular political-legal environment, these developments pose challenges to government and policy making, as the media administration aims to reconcile political objectives, such as maintaining legitimacy, social objectives, such as youth protection, and economic objectives. Furthermore, the party’s supremacy in political and legal matters has created a situation where overarching constitutional notions, which can underpin the structure of governance, are absent. At the same time, it is clear that there is a strong institutional structure to govern the sphere of public communication which has its own underpinnings and dynamics. How then can we make sense of the content and structure of this Chinese media governance apparat? This chapter answers a double question. First, it will analyse the central philosophical underpinnings of the current Chinese communication order as well as their historical origins. Second, it will illustrate how the current governance structure — both in terms of institutional structuring and content of media rules — is set up in order to implement these objectives. Finally, it will briefly analyse the severe problems the government faces implementing media regulation in the rapidly shifting Chinese environment.


4. Western Missionaries and Origins of the Modern Chinese Press
Yuntao Zhang


China can lay claim to being the oldest print civilization in the world. However a modern culture of journalism and publishing was in fact a relatively late arrival, coinciding with the import of modern printing technology from the west. For over a thousand years, Chinese journalism was dominated by the official gazette called DiBao (Peking Gazette). This organ of the imperial state comprised edicts, news of government appointments and court affairs, and served a small privileged readership. It was not until 1815 that what could be considered the first modern periodical (though not strictly speaking a Chinese publication) was to appear in China. This was the work of two British missionaries, Robert Morrison and William Milne, and it marked the beginnings of a process, spanning the nineteenth century, in which a group of predominantly British and American Protestant missionaries pursued a strategy of evangelism centred on the development of journalism, publishing and printing enterprises in China. This chapter provides a short outline of this process and some reflections on its wider cultural consequences.


5. Setting the Press Boundaries:  The Case of the Southern (Nanfang) Media Group
Chujie Chen


This research is concerned with the dialectic relationship between political-economic constraints and journalistic agency that contribute to the transformation of journalism. We should ask what kind of factors gave rise to the outspokenness of the Nanfang subsidiary papers and how their journalists pushed the limits of the permissible in China. Though much attention has been paid to the Nanfang newspapers, relatively few consider Nanfang as a whole and the intra-organisational relations within the group. This chapter synthesises existing studies on journalistic practices at Nanfang and its maverick subsidiary papers in particular. Overall, this chapter attempts to examine (1) the political-economic settings where Nanfang is located; (2) the relationship between the parent newspaper Nanfang Daily and its maverick subsidiaries in terms of organisational culture, division of labour, and the flow of human resources; (3) the strategic rituals used by the press to cope with or even bypass the severe restrictions imposed by power holders; and (4) the implications of strategic rituals for media autonomy.


6. Chinese Investigative Journalism in the Twenty-First Century
Hugo de Burgh


Rather than trying to define investigative journalism by its motivations and heroics, this chapter defines investigative journalism in China according to its method of approach and by the techniques associated with it, techniques that are not necessarily peculiar to investigative journalism, but which are characteristic of them. Some investigative journalists reject the very category, claiming that all journalism is or ought to be investigative, in the sense that checking and digging are intrinsic to good journalism. In general, however, Chinese investigative journalists are expected to display specific characteristics. They should be revelatory (provide new information, i.e. qishi xing, and expose hidden things, that is, jiefa xing); accusatory of bad people/organisations (qianze xing), and moralistic (implying that journalists apply higher moral standards, i.e. shuojiao xing); and finally, willing to take risks (fengxian xing). This chapter explains these characteristics in detail and discusses the particular skills and techniques employed by journalists to achieve their aims.


7. From Control to Competition: A Comparative Study of the Party Press and Popular Press
Hsiao-wen Lee


This chapter looks at how the newspaper industry in China has changed from being a party and government-led propaganda tool to become a more commercially market-oriented product. This will be achieved by first looking at four key influencing factors: (1) circulation, (2) advertising revenue, (3) distribution and (4) organisation of press groups. Second, the chapter explores how different variables impact on the news media: political control, market competition and professional performance. Then finally through the analysis of four news events during the period between 2005 and 2007, the discussions identify the various ways news coverage has been influenced. This chapter will argue that the popular market-oriented newspapers not only try to touch the party line when doing their reports, but also surrender themselves to wider commercial considerations.


8. Press Freedom in Hong Kong: Interactions between State, Media and Society
Francis L. F. Lee


This chapter reviews the politics of press freedom in Hong Kong by focusing on the interaction between the state, the local media and civil society. Without dismissing the importance of structural constraints, the interactional perspective emphasises the capability of actors to influence outcomes — the quality and quantity of press freedom in the present case — through negotiating, contesting, and/or collaborating with each other. Each player in the state-media-society triad has its own basic concerns and goals. Given their respective aims and perspectives, the players develop strategies to interact with each other. At the same time, the players also need to respond to changing social and political contexts. In particular, major political events may lead to changing perceptions of reality, and the players may alter their strategies as a result. Consistent with recent research on political developments in Hong Kong, this chapter treats the 1 July protest in 2003, in which 500,000 people protested against the Special Administrative Region (SAR) government, as a critical event that had significant repercussions on the China-Hong Kong relationship. Before 2003, China was largely willing to grant an ‘exceptional’ degree of press freedom to the city’s media. It relied on an informal system of politics marked by self-censorship and inducement to contain the Hong Kong press. While these elements persisted after 2003, the state developed new strategies to control and co-opt the Hong Kong press as the government began to intervene more openly in Hong Kong society. Yet civil society has also become more active in monitoring press performance, so that by 2013, Hong Kong’s press is more polarised and more proactive in voicing its concerns.


9. Media and Social Mobilisation in Hong Kong
Joseph M. Chan and Francis L. F. Lee


This chapter provides a conceptual overview of the roles played by the mass media and new media platforms in the formation of social movements and specific instances of collective actions in Hong Kong. It first discusses the characteristics and development of contentious collective actions in contemporary Hong Kong in order to provide the broader background against which the roles of media communications can be understood. It then examines important issues in the relationship between media and social mobilisation, such as how the professional news media cover social protests.


10. Citizen Journalists as an Empowering Community for Change: A Case Study of a Taiwanese Online Platform ‘PeoPo’
Chen-ling Hung


In 2007, Taiwan’s Public Television Service (PTS) established the PeoPo Citizen Journalism Platform to encourage public participation in news production. As a friendly web2.0 platform, PeoPo was designed for citizens to report and share news stories online. In addition, training curricula and courses are provided to empower Taiwanese citizens and organisations so that they are capable of reporting on important environmental, socio-economic and cultural issues. PeoPo’s efforts attracted attention from the mainstream media and international news organisations. Philipe Harding of BBC World News has commented that PeoPo could be a model for citizen journalism and ‘one of the best strategies for extending public media service in the digital era’. Why can PeoPo be influential? How is the platform designed and operated? What are the impacts on participants from the viewpoint of empowerment? What implications does it have on our understanding of the media, online journalism and citizen participation? To answer these questions, this chapter applies the concepts of participatory communication and citizen journalism to examine the development and influences of PeoPo. The discussion includes a brief analysis of this platform and interviews with the platform manager and its citizen reporters. This study thus aims to analyse the practice and influences of PeoPo and how this model would advance our understanding of citizen journalism.


11. Politics and Social Media in China
Lars Willnat, Lu Wei and Jason A. Martin


This chapter takes stock of the current state of the internet in China by analysing what digital media are available, how they are used within China’s unique political and social environment, and what effects they might have on political engagement among ordinary Chinese. In doing so, the authors rely on as much empirical evidence as possible, even though they realise that this is a fairly new and unexplored topic among China’s scholars. The chapter begins with a description of internet access in China, followed by a more detailed look at the availability and use of social media and blogging. It then discusses the growing significance of online video in China’s public sphere and how this medium has become an important tool for undermining the government’s efforts at controlling social media. Finally, the chapter reviews the current literature on the potential link between social media and political engagement in China.


12. Online Chinese Nationalism and Its Nationalist Discourses
Yiben Ma


No matter how online Chinese nationalism is studied, whether seeing its outgrowth as a signal of an emerging civil society or as a form of public opinion shaping Chinese foreign policies, the phenomenon can hardly be understood without taking two perspectives into account. Firstly, while investigating the potentials of the internet to bring changes to various aspects of Chinese nationalism, equal attention should be paid to the historical, social and institutional context out of which online Chinese nationalism comes into shape. Secondly, any study related to nationalism concerns two indispensable parts, namely the state, with which the masses identify their loyalty; and the masses who translate their nationalist consciousness ‘into deeds of organised action’. Taking both facts into consideration, this chapter aims to first of all embed the concept of Chinese nationalism into a historical, social and institutional context and explain how the concept has evolved and transformed over time in both official and popular discourses. Then it sheds light on the ‘Chinese internet’ per se - the immediate soil where online Chinese nationalism grows. It inspects the peculiarities of the internet that configure the production, dissemination and discussion of online Chinese nationalism. Finally, it endeavours to set up interrelations between Chinese nationalism and the internet by examining the extent to which the internet brings changes to the expression and discussion of Chinese nationalism, and challenges the relations between official and popular players over nationalism issues.


13. A Cyberconflict Analysis of Chinese Dissidents Focusing on Civil Society, Mass Incidents and Labour Resistance
Athina Karatzogianni and Andrew Robinson


This chapter employs the cyberconflict perspective to offer an in-depth analysis of Chinese dissidents in the People’s Republic of China focusing particularly on the 2000s. A distinction is drawn between socio-political (or active) social movement uses of the internet — which focus on organisation, mobilisation and the networked form of the medium itself — and ethno-religious (or reactive) social movement uses, which subordinate the medium to vertical logics. These are often expressed in terms of ad hoc mobilisations and tit-for-tat defacements and cyberattacks adhering to closed and fixed identities, such as nationality, religion and ethnicity.


14. Workers and Peasants as Historical Subjects: The Formation of Working Class Media Cultures in China
Wanning Sun


Economic reforms, industrialisation, urbanisation and migration since the 1980s have given rise to what is now often described as the ‘new working class’ in China. But is there such a thing as a working class media culture, and if so, what shape and form does a working class media culture take? What are the political, social and economic contexts in which a working class media culture comes to exist? And finally, if there is such a thing as the working class media culture, then what is the relationship between class analysis and media studies in China, and indeed how should future research agendas be shaped by these concerns? This chapter addresses these questions.


15. An Emerging Middle Class Public Sphere in China? Analysis of News Media Representation of ‘Self Tax Declaration’
Qian (Sarah) Gong


This chapter draws on the concept of the public sphere to analyse the democratic potential of the news media in China. It emphasises that in addition to media autonomy, public deliberation based on plural social interests is another major dimension of media democracy. It analyses three news media that represent diverse social interests as well as the ‘journalism domain’ and ‘civic forum’ sectors of the public sphere. Through analysing their representation of a recent tax policy which aims to reduce income inequality, this chapter examines their autonomous civic deliberative function as well as their representative function of plural social interests, drawn from the revisited public sphere concept. It then critically discusses the potential of an emerging middle-class media public sphere in China, which falls short in its inclusion of a wider range of diverse and pluralistic social interests.


16. Expressing Myself, Connecting with You: Young Taiwanese Females’ Photographic Self-Portraiture on Wretch Album
Yin-han Wang


This chapter is part of a broader research project that examines Taiwanese girls’ identity through internet self-portraiture. The empirical data presented in this chapter is based on interviews with forty-two girls aged 13–20 who post self-portraits on Wretch, the most popular social networking site in Taiwan when this project commenced. Interviews were conducted between February and November 2010, mostly through online instant messaging but also a few conducted face-to-face in southern Taiwan. While self-portraiture can be explored from many perspectives, and is sometimes hastily dismissed as pure narcissism, this chapter takes an approach that seeks to understand online self-portraiture as a form of mediated interpersonal communication. The author brings together perspectives on personal photography, mobile communication, and personal relationships in offline and online contexts, and examines the role of self-portraiture — as a kind of visual self-disclosure — in girls’ online and offline interpersonal communication.


17. Against the Grain: The Battle for Public Service Broadcasting in Taiwan
Chun-wei Daniel Lin


This chapter engages with the debate around the expansion of Taiwanese Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) in three main areas of inquiry and conceptualisation: (1) the role of PSB from the perspective of critical political economy, (2) the media in transitional societies with specific reference to Taiwan, and (3) the politics of media representation in the Taiwanese context. One strand in the classic arguments in favour of PSB is particularly addressed in this chapter, that is, the question of what role (if any) PSB can and should play in a televisual environment where consumer choice has been extended by the proliferation of cable and satellite channels. This chapter examines if channel plurality addresses market failures and what distinctive role PSB can play in a multi-channel age. While political and market forces threaten ‘the cultural citizenship’ which stands for citizens’ rights of ‘access to the information and social participation’, one important focus of this study is on the alliances and networks formed by civil society groups or by business interests, and the ways these formations attempt to intervene in the policy marking process by building public and media support and influencing legislators. The competing claims of various groups about the expansion of PSB are the central focus of this chapter.


18. Public Service Television in China
Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley and Chien-san Feng


This chapter traces the development of public service television in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It unravels the endeavours by Chinese elites to reconcile competing concerns from different sections of the society in implementing Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) within the Chinese context. The authors use the term public service television to include both Chinese public television channels and public interest television. A study on the development of public service television in the PRC reveals to a certain extent how China actually functions, that is, not necessarily as a single-minded and highly efficient unit but as a fragmented entity within which lie multiple, and often self-conflicting, interests and directions. Moreover, while an examination of China’s internal debate on public service television may reaffirm a universal value of PSB in modern public life, it also raises fundamental questions: does PSB only exist in democracies? Can a non-democratic country such as the PRC creates its own version of public service television and if so, how will the Chinese audiences benefit from it?


19. The Changing Role of Copyright in China’s Emergent Media Economy
Lucy Montgomery and Xiang Ren


This chapter introduces the changing role of copyright in China from a historical perspective. It begins by briefly tracing the history of copyright, from a censorship related system associated with the emergence of the printing press in imperial China, through modernisation during the Republican period, abolition under communism, and finally to the introduction of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) first copyright law in 1990 and the nation’s entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001.


20. Gamers, State and Online GamesAnthony Y. H. Fung


Freedom of the press and plurality of ideas have been enduring issues in the study of the media. Recently, attention has turned to the cultural industries, sometimes also known as creative industries. Broadcasting industries, music industries, film industries, animation, online game industries and other internet-platform run industries are examples of cultural industries. All these cultural industries in total have started to accumulate huge profits and achieved considerable growth. In view of the economic potential and market, and hence strong cultural influence, the state realises that its influence and control should be extended to these industries. This chapter explains how the Chinese authorities attempted to extend their manipulative logic over the emerging creative or cultural industries. Specifically, this chapter focuses on the government’s effort to (re)gain control over the online game industry, a rapidly growing and highly profitable new media platform in which the state has had no experience in terms of both content production and control.


21. The Geographical Clustering of Chinese Media Production
Michael Keane


This chapter examines the geography of audio-visual media production against the backdrop of China’s attempt to modernise and professionalise its media institutions. The author begins with a brief summary of key changes that have transpired before asking what these changes mean for researchers of China’s media. In contrast to many accounts of China’s media that begin with the political imperative, the chapter argues that commercial reforms of the media system are the key driver of change. The chapter then looks at examples of the realignment of regional media production in television, film and animation before focusing on how Beijing and Shanghai have competed to be media industry centres. 


22. The Politics and Poetics of Television Documentary in China
Qing Cao


The roots of documentary film run deep in China’s political history. However, the commercialisation drive of the media industry in the 1990s dislodged documentary film from state monopoly. Since then it has expanded substantially in function, subject matter, style and voice. The partial de-politicisation of the media industry has released the pent-up creative energy of media professionals. The current popularity of TV documentary, in contrast to the tired dogmatic propagandist films, signifies a structural change in political communication, in state-society relations and in the dynamics of socio-political transformation. Nonetheless, documentary films like all other forms of media are centrally controlled, and subject to the direct administrative supervision of the State Administration of Press, Publications, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT). In early 2013, in an attempt to tighten its control of proliferating documentaries, the SAPPRFT issued a new regulation centralising the management of topics by publishing an officially proved list every six months. These developments over time reveal both the dynamics of change in the Chinese media and the evolving relationships between political control, market forces and socio-economic transformations. This chapter documents and discusses this development through a chronological and thematic account of the history, structure and key issues of documentaries. Emphasis is given to intrinsic linkages between TV documentaries, their roles and functions and the political, historical and socio-economic context.


23. Contemporary Chinese Historical TV Drama as a Cultural Genre: Production, Consumption and the State Power
George Dawei Guo


This chapter examines the genre of the historical television drama from both the production and the consumption perspectives. The first section focuses on the Chinese television drama industry. The aim of this section is to look at how the Chinese television drama industry has been categorising and evaluating historical drama since the 1980s. The author divides the evolution of Chinese historical drama into three stages: 1984–1992, 1992–2004, and 2004–present. At each stage, the meaning of ‘the historical’ has been conditioned by certain literary, production, scheduling and regulatory circumstances. The discussion on the audience response is based on empirical audience research that the author conducted between 2007 and 2008. The author argues that to a large extent the three audience types — conservatives, culturalists and realists — reveal the respondents’ awareness and perception of state power in their cultural practices of watching the historical drama.


24. Live Television Production of Media Events in China: The Case of the Beijing Olympic Games
Limin Liang


The countdown to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, widely seen as China’s ‘coming out party’, started almost as soon as the city won the Olympic bid in 2001. An important component of this countdown was the media planning within China Central Television (CCTV), which is the state broadcaster and the Olympic TV rights holder in mainland China. The coverage would eventually amount to approximately 3,000 hours of programming across nine TV channels. Drawing from literature on media events and cultural production, this chapter engages with an understudied topic in media events scholarship: the relationship between plans and improvisation at different stages of live broadcasting of a mega event. Related to this, the chapter looks at the perception of ‘uncertainty’ in live television production as well as the strategies developed by media agents to cope with it. Regarding the component of ‘improvisation,’ in particular, the chapter revisits the concept of ‘what-a-story’ in news reporting and uses as a case study, sprinter Liu Xiang’s unexpected withdrawal from the race, as an example to illustrate the dialectic relationship between plan and improvisation.


25. Negotiated Discursive Struggles in Hyper-Marketised and Oligopolistic Media System: The Case of Hong Kong
Charles Chi-wai Cheung


This chapter investigates how the extreme marketisation and oligopolisation of the Hong Kong media constrain and enable representational struggles over youth across different media sectors and theorise the counter-hegemonic potentials, influences and limitations of the counter discursive forces involved. The case study has wider relevance to understanding media pluralism in capitalism. First, discursive struggles over Hong Kong youth are rather unequal. This context of an unequal power struggle is not peculiar to youth, but to different degrees is shared by other powerless groups in Hong Kong and by other capitalist societies. Many scholars have expressed serious concerns about how extreme media marketisation and oligopolisation would disadvantage powerless groups. The case of Hong Kong youth can shed light on ‘what would be’ for powerless groups in such a media environment. Second, the Hong Kong case suggests that representational struggles may be neither intense nor insignificant, but are situated between these two extremes at a location termed by the author ‘negotiated representational struggles’. Negotiated representational struggles should not be dismissed as trivial resistance, as they periodically and sporadically pose challenges to the mainstream with strong and lasting counter-hegemonic effects.


26.  Internationalisation of China’s Television: History, Development and New Trends
Junhao Hong and Youling Liu


China’s television represents a highly complicated media system. Not only is it one of the largest television systems in the world and one of the world’s most powerful political and ideological machines, but more importantly it is also a very unique social manifestation. This chapter examines Chinese TV’s internationalisation and the various approaches used by the Chinese government for the internationalisation of television over time. The authors divide the internationalisation of China’s television into four intertwined paths: (1) importing media and cultural products from other countries; (2) co-producing television products with foreign media; (3) exporting television dramas to other countries; and (4) the new trend of internationalisation of China’s television, which is an aggressive strategy of expanding China’s media outlets and their informational and cultural products abroad.


27. Decoding the Chinese Media in Flux: American Correspondents as an Interpretive Community
Yunya Song


American journalists constantly experience tight constraints in China. However, very few academic studies have focused on how American journalists seek the information from the Chinese media, and how they interpret the messages encoded by their Chinese counterparts. The interpretive response of American journalists is not a matter of individual perception alone. While foreign correspondents are typically viewed as loners who set their own agenda, nowhere had the US press corps consorted as much as they did in post-Mao China. This chapter aims to identify what information sources are preferred by the US press corps in their use of Chinese media, and paints a longitudinal portrait of the Chinese media landscape ‘recoded’ by these American journalists. With the view that information seeking does not exist only in the incipient location of information, but also its ensuing ‘relocation’, the concern of this study has been not only with the initial retrieval of facts, but also with shared decoding strategies, to wit, the ways in which American journalists as an interpretive community evaluate and decode local media messages throughout the wider constructive task. Their choice of decoding strategies is not the result of individual self-serving, idiosyncratic renderings of texts but a collective appropriation of texts by virtue of dominant cultural assumptions to suit group interests.


28. Chinese International Broadcasting, Public Diplomacy and Soft Power
Gary Rawnsley


This chapter evaluates the relationship between China’s soft power strategy, its public diplomacy and its international broadcasting capacity. Understanding the connection between these three activities is important for public diplomacy, with international broadcasting as one of its instruments, represents the mobilisation and instrumentalisation of soft power resources: It helps us to understand how soft power resources are converted into behavioural outcomes. The principal themes of this chapter are: (1) the discrepancy between the messages disseminated by China’s international broadcasting stations and the perceptions of China by their audience; (2) the reactive strategy that has determined China’s international broadcasting must be a corrective to both western media reporting about China and the dominance of western media organisations in global news flows; and perhaps most importantly, (3) the question of trust and credibility that surfaces because China’s international broadcasting remains fully embedded within the state system.

BBC Interview with Xu Lin about Confucius Institutes

The BBC's Shanghai correspondent, John Sudworth, has interviewed Xu Lin, the head of Hanban which is the state ministry responsible for China's Confucius Institutes. An edited version of the interview can be viewed here Interview with Xu Lin.

This is an extraordinary interview on many levels, not least Ms Xu's response to questions about her blatant interference in an academic conference earlier this year. I wrote a post about this incident as one of several 'public diplomacy faux pas', accessible here When to say nothing.

What is most surprising in this interview is not what she said in defence of the Confucius Institutes. Like any government minister across the world, Ms Xu is required to provide an official response to critical questions. Rather, most alarming is her logic: John Sudworth has no right to ask questions about Taiwan because it is a Chinese issue and only the Chinese can address it. This was an entirely inappropriate answer to the question of why she had ripped promotional material about the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation from the programme of an academic conference. It makes no sense in the context of the interview and undermines the more positive tone of her answers to other questions. It also provides the framing for the interview and means that any review will focus on the more dramatic and confrontational portion of the interview, rather than the substance. John Sudworth's decision to post online Ms Xin's request for him to to edit out altogether the question about the conference in Portugal and his refusal to do so means that this and not the cultural diplomacy of the Confucius Institutes become the story. Thus Xu Lin revealed that the Chinese government has much to learn about how the media work, and any claims of communication professionalism among government officials are premature. The interview was yet another public diplomacy faux pas.    

Moreover, Ms Xu resorted to complaining she had not been given in advance any question about the conference in Portugal and therefore refused to answer. This was her chance to explain and, dare we say, even apologise for her violation of academic freedom earlier this year. Any critic seeking evidence of how Confucius Institutes are not simply agents of cultural diplomacy and language teaching will find it here: Xu Lin not only refused to answer difficult questions, she also politicised the Confucius Institutes and reinforced the idea that they are led by dogmatists.

Just as we are assured that China's government communications machinery is becoming more professional, more sensitive to the demands of the modern media age, Xu Lin's interview tells a different story. It does little to reassure viewers that Confucius Institutes are not required to pursue a political agenda decided in Beijing.  The interview is a crowning end to a year in which Chinese public diplomacy has taken one step forward and two steps back.

China: When To Say Nothing

Few governments spend as much on their international outreach - what one might call 'soft power' - than China; and few governments get it wrong so spectacularly and so frequently. The main explanation for this lack of success is the failure to understand the first lesson of public diplomacy: Actions always speak louder than words; and that sometimes, saying or doing nothing is the most strategic course to take.

The discussion about how China's behaviour, at home and abroad, undermines its public diplomacy among the international community has a long history. The literature on China's soft power refers repeatedly to how China's record on human rights, democracy, the treatment of dissidents, and freedom of speech, as well as its behaviour towards Tibet and Xinjiang, challenge the more positive narratives that Beijing prefers to project in its international communication. And yet it seems that the Chinese government has difficulty in grasping that its response to adverse events and criticisms may also have negative consequences for its public diplomacy. In 2014 three events in just two months nurture this critical perspective.

The first event occurred in London on 4 June 2014, the 25th anniversary of the suppression by the People's Liberation Army of the protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Two women, one of whom was Wang Ti-Anna, the daughter of a democracy activist, were shoved away from the Chinese embassy in London by staff who also threw to the ground the flowers the two women wished to leave on the steps ... and this happened in front of television news cameras from across the world. This not only indicates that staff in the embassy fail to understand how public diplomacy works - do not react in ways that will inflame the situation and give journalists the story they seek; if in doubt say and do nothing - but it also suggests that embassy staff had to be seen, by their superiors inside the building or in Beijing, to be doing something, even if it results in bad publicity. You can see the BBC's footage of the event here: Chinese embassy in London

A second related event occurred on 18th August 2014. Clive Palmer, a member of the Australian Parliament, launched a tirade on live television against China and the Chinese. His vile, offensive and racist language has been reported all around the world and has given Palmer more international publicity than he deserves. The Chinese embassy in Canberra should have been advised to issue a statement condemning Palmer and his remarks, but reassuring Australians that the Chinese government recognises he was not speaking for all Australians; that Australia remains an important and friendly country to China; and that relations would not be disrupted by the inanity of one man's comments. That is diplomacy. Instead, China's state-owned newspaper, the Global Times, decided to respond in its English language edition with its own excessive zeal, claiming that Palmer 'serves as a symbol that Australian society has an unfriendly attitude towards China'.  The editorial continued by recommending that Australia 'must be marginalized in China's global strategy'. Again such ill-advised rhetoric only inflames further the situation, demonstrates that China's public diplomacy is neither as sophisticated nor as sensitive as Beijing would like to think, and shows yet again that China is unable to respond in a rational way to criticism. Rather, the government decided to generalise about a whole country from the ramblings of one man, something the Chinese repeatedly accuse westerners of doing about China. Clearly the Chinese government and its embassies need better advice on how to handle the international media. You can see Palmer's outburst here: Clive Palmer and read the Global Times article here Global Times.

The third event is more sinister and perhaps undermines China's soft power more than the other two incidents put together. On 22 July 2014 at the annual conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies in Portugal, China's Vice-Minister Xu Lin, Director-General of the Confucius Institutes, impounded all copies of the conference programme and refused to release them until organisers removed pages she deemed offensive. What was so distasteful for Xu was an acknowledgement in the programme that part of the conference was sponsored by Taiwan's Chiang Ching-kuo (CCK) Foundation. Several pages including an advertisement for the CCK Foundation were ripped from a programme which the Confucius Institute had no role in funding. In a published statement (statement) the President of the EACS, Roger Greatrex, said: 'Providing support for a conference does not give any sponsor the right to dictate parameters to academic topics or to limit open academic presentation and discussion, on the basis of political requirements'. At a time when the role of Confucius Institutes - long celebrated as a shining example of China's public and cultural diplomacy - is being scrutinised closely and debated across the world, but especially in the US, Xu Lin could not have picked a worse time to assert her imaginary authority. It is not surprising that headlines in western media adopted critical, sometimes hostile language in reporting and commenting on this news: "Censorship at the China Studies Meeting" (Inside Higher Education); "China fails the soft power test" (China Spectator); "Beijing's Propaganda Lessons: Confucius Institute officials are agents of Chinese censorship" (Wall Street Journal). Academic institutions will now have reason to be more suspicious of Confucius Institutes, while those who have long suspected their political agenda will have far more credibility.

The lesson here for China is very clear: Think before you speak; think before you act. What you do in response to something that you may find unfavourable or even offensive may backfire and ultimately undermine the credibility of your soft power campaign. When in doubt, say and do nothing.      

Pew Research on China and the US: A Soft Power Dimension

To coincide with President Obama's trip to Asia, the Pew Research Center has released the results of its latest public opinion surveys undertaken in those countries he will visit (Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Malaysia). The questions were designed to not only ascertain not only the popularity of, but also the strength of feeling about ties with the US and China. Finally, the survey tried to measure the impact of current territorial disputes with China on public opinion.

The results will make for sombre reading in Beijing, and should be of major concern to the state agencies in China responsible for strategic communication and international engagement.

The first interpretation of the data is that the 'power' - the political dimension - in 'soft power' matters.  As I have argued elsewhere (All fluff and no substance), and as USC's Philip Seib has also noted (Putting a hard edge on soft power), we are in danger of losing sight of soft power as a strategic enabler. In many ways, the core disciplines of international relations and communications have been seduced by the idealism inherent in soft power so that it has become a fashionable catch-all label for an activity that all governments must 'do' otherwise they are out of step with the times. There is a danger that the term has become an 'empty signifier' (Hayden, 2012: 47; Critchley and Marchart, 2004). The production and reproduction of discourses about soft power may ultimately be more important and possess more strength than the original meaning. So the questions about soft power - its meaning and application - must be: Power to achieve what? Over whom? How do the intangible benefits of outreach (international broadcasting, for example, or student exchanges) translate into discrete tangibles that advance the political and strategic agenda of the source?

This is important for the China's public diplomacy cadres studying the results of the latest Pew research. Despite Beijing's apparent confidence in the belief that 'to know us is to love us', its soft power push in three out of four areas surveyed is having little impact, even though the Asia-Pacific remains a primary target of China's endeavours to sell itself as a peaceful and responsible regional power (Malaysia is the exception, and I will defer to my colleagues who know far more about Malaysia's international relations to provide a possible explanation for this). The number of respondents who said it is more important to have strong ties with China rather than the US is shockingly low, making the political meanings of the poll quite transparent (again, Malaysia was the exception). Clues for reason are found in the responses to the question: How big a problem are territorial disputes between China and your country? Given the on-going disagreements about sovereignty of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, the results are not that surprising. Politics matters; and actions - how a state behaves at home and abroad - will always speak louder than words. Presentation is only as good as the policy it is designed to sell.   

References:

Hayden, C. (2012), The Rhetoric of Soft Power: Public Diplomacy in Global Contexts (Lanham, MD: Lexington)

Critchley, S. & O. Marchart (eds.) (2004), Laclau: A Critical Reader (London: Routledge)

Chinese aid and investment

A report in The Guardian newspaper (Chinese mining in Peru) has highlighted China's investment in copper, silver and molybdenum mining in Peru. Chinalco, a Chinese mining giant, is struggling to relocate the 5,000 people who live next to Toromocho mountain where the minerals are awaiting extraction from the earth. Forced relocation at home is easy for the Chinese and happens on a regular basis; overseas it is more difficult, hence the mining company is trying to trying to bring civil society and local consultancy groups into the process to achieve what American academic Cynthia Sanborn calls 'a planned consensual relocation of a town'. The Guardian reveals that Chinalco bought the land for $860 million and invested $.2.2 billion in the mine.    

This report made me think again about China's investment in, and aid to developing countries which are considered features of China's soft power strategy.

One of the best books on China I have read in 2012 is Deborah Brautigam's The Dragon's Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2009; 2011) which connects with my own work on China's public diplomacy and soft power (although it never explicitly discusses either in depth). Brautigam's analysis offers a penetrating critique of popular perceptions of China as a wholly benevolent power offering the not only an alternative "model" of development, but also investment and unconditional aid that is said to be welcome throughout Africa.

Brautigam demonstrates that China's foreign aid 'has become one tool in a range of economic instruments adeptly managed by China's state leaders to boost China's exports and its own development' (p.25). After noting how China's engagement with Africa has contributed to the continent's development, she then asks: 'Should we be critical of China's claim that its aid should foster mutual benefit ...? Shouldn't aid from such a powerhouse be mainly altruistic ...? (ibid.). Brautigam thinks the 'short answer to this is no' (ibid,), and this is where China's public diplomacy creeps into the analysis.

One of the unique characteristics of China's approach to public diplomacy is the concern with reaching both international and domestic audiences: the Chinese themselves are a principal target of the government's public diplomacy programme. This is understandable given the problems associated with the introduction of market capitalist practices (extremes of poverty, unemployment etc.) and, more importantly, the decline of ideology - communism - to legitimise the government's decisions and mobilise the people around a developmental agenda. Now, the authority of the Communist Party depends more than ever on its performance and the delivery of its economic promises. This helps explain the clear shift from complete dependence on old style propaganda campaigns to public diplomacy strategies that might encourage support (of the party and its policies) from the people.

Brautigam's analysis adds a new dimension to this description of China's public diplomacy by discussing 'expectations' (ibid.) of both domestic audiences and the international community (including the recipients of aid). Such 'engagement that is frankly about the benefits for China as well as the recipient ... avoids the paternalism that has come to characterize aid from the West.'

 It also avoids the hypocrisy that inevitably accompanies aid when the aspect of mutual benefit is papered over. For example, the US Agency for International Development routinely justifies its budge requests to Congress by showing the high percentage of aid that comes back as benefits for America. At the same time, it tries to convince NGO critics that aid is really about reducing poverty (ibid.)

 

Note that I am not making any judgement here about the validity of China's claims: Brautigam evaluates China's aid far better than I ever could. Rather, I wish to draw attention to China's claim itself, for mutual benefit is a powerful theme to communicate to domestic audiences, while the apparent transparency of motivations and the urge to avoid western-style paternalism ('hypocrisy') appeals to recipients. This communication aspect of China's aid programme can help explain its attraction and success. It is captured in the words of an African ambassador in the US who told Brautigam "China gives Africans more respect than they get from the West." His fellow African Ambassadors in the group with Brautigam 'nodded vigorously in agreement' (p.68). As Huang and Ding (2006: 24) have noted, 'A country's economic clout reinforces its soft power if others are attracted to it for reasons beyond trade, market access or job opportunities.' It would appear that the Ambassador's sentiments suggest that this strategy is working.

 

 

 

References

 

Brautigam, D. (2009/2011), The Dragon's Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

 

Huang, Y.Z & S. Ding (2006), 'Dragon's Belly: An analysis of China's soft power,' East Asia, Vol.24 (4)

 

An Alternative Exploration of China

In my last posting I discussed how the BBC is inadvertently helping China accumulate and exercise soft power. Its television programme, Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure finished its run on Sunday 26 August with visits to Guangzhou and Taiwan. I noted the programme's apolitical content and the way the crew had apparently been able to film without any official hindrance.

Last night I watched Never Say Sorry, a stunning documentary film about the Chinese artist Ai Wewei. The contrast with Exploring China could not be more obvious, and anyone seeking a more rounded perspective of life in new China should see this film. Ai Weiwei's bravery is inspiring, and the brutality of the Chinese system is quite frightening. Two issues concerning communications emerge from this film:

First, the documentary undermines the soft power advantage that China may have accumulated in other areas. It documents the lack of transparency, especially around the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, and the Big Brother tactics that the police use in following, monitoring and beating Ai and his friends (the most vivid scenes in the film are those of the cameraman filming the policeman filming the cameraman). There is nothing unexpected here, and all of us who follow Chinese politics are fully aware of the problems of living under an authoritarian state. Hence there is a startling inconsistency between how China wishes to project itself and the reality of life there. This credibility gap is a serious problem for the Chinese authorities, and no amount of public diplomacy activities, international broadcasting or Confucius Institutes is going to change that. If China wonders why the international community is so critical of it, the Chinese authorities need to look at their behavour towards their own people first. This film will damage the credibility of China's official soft power work.

However, the most compelling theme to emerge from this film is the strength of an autonomous sphere within artistic circles and even within civil society. Contrary to popular portraits of the Chinese people as passive recipients of centrally directed information and instructions, Never Say Sorry is a remarkable testimony to the growing soft power of a civil society that is challenging the state in more open and innovative ways than at any time in the past. In 2005, Michel Hockx and Julia Strauss edited a volume of essays called Culture in the Contemporary PRC (Cambridge University Press). These brilliant essays made uncomfortable reading as they discussed the lack of creativity in many areas of China's cultural landscape. I am delighted that the perspective offered in this book are now out of date, and Never Say Sorry demonstrates not just the level of artistic creativity thriving in modern China, but also the inventive methods used to challenge the Chinese state. Ai Weiwei is an obsessive tweeter, photographing everyone and everything around him as a permanent record of his experiences. His role in mobilising civil society to support the causes he cares about is not only dramatic proof of the power of modern social media in China, but also the determination of Chinese people - his followers - to stand up and be counted, often at great personal risk. This is Chinese soft power, but it is the soft power of civil society, not the state or the nation, and the film addresses issues that will resonate with and appeal to audiences.

I always impress upon my students, especially those who are not Chinese and therefore may not be aware of the intensity of public debate in social media such as Weibo, that they should analyse the creativity of young Chinese in highlighting and commenting on political issues. Here I include some examples that take as their starting point an obviously photo-shopped picture of three local officials inspecting a road.

In the meantime, if you have enjoyed Exploring China as much as I have, try to watch Never Say Sorry and explore an alternative view of the modern PRC. It might make for more uncomfortable viewing than the Culinary Adventure, but it may be equally inspiring. 

China's Gastrodiplomacy on BBC2

I am enjoying a new series on BBC 2 called Exploring China:A Culinary Adventure, presented by Ken Hom (from Hong Kong living in the US) and Ching-He Huang (from Taiwan living in the UK). Ken and Ching-He are travelling through China to experience the regional cuisines and to find out whether the economic transformation of the country has changed the dietry habits of the Chinese and their style of cooking. On the way, they discuss their own backgrounds and talk about rediscovering their Chinese roots.

Gastrodiplomacy is becoming a defined field of international communications and engagement in its own right, and my friend Paul Rockower has written a lot about this on his own blog (the links are on the left hand side of this page). Exploring China is not only a contribution to China's gastrodiplomacy, but also demonstrates Chinese soft power in action.

First, both presenters never tire of explaining how China has changed since they last visited (Ken Hom in the politically-turbulent year of 1989, but so far he has not mentioned that this was the year when the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred) and pointing out the new additions to the landscape as evidence of China's transformation. In each episode they also venture outside the cities to provide a nice juxtaposition of modern and traditional: Clearly the message is 'The more things change, the more they stay the same ... ' They have so far encountered no obstacles in their journey, no-one trying to prevent their filming or denying them access to anywhere, and their own cooking has been greeted with a unanimous 'hao che' - delicious.

So the programme is apolitical, which is not unexpected in a programme about food. The presenters' enthusiasm and excitement is infectious, while tempting viewers to not only eat Chinese cuisine, but to try cooking it at home (the BBC website where the recipies are published is advertised regularly during the programme). This is an aromatic, tasty, spicy, and above all good-natured portrait of China. The culinary diversity is a gateway into understanding the cultural and social diversity of modern China, which is welcome in an information and news environment which tends to over-concentrate on Beijing (for political news) and Shanghai (for economic stories). The Chinese government could not have asked for a better introduction to its country, especially when its own soft power strategy was designed as a reaction to the alleged demonization of China by the western media. Here the BBC, one of the most internationally powerful, influential and trusted media organisations, is helping China realise its own ambitions; and that is not meant as a criticism. It is a side-product, an unintended consequence of an excellent television programme. 
  
Moreover, the fact that both presenters are culturally Chinese, but that neither is from the PRC, adds an interesting dimension. We are not exactly seeing China through the eyes of outsiders, but both Ken Hom and Ching-He Huang are nevertheless sufficiently removed from China to see the country in a refreshing light that does challenge the stereotypes and misconceptions that so aggravate the Chinese . In other words, through Exploring China the country is accumulating an incredible amount of soft power capital without having to do anything except allow two chefs and their film crews wander around markets and into kitchens to cook. It is an authentic non-Chinese (and therefore a most credible) induction into China that is likely to match, if not surpass the efforts of the Confucius Institutes, CCTV 9 and CNC.  

An interesting few days in Chinese soft power

Phil Seib of the USC Centre on Public Diplomacy has published an interesting blog on Chinese soft power (http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/the_first_soft-power_superpower/). I share Phil's assessment of China's exercise of soft power and its public diplomacy strategy.

Phil's posting comes at the end of a very interesting week which I think clearly reveals a degree of confusion in Beijing about what soft power is, how it works and what the government would like to achieve by exercising it.

We witnessed a minor victory for China in persuading the US State Department to reverse a ruling on accreditation that would have had serious consequences for the work of the Confucius Institutes. Needless to say the major Chinese newspapers were extremely vocal in protest (though the escape of Chen Guangcheng's brother, Chen Guangfu, received no coverage). It is interesting to consider whether this reversal (as it was described by the Chinese media) by the State Department represents the impact of hard power on soft power in that traditional diplomatic institutions are engaged in dispute about the architecture of their soft power strategies(?) There is clearly an interaction taking place here that deserves further consideration. I have not found much coverage of this event in the American media and would welcome from my State-side friends any comments on whether and how this has been reported.     

At the same time, China was extremely critical of the publication in the US of the State Department's annual report on human rights which singled out human rights abuses in the PRC. China's State Council Information Office almost immediately hit back by publishing its own Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011. More information is available here http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-05/26/content_15391823.htm. While of course China is both entitled and correct to point out the double standards in US discourse, to do so in response to the publication of the US's report reveals the PRC's insecurity and lack of confisence in its growing stature; the reactive and defensive nature of China's ppublic diplomacy; and perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates that China has still not learned that being able to tolerate (even if you cannot accept) international criticism is a major asset in soft power terms.

The final interesting development over the last week was the visit by 51 ambassadors and ministers from 49 countries to the Publicity Department. Not surprisingly the official Chinese media reported how the visitors had enjoyed their visit, had asked many interesting questions and learned a lot (see  http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-05/25/content_15383436.htm). Of course diplomats would not say anything else in fear of insulting their hosts. What is important here is that the visit took place at all: the Publicity Department is the English name for the Propaganda Bureau of the Communist Party which is located in an unmarked building next to the seat of power in Beijing, Zhongnanhai. This seems to be another step in China's determination to convert (at least for foreign audiences) propaganda into public diplomacy.

By far the best description of the structure and inner working of the Propaganda Bureau/Publicity Department is Anne-Marie Brady's Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (2009).   

Promised Land, Crusader State

I am still refining my understanding of Taiwan's public diplomacy and its location within approaches to soft power (western and non-western). Every time I speak to colleagues, present my ideas in seminars and cover the new literature I seem to take one step forwards and two steps back, thus challenging my own approaches again and again. While this is an exciting intellectual exercise, it can also be frustrating.

Following a discussion with Caitlin Schindler, a PhD student I am co-supervising with Robin Brown and who is tracing the history of American public diplomacy since Colonial times, I began to think that perhaps I need to interrogate a different literature for a while. So I decided to follow her trajectory and read about how the founders of modern America engaged in international communication and projected the new American identity abroad. This literature is based on the main thesis of my research, namely that Taiwan is communicating the wrong theme in its public diplomacy - culture (and traditional Chinese culture to boot) rather than the more exciting and appealing story of Taiwan's democratisation. However, I might benefit from understanding better how other "new" democracies have engaged in public diplomacy, and where better to start than post-Revolutionary America.

On Caitlin's advice I picked up a copy of Walter A. McDougall's Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (Mariner, 1997). This is proving a wonderful read and I am learning so much that I can apply to my own understanding of not only American and Taiwanese public diplomacy and soft power, but also Chinese approaches. For example, we learn that question we heard so often immediately after the 9/11 attacks - Why do they hate us? - is long-standing and has been directed equally, if not more, to friends rather than the US's foes: McDougall states that 'It's the contempt of our friends that really gets our goat' (p.9). And nothing caused more concern than the 1823 Monroe Doctrine which, said Otto von Bismarck, was 'a species of arrogance peculiarly American and inexcusable' (p.57). Sound familiar?

In Hamilton's "Original Major Draft" of George Washington's Farewell Address which established the notion of the Great Rule of American Unilateralism I detected parallels with Chinese public diplomacy. This may be a stretch, and perhaps I will come to regret making such statements; but there is talk in the Draft of cultivating harmony with all nations, the importance of sovereignty and not being entangled in foreign alliances. Moreover, commercial relations should always take precedence over political relations. All of these have been characteristics of Chinese foreign policy and themes in Chinese public diplomacy at one time or another.

In tackling this literature I may have taken a slight diversion from my East Asian interests, and I do not yet know how much this historical approach will inform my understanding of Taiwan's soft power and public diplomacy. However, it has re-awakened in me the sense that sometimes going off on an intellectual tangent can be very rewarding and is recommended from time to time.   

China's soft power and public diplomacy

Here is a recording of a talk I gave in Oxford two weeks ago. It was part of the Media & Governance Seminar Series for the Programme in Comparative Media, Law and Policy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlMCF-cldOM&list=PL70E56B646E48F1F3&index=6&feature=plpp_video

Chinese soft power and credibility

I wrote this piece for The China Daily and then I decided to ask them not to publish it. So, I thought I would post it here. I think that current reports coming out of China about increased repression in Tibet and areas of Tibetan residency (for example Sichuan) demonstrate the continued problems China faces in the credibility of its message. See this report from the Guardian newspaper which details some of the hearts and minds techniques China is using in Tibet (including old-fashioned re-education) and also its attempt to control media reporting of events there http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/12/tibets-acts-self-immolation-china

Is this newspaper an example of China’s soft power? It is, after all, published in English and provides news, information and comment about China for an international audience. Does it help attract interest in China? Will it mobilise public opinion and change the way readers think about China? Has it changed your mind? There is no doubt that The China Daily is an important part of what often appears to be titanic soft power push by the Chinese government which spends a reported $9 billion per year on soft power activities (making China the highest soft power spender in Asia). China has certainly embraced the idea that soft power can make a difference with an enthusiasm rarely witnessed elsewhere: Confucius Institutes, promotional videos in New York’s Times Square, pandas arriving at Edinburgh Zoo – China’s soft power strategy explores new and innovative techniques of attracting global attention, while remembering that History and culture can also resonate with international audiences.

The problem with any soft power strategy is finding the answer to the all-important question: Is it working? In designing their international outreach programmes many governments concentrate too much on outputs (how many viewers does CCTV 9 have? How many foreign students are studying in China? How many people have seen the exhibition of the Terracotta Army at the British Museum?) and pay far too little attention to impact. Outputs are an important indicator, but as with any statistic they tell only a partial story. So knowing the box office takings for a Chinese film released in the US allows us to appreciate how many people bought tickets, but tells us nothing about their opinions of the film, or even if they stayed awake during it! Let’s take a look at some evidence:

In a 2005 poll conducted in 22 countries, the BBC World Service found that 48% of respondents had a positive image of China, and 30% a negative image. Of the Asian countries surveyed, 55% of respondents had a positive image.

In a 2011 poll, the number of respondents in 22 countries with a positive image of China fell to 44%, with 38% having a negative image. In Asian countries, the number of positive images fell by 14% to 41%.  Similar data is found in other credible surveys conducted by Gallup, Pew Global Attitudes and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Clearly these are disturbing results for China since they suggest that despite the expansion in soft power activities, both the regional and international profiles of China have gone down.

 Here is a more anecdotal item of evidence: At the opening of the 2011 China Movie Culture Week at New York’s Lincoln Centre, not one single person attended the premier of the movie, Founding of the Republic (建国大业) , financed by the Communist Party’s largest state-owned film company, China Film Corporation. Several other events in China Movie Culture Week were cancelled due to poor attendance.

The problem is what we might call the ‘credibility gap’. In many parts of the world public opinion identifies a very clear discrepancy between China’s soft power message and its domestic and foreign policy behaviour. Moreover, Chinese media struggle to build and maintain credibility among their potential audiences. Because CCTV and Xinhua are located within China’s state system, they lack the kind of credibility that the BBC, Al-Jazeera and CNN enjoy. Audiences are naturally suspicious that CCTV is a mere channel for the dissemination of propaganda rather than soft power. Perhaps if China Movie Culture Week had not chosen to show Founding of the Republic with its obvious patriotic themes and its connection to the Communist Party, but had instead shown a film made by an independent director with no political agenda, it may have fared better. It would also have signalled that China is changing and is not using the same kind of blunt propaganda that it did in the past. Films such as Changwei Gu's Love for Life (最爱), which tackles the very sensitive and previously taboo subject of AIDS, have enormous soft power potential because they demonstrate changing attitudes in China. So soft power credibility is not just a condition of autonomy; it is also predicated on (i) a consistency between the message and practice (whenever a story emerges about poisoned milk, repression in Tibet, a Chinese Nobel Prize winner being denied the opportunity to collect his prize, or the arrest of an internationally-famous artist such as Ai Wei Wei, China’s soft power suffers a set-back); and (ii) a capacity to accept criticism as a natural consequence of international engagement without retreating into a fierce nationalist rhetoric that believes anyone who criticises China is by definition anti-Chinese.  Perhaps this is the key to understanding how China’s soft power may have more impact consistent with its expenditure and effort in the soft power domain. Presentation can never be a substitute for policy.

 

 

China's soft power - an interview with China Radio International

Just before Christmas I was interviewed by China Radio International about China's soft power. You can listen to the interview here:

http://english.cri.cn/7146/2011/12/31/1942s674081.htm

I am very pleased that they broadcast most of what I said, even the more critical parts. This is an honour for me as I remember as a young teenager  listening regularly to Radio China International on my Vega Selena 215 shortwave radio.

Beware of Mainland China's Fearsome Public Diplomacy

An interesting article published by John Brown. Does this confirm my suspicions about the value of culture - and especially film - as instruments of soft power and public diplomacy? Clearly box office receipts are no indicator of impact. It will be interesting to follow this story and see how the Chinese respond/react.

http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2011/10/beware-of-mainland-chinas-fearsome.html

Two excellent books

I want to take this opportunity to recommend two books that I have read so far during my time in Taiwan. They are both excellent discussions that combine empirical and theoretical insights into public diplomacy and soft power, and they make a significant contribution to the de-westernization of both practices.

The books are:  Public Diplomacy and Soft Power in East Asia edited by Sook Jong Lee and Jan Melissen (2011). This collection is published in the Palgrave Macmillan Series in Global Public Diplomacy edited by Kathy Fitzpatrick and Phil Seib. Young Wook Lee's chapter on 'Soft Power as Productive Power' is a particularly useful and sophisticated re-examination of soft power, while Rizal Sukma's chapter on Indonesia should be essential reading for policy makers undertaking public diplomacy in this unique Muslim nation.

The second book I wish to recommend is Soft Power: China's Emerging Strategy in International Politics edited by Mingjiang Li (published in 2009 by Lexington; paperback 2011). The contributers have provoked me to rethink my understanding of Chinese soft power and have turned some of my ideas on their head. Again, it is is the thoretical richness of the book that is its most valuable contribution.   

Confucius Institutes #1

I have called this Confucius Institutes #1 because I am sure there will be much, much more to say here given the attention these Insitutes are receiving. I have yet to be convinced of the CIs, either in terms of source (their close relationship with the Chinese government makes throws some doubt on their credibility) or in terms of audience (is there any evidence of their success? Are they having any influence beyond the developing world?). I think it is still too early for me to make any sound conclusions on this but will continue to try to discover more. Every year at least one of my MA students writes a dissertation about the CIs, which gives me an opportunity to learn more about them.

But I have just come across this story on Xinhua's website 'Senior CPC official urges Confucius Institute to contribute to China-Armenia friendship' (http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-04/12/c_13824072.htm). What you may not know when you read this article is that not only is Li a member of the Chinese Communist Party's Politburo Standing Committee, he is also the Party's propaganda chief .... 

China's Foreign Aid

In April 2011, the Information Office of the State Council issued a White Paper on China's foreign aid. The full text should be available at http://www.gov.cn/english/official/2011-04/21/content_1849913.htm but the link was broken last time I tried to access it. It is easier to go to http://www.gov.cn/ - click on English and then search for it. The document is still on the site.

The document makes interesting reading. We are all aware that foreign aid is an instrument of public diplomacy, and can represent genuine activity among an audience rather than just speaking and hoping for a reaction. From that perspective, this is an important White Paper that gives us a greater insight than ever before into China's foreign aid programme. Also, the PRC has not always been forthcoming in releasing information about its foreign aid, so this White Paper is very welcome (though phrases such as 'Since 2000 aid has increased, averaging 29.4% from 2004-2009' are unclear and don't tell us very much). 

It is also interesting for what is missing. Where is Taiwan here? The White Paper is very guarded, but a close reading of the Appendices reveals a clear political agenda: various promises to African countries include the rejoinder 'having diplomatic relations with China'. So much for unconditional loans and aid.  

I also like the rhetoric used in the document. This passage is an example of how public diplomacy and propaganda are still blurred in China: 'China started foreign aid by providing goods and materials. In the 1950s and 1960s, China was short of goods and materials at home. But to help Asian and African countries win national independence and develop their economies, it provided these countries with a large amount of goods and materials'. Note the language of self-sacrifice here.

Finally, the White Paper's boasts about environmental aid, but are these claims credible given China's own environmental problems, and China's behaviour in climate change discussions and conferences?

All in all, a very interesting document that is worth reading in detail.

The Chinese Government’s Formulation of National Security Narratives in Media and Public Diplomacy

In March 2011 I was invited to submit a written testimony to a public hearing organised by the US-Chian Economic and Security Commission, a Congressional advisory body in Washington DC. The subject of the hearing was China's Narratives Regarding National Security Policy. This is the testimony I submitted.

Propaganda to foreign audiences: Public Diplomacy and Soft Power

The reasons why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to practice propaganda have changed in the last thirty years, as have its objectives and the methods of its delivery. No longer are communications and persuasion occupied by revolutionary ambitions to convince the masses (at home or overseas) of the correctness of the Communist Party’s direction, or by the goals of social and ideological transformation; now the propaganda is structured around three inter-connected pillars of economic development, maintaining the authority and legitimacy of the Communist party following the doctrinal demise of Communism (and avoiding a Soviet-style collapse), and consolidating the national unity of the Chinese people. This adjustment was signalled in an internal speech by a Party leader of Suixi County government in 2007 who connected economic development to the tasks of ‘external propaganda’ (duiwai xuanchuan): ‘The current mission of the external propaganda is to effectively promote each region, each sector to the outside world, in order to attract outside investors’ attention and build up outside investors’ confidence. We can safely say that the purpose of doing external propaganda work is to attract outside investment and undertake commercial projects.’

There is no doubt that China is successfully exporting the economic imperatives behind its remarkable growth. By 2006 China had become the world’s second largest economy after the United States with an average growth rate of 9 percent. However, China has difficulty in selling its political values except to governments in need of, or experienced in, undemocratic politics. The so-called ‘China model’ connecting an attainable economic paradigm with a set of specific cultural and political values – authoritarian state-led management, “Asian Values”, etc. – has proven attractive to many developing nation-states around the world (even Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, has referred to the ‘great Chinese fatherland’). By contrast the liberal-democratic world is not yet convinced by the political dimension of the China model. As Huang and Ding (2006) have noted ‘A country’s economic clout reinforces its soft power if others are attracted to it for reasons beyond trade, market access or job opportunities’  (‘Dragon’s Belly: An analysis of China’s soft power’, East Asia Vol.24:4). So far, there is little evidence that political or ideological motivations trump the economic benefits of associating with China.

Moreover, China devotes considerable resources to foreign aid, also a valuable instrument of public diplomacy and propaganda. While the actual size of China’s foreign aid budget is unknown (the PRC government does not release information about its foreign aid programmes), estimates place the totals between 2003 and 2007 anywhere between $970 million and $27 billion depending on which definition of ‘aid’ one accepts.

We should not be surprised that China pursues a political agenda through its aid programme. In September 2005, while on a visit to New York, President Hu Jintao promised $10 billion in Chinese aid over the next three years to the poorest countries … with diplomatic ties to China, suggesting that countries which recognise Taiwan would reap substantial economic benefits if they switched their recognition to Beijing. Here there is a clear reason to be apprehensive of claims that Chinese public diplomacy is working. The motivation for small and/or developing nations to switch their allegiance from Taiwan to China has little to do with persuading them of the intricate political and legal arguments for doing so and almost everything to do with the promise of more financial rewards than Taiwan can offer. As Taiwan’s Free China Review noted in 1998, ‘in diplomacy, you can’t buy friends, you only rent them.’

It is clear that since 2004 the CCP has become increasingly sensitive to the way its propaganda work is viewed by the world outside China, as indicated by the re-branding in English (and in English only) of the Propaganda Department as the Publicity Department.2 This re-classification of activities is associated with the CCP’s development of new ways to engage in propaganda and censorship – in China as elsewhere it is impossible to separate the two – partly in response the momentum of events such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the outbreak of SARS in 2002, and partly because of the rapid and dramatic transformation of the communications landscape.

There can be little doubt that China has embraced the concepts of public diplomacy and soft power with an enthusiasm rarely seen in other parts of the world. In 2004, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade established a Division of Public Diplomacy within the Information Department. The Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs said that China needed to ‘catch up with the development of public diplomacy in some developed countries’. The PRC clearly recognised that if it wanted to participate fully in a globalised international environment, present as a serious commitment its ‘peaceful rise’ (a nice public diplomacy slogan), challenge what the Chinese consider the distortions in the western media reporting of China then it needed to get its own voice heard, and engage more with foreign publics. Chinese discourses on soft power privilege culture as a major resource in the international arena. So, Chinese soft power tends to emphasise China’s cultural traditions – language, literature, philosophy, medicine, cuisine, martial arts and cinema. In other words, there is a tendency to focus on the idea of Chinese civilisation, and especially its continuity (the Confucius Institutes, for example, which have met limited success where host organisations are suspicious of their method and motive) and the reassertion of Chinese superiority.

The problem is how to determine whether this cultural attraction translates into power and influence. The consumption of a cultural product does not necessarily mean the consumer will be attractive to the political values or ideals of the source. Governments and other actors within nation-states may be able to control the design, the message and transmission of soft power or public diplomacy, but they can exercise no comparable control over reception.

It is still too early to discuss the results of China’s soft power crusade; attitudes and opinions take time to develop, and so far it is not possible to identify a positive correlation between Chinese soft power and Chinese foreign policy objectives or achievements. Also this is confusing the principle of soft power with the instruments of soft power.

In his book Soft Power (2004: 31-2) Joseph Nye argued that ‘The countries that are likely to be more attractive and gain soft power in the information age are those with multiple channels of communication that help to frame issues: whose dominant culture and ideas are closer to prevailing global norms (which now emphasize liberalism, pluralism and autonomy) and whose credibility is enhanced by their domestic values and policies.’

Leaving aside the problems in this quotation – what are ‘prevailing global norms’ and who decides? Why are liberalism, pluralism and autonomy necessarily ‘global norms’ - Snow (2009: 4) comments: ‘The US is at a comparative advantage with the first two and at a decisive disadvantage with the last dimension.’ This book will suggest that China is at a similar ‘decisive disadvantage’ in all three areas. Beijing has difficulty persuading the liberal-democratic world that China’s agenda is compatible, if not consistent, with the norms and values of democracies; China is only just developing the capacity to frame stories in the global news media, but this remains limited; and China’s domestic and international behaviour does not inspire confidence (though some progress has been made following Beijing’s decision to become a more responsible world power. Examples here include the PRC’s position and value in helping western powers in their relationship with North Korea; the so-called ‘Good neighbour policy’ in South East Asia; and China’s growing involvement in international organisations such as the UN. However, it only takes one episode to undo any good work; continued belligerence against Taiwan, policies in the Sudan, and crackdowns in Tibet and the international repercussions during the Olympic Torch Relay have tend to undermine almost in an instant any credibility and soft power capital the PRC has accumulated in other areas.

In the US after 911 it was common to hear Americans, including President George W. Bush, ask: ‘Why do they hate us?’ In public diplomacy terms, this immediately begs a second question in response: ‘Why don’t you ask them?’

The Chinese often ask a similar question, especially of the western media: Why do they criticise us so much? Zhao Qizheng, Director of the Foreign Affairs Committee and former director of the State Council Information Office, has often talked about the need for China to develop a soft power strategy in response to the alleged demonization by the western media and the constant chatter in some quarters about the so-called China threat. ‘This situation,’ said Zhao, ‘requires China to pro-actively establish a public diplomacy policy to improve the international image of China.’ While the idea of demonization is extremely problematic – in accepting the existence of a political conspiracy among the western media one is conveniently ignoring the differences in professional news values between Chinese and non-Chinese media and audiences – this statement is intriguing because it reveals high-level acknowledgement of the need for public diplomacy and a motive for doing so, however specious and reactive that motive may be.

However, first it is important to get the image right. If the question is ‘Why do they hate us?’ perhaps another satisfactory response might be: ‘Do they really know us?’ which is immediately followed by another crucial question: ‘Do we know ourselves?’ Public diplomacy must begin by understanding who ‘we’ are before we attempt to understand the audience with whom we wish to communicate.

We cannot deny that the Chinese think they know who they are: the PRC has a strong self-identity (even though it is often contradictory, hence William Callahan’s description of China as the Pessoptimist Nation (2009)); and this identity is increasingly based on power and self-confidence – the idea of Zhongguo and (inter)national recovery, rapid and widespread economic development, and increasingly (and perhaps disturbingly) a form of radical nationalism. While China’s enthusiastic embrace of soft power and public diplomacy is welcome as an alternative to the dependence on hard power, does China listen enough to a wide range of actors and institutions to understand why the international community is sometimes so critical of its actions and behaviour?

Nye has used the term ‘meta-soft power’ to describe ‘the state’s willingness to criticise itself. For Nye, such capacity for introspection fundamentally enhances a nation’s attractiveness, legitimacy and reliability’ (Watanabe & McConnell, 2008: xiii; see also Watanabe, 2006). Again, this is a useful criterion to measure China’s success (or lack of it) for the leadership in Beijing has not readily demonstrated any capacity for national self-criticism. The problem for China is that the west has been attracted to China, but engagement with the international community also exposes the PRC to criticism. I suggest that the reaction among the Chinese that greeted the pro-Tibet protests during the torch relay demonstrates that China is having great difficulty in coming to terms with the idea that international accountability is a natural consequence of international engagement. Television pictures of the aggressive behaviour of blue track-suited torch guards against pro-Tibet demonstrators in Paris, London and elsewhere merely drew attention to the issues that Chinese public diplomacy has tried to overcome, and reminded viewers of Tiananmen Square, the absence of human rights and the denial of free speech inside China; or at least the guards’ behaviour gave the western media the pretext to remind viewers about these issues. (It should also be noted that French, American and British public diplomacy – at home and abroad – was damaged by the governments and police of those countries allowing the Chinese torch guards to behave in such an aggressive manner. Only the Australian government clearly and openly prevented the Chinese police from acting in this way.) Moreover, the mobilisation by China’s embassies of Chinese communities, and especially students around the world to guard the torch and protest the media bias again brought to the surface worrying questions about unchecked nationalism.

It is not yet clear if China has the capacity to convert soft power and public diplomacy resources and effort into achievable foreign policy aspirations. China bestows upon its distinct approach to public diplomacy an extraordinary amount of hard and soft power – in selling Chinese language and culture; in humanitarian assistance; and in persuading its neighbours of China’s commitment to a stable, peaceful and prosperous Asia-Pacific.

China’s economic and commercial power is undeniable; and it makes China an attractive destination for global investment and entrepreneurship. However, convincing the liberal-democratic international community to look beyond trade and economics and to accept China as a credible diplomatic and political power is a considerable challenge for China’s public diplomacy. Cultural and economic diplomacy neither easily nor necessarily translate into foreign policy success.

The principal problems for public diplomacy are the contradictions in Chinese foreign policy. One the one hand, China yearns to be part of an interdependent world and to spread the benefits of political, economic and cultural engagement with China. On the other hand, Chinese political discourse is often characterised by a fierce nationalist rhetoric that is reinforced by the Communist Party’s determination to maintain authoritarian rule. Together with China’s unconditional friendship of ostracised regimes, and the use of the military threat against Taiwan and Tibet, this undermines the idea that Chinese soft power is all about selling national and cultural values.

Until they are unable to overcome such contradictions it is unlikely that Chinese public diplomacy will break out of its narrow success in a few friendly areas of the world where Beijing now operates.

China’s International Media

Global Times and CCTV 9

The Communist Party’s launch in 2009 of a new English-language newspaper, the Global Times (a tabloid attached to the Communist party’s mouthpiece, People’s Daily), reveals that no matter much we observe and analyse the renaissance in China’s public diplomacy, we cannot but stand by and watch as China and its champions seem to misunderstand public diplomacy, what it is and how it is/should be practiced.

First, there is a misconception: Reporting the launch of the Global Times English edition, AP’s Christopher Bodeen wrote (20 April 2009) that this ‘reflects China’s recent “soft power” drive to build its global reputation, muffle foreign criticism and broadcast the leadership’s particular views on issues such as democracy, human rights and Tibet’. If “soft power” means the attempt to win hearts and minds by projecting culture and values (which is, I think, what Joseph Nye intended) then this is not the way to go about it. Instead China is engaged, at best, in public diplomacy, at worse in good old fashioned propaganda. The Global Times’s promise to present ‘news from a Chinese perspective, in a fair, insightful and courageous manner’ and then publish the usual accusations against the western media as being part of a large conspiracy against China does not auger well for the future of the newspaper in terms of attracting its intended audience. I have talked elsewhere, most recently in a chapter in Nancy Snow and Philip Taylor’s edited collection, The Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy, that there is inconsistency between what China says and what China does. (China is not alone in this, of course; how else can we explain the failure of American soft power?) In other words, the message of the public diplomacy must be credible; and if there is one thing lacking in China’s English-language media it is credibility. China’s media are no longer the butt of jokes they once were – my favourite (and the favourite of most Chinese who know it) is ‘The only thing you can trust about the People’s Daily (the official party newspaper) is the date’ – yet credibility remains a serious problem when there is a serious inconsistency between policy and message, and when foreigners (and increasingly Chinese) have access to a range of non-Chinese media and sources of news.

The Global Times joins China Daily and the Shanghai Daily in trying to capture the English-language market. For those who watch TV rather than read newspapers, there is always CCTV 9, China’s English-language channel. These are all parts of China’s public diplomacy armoury, communicating China’s story and culture and to a world eager to hear the authentic voice of the nation, its people and its government ... at least that is what Beijing likes to believe.

Why does China always get it so wrong? The English-language media are rarely consumed by their intended international audience, but are rather used as tools by Chinese to improve their own English-language ability. Stories from the China Daily regularly crop-up in school and University English-language examinations. Few foreigners regularly watch CCTV 9 unless they have no other option (ie. they are not staying in five-star hotels where BBC World is available) or they wish to improve their own understanding of Chinese by watching programmes hosted by the Canadian Mark Rosewell (known in China as Da Shan – Big Mountain) teaching Mandarin. Moreover, even internet-savvy Chinese can leap over the Great Chinese Firewall and access foreign news websites; why bother with the China Daily or news on CCTV 9 (hosted now by non-Chinese in a bold move by CCTV to boost its public diplomacy credibility) for your daily news when you can read The Guardian online?

And yet the CCP and CCTV remain over-confident in these media’s public diplomacy potential, as brought home to me during a visit to Beijing in 2007 when I was lucky enough to be invited to tour CCTV. The obligatory bank of monitors displaying different television channels included one showing CNN, a station that ordinary Chinese are unable to access. CNN is a model and a template, if not an inspiration to these young Chinese media-types for how to package the news.

My guide was dismayed when I actually questioned the public diplomacy potential of CCTV 9. ‘CCTV 9 has an audience of 45 million all over the world,’ she declared proudly, repeating a mistake that can be found on the station’s website (http://www.cctv.com/english/20090123/107144.shtml). ‘No,’ I pointed out politely. ‘It has a potential audience of 45 million all over the world provided they subscribe to the satellite or cable package that subscribes to it.’ CCTV is now also available in French (CCTV-F) and Spanish (CCTV-E) increasing further the potential but not the actual audience.

The Global Times has a future; it will survive, like the China Daily and CCTV 9 for two reasons: these media are state owned, and therefore do not face competition. Their political agenda and support mean they do not have to do things differently, and no matter the size of the audience, they will continue to appear. The Communist Party cannot lose face by letting them disappear.

The second reason is the most disturbing – the Chinese genuinely believe they are effective tools of public diplomacy.

The Global Times is attracting attention for its sometimes critical coverage of some sensitive issues that are rarely reported in the official media. However, the reason Global Times is able to report such stories is precisely because it does so in English (the Chinese version continues to behave ad nauseum as a newspaper under state control) and because it enjoys the patronage of the People’s Daily. Journalists are not testing the boundaries of state censorship or creating new norms and routines of Chinese journalistic practice; they are following directives or clearance to report otherwise topics deemed sensitive for domestic consumption. Again, it raises the question, other than the illusion of media pluralism, what public diplomacy value is there in publishing the English-language Global Times and China Daily, both of which are connected to official organisations?

Xinhua’s China Network Corporation

On 1 July 2010 Xinhua, the news agency of the PRC launched a global 24-hour English-language television channel called China Network Corp (CNC). Trial broadcasts begin on 1 May. Announcing this development Xinhua’s president, Li Congjun said that ‘CNC will offer an alternative source of information for a global audience and aims to promote peace and development by interpreting the world in a global perspective.’ This sentence loses clarity in translation from the Chinese; not only is it confusing, but it is characteristic of the sentimental official rhetoric that Chinese officials use to mark landmark events (for further evidence, listen to the largely meaningless speeches delivered at the opening of Expo 2010 in Shanghai).

It is difficult to identify what China will gain by investing in yet another international television station: what will CNC do that CCTV9 is not already doing? Does the launch of CNC English reveal internal competition within the state system for control of China’s public diplomacy strategy? Perhaps it indicates that the Chinese have finally acknowledged CCTV9’s shortcomings and have decided it really is not up to the job. But will CNC fare any better?

The launch of this television station confirms that the leadership in Beijing is confident that it is possible to influence international public opinion and media coverage of China. The government has long criticised the way ‘Western’ media report China, accusing them of bias by focusing on human rights, Tibet and democracy, choosing to ignore differences in news values between Chinese and ‘western’ news organisations.

Li’s announcement came on the same day that the BBC World Service published its latest poll of 30,000 adults in 28 countries which reveals that views of China have declined sharply. In 2005, 49 percent of people surveyed thought that China’s influence was mostly positive (a striking 11 points higher than that of the United States). However, in the most recent survey China’s standing has dropped to just 34 percent, 6 points behind the US. The official Chinese media responded as expected, alleging that public opinion is shaped by western media organisations which ‘are unsuitably seasoned with misunderstanding, misinterpretation or even bias or enmity’.

China Daily is of course correct to state that the media can affect public opinion, but the downturn of opinion is not just in ‘western’ countries; the surveys reveal that several Asian countries are also responding more negatively to China than in the past. Besides, when China was ‘more popular’ than the US, the western media did not report news from China any differently. This suggests that Chinese policy – for example, the brutal Chinese handling of disturbances in Tibet and Xinjiang – may have helped to turned public opinion against China.

All in all CNC, CCTV9 and Chinese public diplomacy has a hard job ahead; and more information or channels of distribution does not necessarily mean better communication, especially when CNC and CCTV9 are embedded within the state system and are thus viewed with suspicion by international audiences. Just because you have a message and a means to deliver it, it does not mean anyone is listening. If few people outside China or outside Chinese-speaking communities (who wish to improve their English) are watching CCTV9, what makes Xinhua think they will turn to CNC instead? CCTV9 is accessible via satellite to some 85 million viewers in 100 countries; what proportion of the 85 million possible viewers are actual viewers? Rebranding CCTV9 as CCTV News is not going to offer much help in converting these potential audiences to regular viewers. Rebranding rarely succeeds without careful market research and, if necessary, modification of the product. Given that China’s international media are state owned and follow an agenda decided by the state, such a radical transformation of content is unlikely. So viewers will no doubt get more of the same under a different name.

At the end of the day the possible influence of China’s international media will be offset by the actions of its government at home and abroad, and issues of democracy, human rights, Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan will continue to mar China’s public diplomacy for as long as Beijing continues to avoid resolving them sensitively and to the satisfaction of the people living in these areas.