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UM E-Theses Collection (澳門大學電子學位論文庫)

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Title

China's public diplomacy : can it make a difference?

English Abstract

With the development of globalization and the growing of civil society, the public shows increasing interest in the international affairs. It can be a powerful effect on the governmental agenda-setting. Based on this new trend, the diplomatic work should not be limited to the traditional government-to-government diplomacy. Therefore, public diplomacy, as one kind of diplomatic patterns, plays much more vital role in international relations. In recent years, the public diplomacy has become the central point in China’s overall diplomatic strategy. It means a lot to a rising China. Facing consistent fast development in all sectors of China's economy, the Western world preaches the heated development of China, and thus makes up various versions of "China Threat Theory" to construct a terrible image to the whole world with a purpose of creating an undesirable public opinion to hinder the continuing quick development of China. Consequently, public diplomacy, as an important composition of the soft power has been enhanced to a strategic level in the grand layout of diplomacy. China must engage in public diplomacy, build up its soft power, and increase its appeal, influence and support in the world. However, although the Chinese government has made great efforts and spent a large amount of money to develop public diplomacy, the response and outcomes of this work are to some extent undesirable due to some inner problems, for example the political setup and the related institution design, the affinity to propaganda, China's tight bureaucracy, heavily censored local media , restricted international networks and serious domestic issues such as the striking gap between the rich and the poor, government corruption and environmental II pollution as well as the external challenges such as cultural and language barriers, 1 the imbalance of discoursive power between the Western media and China’s domestic media and the stereotype and prejudice deeply rooted in the foreigner's minds. All the above factors contribute to the unsatisfying results of China's public diplomacy work. In response against the undesirable outcomes which are beyond the government preliminary expectation, there are some alternative suggestions and measures which can be adopted to achieve a better result in building a good image to the outside. Our government should improve the public diplomacy operation in China according to widely mobilizing non-government resources in participating in the related public diplomacy tasks to weaken political background, paying much attention to deal with the domestic problems in national image building, and provide a relatively free room for the domestic mass media to grow and to become a competent rivals to other prominent foreign mass media in the world.

Issue date

2012.

Author

Hu, Ke Jia

Faculty

Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

Department of Government and Public Administration

Degree

M.A.

Subject

Diplomacy

Public relations and politics

China -- Relations

Supervisor

Wang Jianwei

Files In This Item

TOC & Abstract

Full-text (Intranet only)

Location
1/F Zone C
Library URL
991001316319706306