• Strategy21
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• s.33
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• pp.37-64
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• 2014

The year 2010 has been regarded as a year of China's assertive diplomacy. A series of China's behavior--including China's critical reaction to the U.S. for its sales of weapons to Taiwan, the Dalai Lama's visit to President Obama, China's arbitrary designation of 'core interests' over the South China Sea, China's inordinate reactions to the sinking of the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong bombardment, and China's activities in the Senkaku/Diaoyu island areas--has served as the witnesses to China's assertive diplomacy in 2010. The major causes of China's assertive diplomacy can be summed up by three factors: potential power transition from U.S. to China; emerging China's nationalism; and the recession of the Tao Guang Yang Hui as a diplomatic principle. But a majority of Western sinologists claim that China's assertive diplomacy is defensive in terms of its character. China's neighboring states, however, perceive its assertive diplomacy as diplomatic threat. Due to these states' geographical proximity and capability gaps with China, these neighbors experience difficulties in coping with China's behavior. In particular, China's coercive economic diplomacy, in which China tends to manipulate the neighbors' economic dependency on China for its diplomatic leverage, is a case in point for China's assertive diplomacy. China's assertiveness seems to be continued even after the inauguration of Xi Jinping government. Although the Xi government's diplomatic rhetorics in "New Type of Great Power Relationship" and the "Convention for Neighboring States Policy" sound friendly and cooperative, its subsequent behavior, like unilateral announcement of Chinese Air Defense Identification Zone (CADIZ), does not conform with its rhetoric. Overall, China's assertiveness has been consolidated as a fashion of its diplomacy, and it is likely to continue in its relations with neighbors. As a neighboring state, the ROK should approach to it with more balanced attitude. In addition, it needs to find out a new diplomatic leverage to deal with China in accordance with its security environment, in which China plays a growing role.

• Journal of Public Diplomacy
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.49-74
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• 2021

In this paper, I applied grounded theory in exploring how Twitter became the battlefield for China's public diplomacy campaign. China's new move to global social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, has been a controversial strategy in public diplomacy. This study analyzes Chinese Foreign Spokesperson Zhao Lijian's Twitter posts and comments. It models China's recent diplomatic move to Twitter as a "war of words" model, with features including "leadership," "polarization," and "aggression," while exerting possible effects as "resistance," "hatred," and "sarcasm" to the global community. Our findings show that by failing to gage public opinion and promote the country's positive image, China's current digital diplomacy strategy reflected by Zhao Lijian's tweets has instead constructed a polarized political public sphere, contradictory to the country's promoted "shared human destiny." The "war of words" model extends our understanding of China's new digital diplomacy move as a hybrid of state propaganda and self-performance. Such a strategy could spread hate speech and accelerate political polarization in cyberspace, despite improvements to China's homogenous network building on Twitter.

• Analyses & Alternatives
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.59-85
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• 2021

This study focuses on the impact of China's system on the goals and strategies of public diplomacy for its actors and actions. In other words, China, which aims to assimilate the Western political values and systems, is special in setting the goals and strategies pursued through public diplomacy. Therefore, China often uses the historical and cultural agenda that it shares mainly in order to promote public diplomacy in the neighboring countries of Northeast Asia such as Taiwan and Korea, who have different systems. This phenomenon is an important key of explaining the vulnerability of China's public diplomacy in the face of political and security insecurity. Also, because of China's authoritarian politics and national-social relations, China can pursue efficient public diplomacy. On the other hand, however, such phenomenon provides an answer to why China's public diplomacy is not an effective buffer in the face of political and security conflicts with neighboring countries. Based on this framework, this study seeks to find answers to Why is China's public diplomacy not strong enough to ease political and security conflicts with neighboring countries?

• Journal of Public Diplomacy
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.43-68
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• 2022

Multiple modes of communication on social media can contribute to public diplomacy in informing, conversing, and networking with members of foreign publics. However, manipulative behaviours on social media, prevalent especially in high tension contexts, create disruptions to authentic communication in what could be grey/black propaganda or information warfare. This study reviews existing literature about models of public diplomacy to guide an empirical study of China's communication in the #SouthChinaSea conversation on Twitter. It uses computational methods to identify, record, and analyze one-way, two-way, and network communication of China's actors. It employs manual qualitative research to determine the nature of China's actors. On that basis, it assesses China's Twitter communication in the issue against various models of public diplomacy.

• East Asian Economic Review
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.49-91
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• 2022

Recent years have witnessed renewed interest in Africa and public diplomacy has emerged as the vital tool being used to cultivate these relations. China has been leading in pursuing stronger economic partnership with Africa while middle powers such as Korea are also intensifying engagement with the continent. While previous studies have analyzed the implications of China's activities in Africa on advanced powers, none has examined them from the paradigm of middle powers. This study fills this gap by assessing China's activities in Africa, their economic engagement and implications for Korea's interest in Africa. The analysis is qualitative based on secondary data from various sources and literature. The study shows that China's public diplomacy strategy involves a high degree of innovation and has evolved to encompass new tools and audiences. China has institutionalized a cooperative model that permeates many aspects of governance institutions in Africa, enabling it to strengthen their relations. This could also be helping China to adjust faster leadership transitions in Africa. Whereas the US is still the most influential country in Africa, China is influential in economic policies and has outstripped the US in infrastructure diplomacy. This could be because African policy makers align more with China's economic model than the US' mainstream economics. Chinese aid to Africa has been diversified to social sectors that are more responsive to the needs of Africa. Trade and investment relations between China and Africa have deepened, but so does trade imbalance since 2010. China mainly imports natural resources and raw materials from Africa. But this product portfolio is not different from Korea and the US. China's energetic insertion in Africa using various strategies has significant implications for countries with ambitions in Africa. Korea can achieve its ambitions in Africa by focusing resources in areas it can leverage its core strengths-such as education and vocational training, environmental policy and development cooperation.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.130-151
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• 2018

China's cultural diplomacy is mostly understood as an endeavour to build and project soft power, which draws on three sources of 'culture, political values and foreign policy' according to Nye. This paper focuses on the debates about the vehicle and agents of China's cultural diplomacy. It starts with a theoretical discussion of the competing views in the Chinese context, and develops an argument that the vehicle of China's cultural diplomacy tries to project soft power on two wheels of culture and political values, to serve the purpose of reshaping China's image away from being the 'cultural other' and 'ideological other' respectively. However, the state-led approach to driving this vehicle is generating some side effects with its sponsorship, censorship and presence in the driver's seat. Then the paper analyses the inherent tensions existing in practice both between the two sources of building soft power and between the two means of doing so, attraction and persuasion, with empirical evidence through a comparative case study of the Confucius Institutes in the US and South Korea. The finding shows that China's attempt at reshaping its image as an Eastern cultural contestant is often disrupted by its authoritarian political values, and the state-led persuasion is often reducing China's cultural attraction. Following this, the paper finishes with some recommendations regarding evolving the cultural diplomacy approach from a vertical one that is government-centred to a horizontal one that is network-based with multiple agents, and localising its practice by engaging the target audiences as stakeholders.

• Journal of Public Diplomacy
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.120-122
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• 2021

• Journal of Public Diplomacy
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.53-80
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• 2022

Despite an astronomical budget for public diplomacy, China is experiencing successive failures in public diplomacy. The unfavorable feeling towards China is increasing every year in the world and China needs a new public diplomacy to resolve anti-Chinese sentiment. Here, we found that viewers of Korean-Chinese student YouTuber Deemd formed a friendly image towards China after watching Deemd's China vlog. Therefore, in this study, we tried to examine whether Deemd's vlogs affect the improvement of China's country image theoretically guided by the theory of mere exposure effect. In addition, we examined whether the improvement of a country image causes the 'Halo effect' that leads to an increase in the intention to visit China and purchase intention of Chinese products. It is expected that the results of this study can serve as a new digital media diplomacy solution for countries, including China, that want to capture the hearts of foreign public in the era of a new digital public diplomacy.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.20 no.7
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• pp.169-184
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• 2020

This paper analyzes the implications of the change in the way China conducts public diplomacy, through an in-depth study of international education programs promoted under China's public diplomacy strategy. The leadership of Xi Jinping is now trying for China to become the top power in the world, not just a G2 country, based on China's economic growth over the past 40 years. Also, as a vision for the goal, the leadership is presenting the dream of the great revival of the Chinese nation. Currently, the international education program promoted at the level of public diplomacy in China is operated in an active, mid- to long-term manner within the national strategy, away from the past passive and responsive method. In other words, while China's past international education program was a passive model for dispelling the "Chinese Threat Theory," China's current international education program is evolving into an active model that can promote the "Chinese" order in the world.

• Journal of International Area Studies (JIAS)
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.107-133
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• 2009

International relations in the 21st century is featured by boundless competition among nations to secure sufficient energy resources for achieving economic development. Resource diplomacy, therefore, is competitive in its nature, which is derived from the fact that resources of the globe are limited. Chinese recent economic growth has been possible mainly due to its success in resource diplomacy. The Chinese resource diplomacy has shown two different patterns according to target regions. On the one hand, China has pursued multilateral approach to Central Asia region, by which China aimed to secure energy with joint exploration method in the region. Chinese resource diplomacy toward Africa, on the other hand, has been based on bilateral approach combined with unit-centered economic aid to African nations. This difference in Chinese foreign policy pattern seems to be derived from three factors: namely, Chinese strategic considerations on geopolitical condition, regional security sensitivity, and legacies of Chinese long-time non-alignment diplomacy since the 1950s. Whether China is able to maintain the current pattern of resource diplomacy will be depended on how wisely China pursue its relations with two other global powers: Russia in the Central Asia and the U.S. in Africa. In this regard, the Chinese resource diplomacy is expected to work as determining factor of shaping a pattern of tri-lateral strategic relations among the U.S., Russia, and China. Chinese resource diplomacy thus will determine the future direction of the global politics in terms of strategic arrangement.