Soft Power Struggles: China's State-Media in Africa

我的博士学位将通过研究中国通过国家媒体组织的传播来追踪中国与非洲的软实力互动。约瑟夫·奈（Joseph Nye）将软实力描述为“在世界政治中取得成功的手段”（2005），他的理论是利用文化活动作为国际实力的来源。在中国背景下，软实力最积极地通过公共外交来实现：“一个国家为了传达该国的某些叙事和形象而与外国公众接触和沟通”（Hartig 2016, 656）。这些接触和交流有多种形式，如国事访问和现在无处不在的孔子学院，但主要是中国的国际国家媒体机构的工作。中国领导人显然对在中国共产党的散文和修辞中使用“软实力”一词表现出了极大的热情，这种热情不断出现在中国国家媒体组织的战略声明中。然而，通过这些组织的软实力战略的漏斗打开了他们对非常不同的结构和代理人的解释，他们利用这些对自己角色的解释作为软实力资源来创造中国的非洲新闻文本。利用“自下而上”的方法，我的研究将调查中国非洲新闻编辑室的多样性如何创造多样化的内容，并将试图质疑中国在非洲的软实力战略在这种差异下实际上是如何连贯的。为了研究这一点，我将研究中国在非洲的四家国有媒体的战略、结构和生产。本研究旨在对软实力的研究产生深远的影响，特别是在软实力与国有媒体的互动以及非自由主义国家通过公共外交发挥软实力的潜力方面，以及在中国日益竞争的全球角色方面对中国国际关系的理解。

My doctorate will trace China's soft-power interactions with Africa through a study of Chinese communication via state-media organisations. Joseph Nye described soft-power, his theory concerning the use of cultural activities as a source of international power, as the 'means to success in world politics' (2005). In the Chinese context, soft-power is most actively pursued through public diplomacy: 'a country's engagement and communication with foreign publics for the sake of communicating certain narratives and images of the country' (Hartig 2016, 656). These engagements and communications takes many forms, such as state visits and the now ubiquitous Confucius Academies, but in bulk is the work of China's international state-media apparatus. China's leaders have certainly shown an enthusiasm for utilising the term ruan shili ('soft-power') in prose and rhetoric of the Communist Party of China (CPC), appearing constantly in the strategy statements of China's state-media organisations. However, the funnelling of soft-power strategies through these organisations opens them up the interpretations of very divergent structures and agents, who use these interpretations of their roles as soft-power resources to create China's African news texts. Utilising a 'bottom-up' method, my study will investigate how diversity within China's African newsrooms creates diverse content, and will seek to question how coherent China's soft-power strategy in Africa actually is in light of this divergences. To investigate this, I will examine the strategies, structures, and production of four Chinese state-media outlets in Africa. This study aims to have far-reaching implications to the study of soft-power, particularly in terms of its interface with state-owned media and the potential of non-liberal nations to exert soft-power through public diplomacy, and also to the understanding of China's international relations in terms of its increasingly contested global roles.