Global and Local Determinants in Narratives of China's Rise

• In Event: China and Global Public Opinion

Abstract

The Chinese government cares deeply about its international image. Existing research has studied Chinese efforts to earn status from foreign governments and to direct public diplomacy toward foreign publics, but largely overlooked the country’s preoccupation with foreign media. This project extends the study of China’s image management by explaining variation in leading print newspapers’ reporting on China, in the form of adjectives and verbs attributed to the Chinese government and state actors. Specifically, it compares the relative importance of a country’s own interactions with China with those taking place in other countries. I find that this relationship is moderated by regime type: non-democracies have a hub-and-spoke relationship with China, in which narratives are driven by bilateral interactions. By contrast, narratives in democracies are more highly correlated with one another, reflecting a global conversation about China’s rise. These findings shed light on some of the difficulties China faces in negotiating debt restructuring: efforts to recoup investments could incur a risk to China’s broader international image.

Author

• James Sundquist, Yale University