Elsevier

Public Relations Review

Volume 38, Issue 5, December 2012, Pages 643-651
Public Relations Review

Editorial
Soft power and public diplomacy: The new frontier for public relations and international communication between the US and China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2012.07.002Get rights and content

Abstract

The underlying assumption is that a gradual change in economic and financial power will also lead to changes in ‘soft power’ like media communication, public relations, public opinion, public diplomacy and (new and old) media consumption. In other words, culture and mass communication play a significant role in shaping the dialogue between organizations and publics in different countries in general, and between the US and China in particular.

New ways to conceptualize and study Public Relations and News, Public Diplomacy, International Communication, and Crisis Communication are being introduced.

Section snippets

From bi- to multi-polar

The three opening articles in this special issue attempt to present a framework for the analysis of public diplomacy in a multipolar context. Aimei Yang of the University of Dayton, Anna Klyueva, University of Oregon, and Maureen Taylor, University of Oklahoma advocate for a multipolar approach to public diplomacy within a public relations framework. They apply a semantic network analysis to understand Chinese public diplomacy efforts during the 2011 Libya crisis. Theories on image building and

New ways of conceptualizing public relations and news

In his contribution to this special issue, Professor Di Zhang of Renmin University of China extended the generic organizational-public relationship cultivation strategies into the field of media relations and used this conceptual framework to quantitatively evaluate how the Chinese government's international media relationship cultivation strategies at news conferences changed between 2001 and 2009. The study confirms that the Chinese government has started to embrace a two-symmetric model of

Media's impact on reality

To further problematize the above observations I wish to expand the arguments by introducing the discussion of media's impact on reality. Two recent contributions stand out in this debate: (1) the research by Prof. Holli Semetko (2011) of Emory University, and her colleagues Christian Kolmer and Roland Schatz from the Zurich-based Media Tenor Research Institute. They did a great job analyzing more than 100,000 stories from almost 20 TV channels in Europe, China and the USA.

And (2) the Wang and

The soft power of global events and public service advertising

Hosting global events like the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, and the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games are a new form of public relations for cities and countries. These events are believed to help brand national and government images of the host city or country. Existing studies explain that mega-event images are transferrable to a host country and/or government. Yet, such an assumption has not been widely tested, or studied within specific country cases. Furthermore, while

Crisis communication

The last section in this special issue deals with issues of crisis communication.

Joanne Chen Lu of the Chinese University in Hong Kong opens with a comparative study of two crisis communication strategies (CCSs): (1) the crisis communicative strategies (CCSs) that organizations used to respond to a congenetic melamine-tainted milk crisis in mainland China and Taiwan, and (2) the underlying political, media-system reasons that led to the differences. She used content analysis and discourse

Mass media, public relations and public opinion

What can we learn from these cases and observations? Let's start with the summaries provided by Semetko et al. (2011) and Wang and Schoemaker (2011):

  • 1.

    The mass media influence public opinion. Since most Americans lack direct experience with China, they rely on media news to make their judgments. When China/US is covered more positively in the US/China media, Americans/Chinese tend to hold more favorable opinions toward it, while negative coverage may make them perceive China/the US in an

For a new public diplomacy

Hu (2011) ends his book with a section on Rethinking the China Dream. Like any other major power (or should it read: civilization) in the world, China has had many dreams over the ages. Hu hopes that the current one looks like this:

“Besides its enormous economic and trade contributions, as well as poverty reduction contributions, China needs to contribute in four other key areas: human development, science and technology, the green movement, and culture. These four contributions would represent

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