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