Transnational Sites of China’s Cultural Diplomacy: Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Middle East and Europe Compared

0535574 - OÚ 2021 RIV SG eng M - Monography Chapter
Exnerová, Věra
China’s ‘Silk Road’ Public Diplomacy in Central Asia: Rethinking the ‘Network’ Approach to the Study of Public Diplomacy and Its Instrumentalism.
Transnational Sites of China’s Cultural Diplomacy: Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Middle East and Europe Compared. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020 - (Ptáčková, J.; Klimeš, O.; Rawnsley, G.), s. 65-87. ISBN 978-981-15-5591-6
R&D Projects: GA ČR GA15-21829S
Grant - others:AV ČR(CZ) LQ300211901
Program: Prémie Lumina quaeruntur
Institutional support: RVO:68378009
Keywords : diplomacy * Silk Road * China
OECD category: Political science

This chapter shows how the Chinese government’s foreign policy agenda offers opportunities and benefits to public and cultural actors in Central Asia through the ‘Silk Road’ initiative. It begins by contextualizing the ‘Silk Road’ public diplomacy strategy in terms of the general debates on soft power and the public diplomacy of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It analyzes the conceptual framework for studying people-to-people exchange and the involvement of local actors and notes that the Chinese state and its policies are mostly studied as imposed, top-down, and thus inauthentic initiatives. The chapter then uses the ‘network approach’ to public diplomacy (Hocking 2005) as well as debates on the instrumentalism of cultural policy (Nisbett 2013) to introduce a new perspective into the debate. The approach is illustrated using examples of dynamics within the academic and cultural networks in the major cities of Almaty (in Kazakhstan) and Tashkent (in Uzbekistan). In the conclusion, the chapter suggests adopting insights from transnationalism to study public diplomacy and, specifically, explores how the scope of the study of the ‘new public diplomacy’ might be theoretically broadened in the future. The chapter argues that public diplomacy not only needs a ‘new’ name or perception, but also needs to step outside of critical or applied approaches and to change units of reference and analysis that are not dependent only on ‘China’ (or the nation-state) and the idea of monocentric distribution of power, interests, and resources.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0316598