A review of the current state of research on China’s international image management

Abstract

Image Management is a crucial aspect of China's engagement with the world, and the related scholarship has already produced high-quality learned analyses. This article, however, identifies a certain stagnation in knowledge production. This stagnation, I argue, is first due to a tendency to focus research on a few recurring themes and second due to three contested areas and related research gaps. These contestations concern (1) the question how to describe and conceptualize image management practices, (2) the question what instruments belong to image management practices, and (3) most importantly the question of audiences and how to measure the impact of these practices. By mapping out these areas, this article provides avenues for further research and argues in favor of interdisciplinary mixed-methods research in this field. Taking those contested areas and the existing research gaps more seriously into consideration is imperative to understand China's communicative practices which increasingly become a major component of China's overall behavior on the global stage.

Beijing’s cultural diplomacy efforts in Pakistan: Building soft image through internet sources

“…The dawn of twenty first century has brought in the indispensable role of information communication technology. Scholars have pointed out that Beijing is using the tool of social media, such as Twitter, Facebook and so forth to forward its own worldview (Hartig 2019;Safdar 2021). Regarding China's efforts at highlighting its culture in Pakistan, after a careful survey of internet sources, we identified six web-sources.…”

“…There exists scholarship attentive to the domain of soft power, public diplomacy, and cultural diplomacy vis-à-vis China linking it with Middle Eastern nations (Ma 2010), ASEAN countries (Shuto 2018), Malaysia (Hrubý and Petrů 2019), USA (Becard and Filho 2019), and Pakistan (Gui and Arif 2016). The discourse has attempted to explore various dimensions of Chinese diplomacy, such as Confucius institutes (Hartig 2012(Hartig , 2014Liu 2019;Pan 2013;Shuto 2018); translation (Jiang 2021); museum diplomacy (Wang 2018); panda diplomacy (Hartig 2013), international higher education (Mulvey 2019), cinema (Becard and Filho 2019), image management (Hartig 2019) and engagement (Safdar 2021).…”

Based on Contaminated Water and Human Health to Change of China’s International Image Under Mainstream Media Reports During the COVID‐19 Pandemic

“…Disagreements between countries on public health and economic policy responses have led to a propaganda war. After roughly examining the time trajectory of China's public health response and its underlying factors, this article continues to study some controversial issues regarding China's public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted in hegemony [ 1 ]. However, our understanding of the dynamics of this exposure response during the COVID-19 pandemic is still limited.…”

International broadcasters and country image management: Comparing audience perceptions of China, Russia and Iran in Latin America

“…While Anne Geniets (2013) conducted one of the few comparative studies analysing the strategies of English-language international broadcasters and audiences in a few African and Asian countries, more recent publications look at the reception of Chinese channels overseas (Maweu, 2016; Morales, 2018; Wasserman & Madrid-Morales, 2018) but do not address the issue of image management. Looking at the specific case of China, Falk Hartig (2019) stresses the need for more empirical research to test whether image management efforts have had any effect on audiences. This study aims to fill these gaps by exploring the reception of international broadcasters in Latin America, a region that is increasingly becoming geopolitically important for China (Piccone, 2016), Russia (Blank & Kim, 2015) and Iran (Karmon, 2010).…”