Branding the Chinese Dream: Reception of China’s Public Diplomacy in Britain’s “Cultural China”

Abstract

Over four decades, China’s transformed propaganda system has embraced public diplomacy to dispel its perceived “threat.” The most recent strategy has been the branding of the Chinese Dream narrative. Although there has been some academic focus on China’s nation branding, little has been written about its reception by overseas audiences. Accordingly, this article draws on focus-group data and employs Tu Wei-ming’s “cultural China” framework in exploring how the Chinese Dream is received and interpreted in the United Kingdom. This article contributes to understandings of nation branding by recognising how Chinese diaspora communities and British intellectual and professional elites engage with and promote brand values. It argues that the socio-cultural aspect of branding is important for China’s identity and that using the Chinese Dream as a branding narrative is successful when it focuses on cultural and economic messaging but divides opinion when political ideology is used.
 Image © Yan Wu

The visual politics of Brand China: Exceptional history and speculative future

“…Analyzing China through the practice of nation branding crystallizes these tactics of national image creation and projection, but pivotally, it also highlights another dimension of the country’s own perception of its influence and status, as well as its response to the challenge of global image management. The recent academic corpus on China’s nation branding efforts remains divergent, for example, with emphasis on a single event, such as the Olympics (Puppin 2021 ) and the COVID-19 pandemic (Lee 2021 ), or through particular domains such as social media (He et al 2020 ), sports (Li and Feng 2021 ), the Belt and Road Initiative (Zhang et al 2020 ), and intellectual property rights (Yang 2016 ), or in a specific country, for instance Britain (Wu et al 2021 ). This article takes an interdisciplinary approach and engages with these existing debates on three fronts: first, it shifts the attention of analysis to two alternative objects of study; second, it amplifies an often-elided, if not taken-for-granted, relationship to time that is a prominent feature of the country’s nation brand style.…”