Gary D. Rawnsley

Approaches to soft power and public diplomacy in China and Taiwan

Abstract This paper compares the soft power capital and public diplomacy strategies of Taiwan and the Peoples Republic of China. The premise is that Taiwans international status and the absence of formal diplomatic recognition by major powers are a serious constraint on Taiwans ability engage in meaningful outreach with the global community. The focus of the discussion is a paradox: Taiwan should be more successful at soft power since it is the personification of political values which should make it attractive to the liberal-democratic world; and yet the Peoples Republic of China – an authoritarian regime – is attracting far more attention and seems to possess and exercise far more soft power capital than Taiwan. This suggests that measurements of hard power and the models advanced by traditional approaches to international relations are more convincing ways to understand Taiwans present predicament and its soft power. However, current strategies – operationalised by both Taiwan and the PRC – enjoy limited success for different reasons.

Regime transition and the media in Taiwan

Taiwans recent experience of political regime transition suggests the existence of a strong correlation between the promotion of free and diverse media and the level of political change. The governments efforts to create a more liberal media environment are commendable, but, owing to the structure of the market and ownership patterns, the party of government (the Kuomintang) maintains a powerful influence over television and major newspapers. This makes the so‐called new media, especially cable television and talk radio, particularly important to democratization in Taiwan. So far, however, they have tended to promote a divisive and adversarial political culture rather than true democratic consolidation.

Critical security, democratisation and television in Taiwan

Threats to security materialize in many guises. This text examines the effect that television in Taiwan has on the management of critical security and democratization. Topics discussed include the media and popular protest, public television and empowerment, and globalization.

To Know Us is to Love Us: Public Diplomacy and International Broadcasting in Contemporary Russia and China

China and Russia have devoted significant resources to developing their international broadcasting capacity as an instrument of public diplomacy. Focusing on CCTV-N (China) and RT (Russia), this article discusses the strategies each has developed to communicate with international audiences and further the foreign policy ambitions of policy makers in Beijing and Moscow. It highlights the differences between the two stations – namely CCTV-Ns ambition to rectify perceived distortions in the global flow of news about China, and RTs focus on reporting events in the US. Hence the case studies expose the fine line between propaganda and public diplomacy.

Political Communications in Democratic Taiwan: The Relationship Between Politicians and Journalists

This article assesses the present state of political communications in Taiwan through a close analysis of the perceived relationship between journalists and politicians. This relationship is examined within the context of media commercialization. Based on the assumption that in cultures of democratic political communication the interaction between media and political actors involves both conflict and cooperation, we consider how journalists and politicians negotiate the balance of power between them. The empirical evidence gathered from semistructured interviews for this article suggests that the interaction between media and political elites in Taiwan is defined by high levels of conflict, hostility, mutual suspicion, and mistrust—attributes of a relationship that can have profound implications for the legitimacy and efficacy of institutions, actors, and political communications in a newly created democratic system. The article explains the evidence through the perspective of the “knowledge deficit model” that operates within the context of media commercialization. This indicates that the perceptions (of the public, journalists, and politicians) of the formal aspects of democracy may have been transformed, but the nuances that define the application of democratic norms (the practice of responsible journalism) remain ambiguous. More importantly, huge market pressures and the widely accepted media logic, coupled with the democratic knowledge deficit, are creating a vicious cycle in the practice of political communication in Taiwan. This perhaps provides some tentative explanation for the brisk deterioration of expectations about democracy and the medias role in it, as well as the quality of democratic political communication in Taiwan.

How special is special? The Anglo‐American alliance during the Cuban missile crisis

The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 affords an excellent opportunity to scrutinise alliance relationships during the most critical phases of international history. The recently declassified documents at the Public Records Office suggest that although Britains role in the crisis was limited to consultation with the United States and did not actively participate in the resolution of the crisis, the government was not prepared to passively support those American decisions with which it did not agree. In addition this case study allows scholars to derive a greater sense of the importance of a detached and specialised Foreign Office in a political system which places greater power in the hands of an elected and transient government with narrow interests.

Cold War Radio in crisis: the BBC overseas services, the Suez crisis and the 1956 Hungarian uprising

Rawnsley, G. (1996). Cold War radio in crisis: The BBC Overseas Services, the Suez crisis and the Hungarian uprising, 1956. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 16 (2), 197-219.

Cinema Wars: Hollywood film and politics in the Bush–Cheney era

Stendhal)’ (p. 153). The last part of the sentence refers to Stendhal’s De L’Amour (1822), and implies that technological invention happens as spontaneously, as uncontrollably, as love. However, the German original for ‘assemblages’ is ‘Basteleien und Montagen’ (Optische Medien, Berlin: Merve, 2002, p. 208), meaning ‘bricolages’, so caution is advisable here. The key is that Kittler is not ‘ahistorical’, nor is he a crude technological determinist (see his insistence on the tension between economics and science, p. 220, or between the developments of math and linear perspective, p. 52). As he states early on, his lectures ‘attempt to derive the structures of film and cinema from the history of their development’ (p. 23). Nor are the accomplishments of science seen as anthropologically foreordained. ‘What Edison and the Lumières accomplished [. . .] therefore fulfilled neither timeless need nor some primal dream of mankind [. . .]; rather it was a technical and thereby definitive answer to wishes that had been historically produced’ (p. 101). Attentive readers (or listeners) will not have overheard the crucial phrase: ‘technical and thereby definitive’. If technology, for Kittler, is not necessarily an efficient or material cause in Aristotle’s terms, it may be something of a final cause. Ultimately, optical media, for Kittler, cannot but vanish in a Hegelian ‘fury of disappearance’, namely into the computer and the digital (‘visible optics must disappear into a black hole of circuits’, p. 225). This holds true for film as well, which television has rendered superfluous (p. 219). Given that media ‘overcome’ art (p. 224), ‘so-called video art’ (sic, p. 221) becomes a contradiction in terms. Introducing film censorship and inventing the auteur film ‘amounts to the same thing’ (p. 178). Many film scholars will not find Kittler’s message a cheerful one. But he needs to be taken seriously. Although he relies heavily on some sources (such as Friedrich von Zglinicki’s 1979 Der Weg des Films), his work, like Foucault’s, makes philosophical and not only historical claims. His perspective on media history, derived from Claude Shannon’s 1948 information theory, is consistently if idiosyncratically applied. One only hopes that scientists and mathematicians might one day offer us commentaries on his more densely technical passages. Anthony Enn’s translation is readable and accurate. A few references in the text are not given in the bibliography (pp. 33, 37, 48, 154, 177). Kittler’s book is recommended not only to film and media historians, but also literary scholars and philosophers of science.

Radio Diplomacy and Propaganda

Dialogue between statesmen and diplomats is at the very heart of the diplomatic process. It is an art of communication designed to exchange views towards learning what other governments aspire and object to, and then persuading them of the existence of parallel, even mutual interests.

The Campaign of Truth : A populist propaganda

The ‘Campaign of Truth’ has received little serious attention from students of the Truman Presidency, and this is unfortunate since it marked a period of transition and development, not only in terms of America’s approach to Cold War propaganda, but also in the foreign policy which such propaganda was designed to reinforce. For one thing, propaganda finally became a much more ‘acceptable’ activity among State Department officials who were suspicious of its potential intrusion upon the sensitive worlds of foreign policy and diplomacy which they inhabited. However, the deterioration of the international situation after 1948 and the hardening of the Cold War, symbolized by the Berlin blockade, the consolidation of Stalinist rule in Eastern Europe, and the outbreak of war in Korea, convinced the Truman administration that a more concerted and certainly more militant propaganda effort was required. Containment had called for the American political establishment to accept a degree of passivity in its foreign policy, reflected in Senator Wiley’s description of the strategy as ‘pantywaist diplomacy’.2 Other denunciations of containment were much more forceful but no less colourful. Congressman Charles J. Kersten believed it was ‘immoral and unchristian to negotiate a permanent agreement with forces which by every religious creed and moral precept are evil’.