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Abstract As China increasingly engages with world affairs, the American-West, including individual governments, media and academia, have frequently decried Chinese diplomacy as “aggressive” “ambitious” or else “deviant”. This poses a serious challenge not just to global governance, but also to China’s effort of image-building. The present article attempts to reexamine and reinterpret the character and patterns of contemporary Chinese diplomacy from a cultural discourse perspective in favour of improvement in intercultural understanding in particular and in international relations more generally.
So the paper begins by pointing out that mainstream diplomacy studies, despite its insights and achievements, has not paid sufficient attention to the role that discourse plays and, in that connection, to the cultural nature that discourse is imbued with. This neglect may lead as a result to blindness to not only new ways of thinking, speaking and acting, but also, more seriously, the cultural traditions that guide those ways of thinking, speaking and acting.
Then the article moves onto outlining a cultural-discursive perspective with special reference to dimplacy in general and to contemporary Chinese diplomacy in particular. First, it is argued that human communication needs to be considered as a global system of social interaction which is constituted out of diverse and competing discourse systems. Here discourse refers to social interaction in which groups or members interact using language and other means purposefully and consequentially in particular historical and cultural contexts. Thus, discourse is a composite of dialectically interlinked manifold elements (roughly speaking: communicators, acts, media, purposes, history and culture, CAMPHAC), while discourse system refers to the conglomerate of the cognitive-system (worldview, values, principles, theories, strategies, etc.) and the operational-system (organization, institutions, technologies, tactics, etc.) which undergirds, guides, shapes and constitutes the particular discursive practice of a group, which is in differential and power relations with those of other discursive groups. As such, a discourse system serves as an important factor that determines the efficacy of its actual practice. It is these particular differential and power relations with other discourse systems that constitute the cultural nature of a discourse—hence cultural discourse.
Next, it is pointed out that diplomacy is embodied and reproduced primarily in and through the social practice of discourse and furthermore that it is the living cultural tradition embedded in the discourse that plays a central role in guiding, molding and constituting the discursive practice of diplomacy. After all, diplomacy depends on and is realized through actors using language and other means of communication in ways that draw on and so reflect cultural traditions. By cultural traditions are meant those living worldviews, values, ways of thinking, principles of action, ways of meaning making, and the like.
Proceeding from the notion of diplomacy as a form of cultural discourse, it is then argued that, as part of Chinese cultural traditions, five communicative principles are centrally relevant to and particularly important for contemporary Chinese diplomacy and therefore should be employed as an effective framework for its understanding. These are: to speak holistically, dialectically, harmoniously, poetically and creatively. To be more specific, the Chinese holistic worldview primes one to take into consideration time and space, history and culture, the local and global, self and other, etc. The Chinese dialectic way of thinking encourages one to look for interconnections and interrelations as a strategy to solve problems or overcome difficulties. The Chinese ethical code of conduct requires one to seek balanced harmony or equilibrium. The Chinese technique of meaning making exhorts one to resort to figures of speech in sense making. The Chinese belief in change expects one to embrace creativity and renewal.
With this cultural discursive perspective on diplomacy, new light may be expected to be shed on the questions and answers over Chinese diplomacy reproduced by the Western world. Accordingly, two sets of recent cases of Chinese diplomacy are examined, also with a view to illustrating the use of the proposed cultural discursive account of diplomacy. They revolve round the Russian-Ukrain conflict and the US “China-strategy”, respectively. Here it will be seen that the Chinese diplomatic mission proposes to view the Russian-Ukrain conflict as well as its solution from a historical and geopolitical perspective, constructs the conflict as a matter of diverse facets and interrelations, suggests settlement of the conflict through peaceful dialogue and issues criticism of the US using figurative means. Further, it will be witnessed that, in the face of accusations by the US in its Administration’s Approach to the People’s Republic of China, China publicizes its response and position by making active use of all new media and channels of communication: e.g. the central government’s websites, embassies’ websites, official media, foreign media platforms, joint organizations, as well as foreign institutions and individuals.
Of course all this is not to say that a cultural discursive approach would serve to provide a fully satisfactory explanation of and guidance for a nation’s diplomacy. However, given the present theoretical reconstruction and empirical analysis of Chinese diplomatic practices, it may be contended that diplomacy, of which every country, cannot be fully understood unless a cultural discursive perspective is drawn upon, especially in the case of China.
In conclusion, a new cultural discursive strategy for the China-styled major-country diplomacy is proposed: To defuse China-threat and China-ambition theory and so to improve intercultural understanding of diplomacy and so also international relations in general and to facilitate China’s participation in and contribution to global governance in addition to its national rejuvenation, China’s diplomacy sets great store by Chinese cultural wisdoms in its global communication and actively integrates media platforms and technologies in the process.
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Published: 03 November 2023
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