China in symbolic communication

Abstract

The story of China is multi-faceted. In the 21 century, alongside the rise of China as an economic power and geopolitical actor, the storytelling of China has become a dynamic, and sometimes conflicting, space of narratives that involves both domestic and international participants. Beyond an ethnocentric mindset, a dynamic, yet historical, civilization lying within the nation has brought certain cognitive barriers and interpretive challenges for those who strive to understand the complex nature of this country, as well as its expanding but uncertain international influences. On 31 May 2021, Xi Jinping directed the 30 collective learning of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee towards strengthening China’s capacity in international communication. Xi’s talk emphasized both contradictions that underline the global perceptions of China and how China’s international communication system can perform better to reach a larger audience, customize content for cross-regions and cultures, reduce knowledge gaps and cognitive biases, and finally, have China’s story decoded internationally as similar as it is encoded domestically. Despite obvious theoretical and practical difficulties, Xi’s talk, released by official media immediately after the meeting, mobilized nationwide learning and discussions on how to achieve effective outward communication. International communication (guoji chuanbo), though popular for decades, has become a buzzword in today’s China across all relevant sectors, ranging from government and media to universities and think tanks. Against this backdrop, driven by both policy and academic incentives, multidisciplinary scholars and various theoretical approaches are inspired to touch on this field to examine the image making of China, which often entails a scientific method to collect and analyze survey-based data, and an interpretive method to make sense of a two-fold process of encoding and decoding, or