To this extent, the Chinese government neither looks solely at commercial benefits nor sometimes even at host country reactions when implementing the BRI.ĭrawing upon content analysis, this study analyzes the public diplomacy narratives of the BRI by selecting President Xi’s speeches and the authorized BRI documents of the Chinese government. To a large extent, as Ramo argues “China’s problem is more complex than whether or not its national image is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but hinges on a more difficult puzzle: China’s image of herself and other nations’ views of her are out of alignment.” That said, it is clear that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a party state, driven by a devotion to staying in power and appearing successful and powerful to home audiences and only secondarily to international audiences. Sun argues that there is an imbalance between China’s strong economic power and shortcomings in the mode of messaging. Despite the enormous investment, China’s public diplomacy has encountered misunderstanding and suspicion. Public diplomacy, as defined by Cull, “is a two-way street: a process of mutual influence, whereby a state or other international player facilitates engagement between publics or tunes its own policies to the map of foreign public opinion.” It is not the first time that China has had this kind of issue. However, the various interpretations of the BRI by international and domestic observers have made the BRI a diplomatic problem for the Chinese government, in which these interpretations are specified in the next section. In October 2017, the BRI was incorporated into the Constitution of the Communist Party of China (CPC), in the 19th National Congress of the CPC, attaching unparalleled importance to this economic and diplomatic initiative. The Database of Xi Jinping’s Important Speeches in the People’s Daily records President Xi mentioning the BRI 1653 times from 7th February 2014 to 23rd August 2019, on average once every 1.2 days. President Xi Jinping first proposed the BRI in Kazakhstan and Indonesia in 2013, initially as One Belt One Road. Within China, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is widely acknowledged as a central diplomatic and economic policy of the Chinese government. Despite positive interpretations of the BRI the Chinese government has adopted, the paper argues that there are no deceptive tricks with skeletons in the closet of the Chinese government, as the BRI public diplomacy narratives are, in general, consistent with its implementation.
Also, this paper draws on differences between countries joining the BRI or not, and several case studies to elucidate the implementation of the BRI.ĭifferent from repetitive literature that explores either the BRI narratives or its implementation, this paper contributes by combining and comparing the two.
It identifies the public diplomacy narratives of the BRI: an assemblage of constantly changing policy settings that accommodates various economic and political interests. By using content analysis, this paper analyzes Chinese President Xi’s speeches from 2013 to 2020 about the BRI, as well as official statements of the Chinese central government. This paper intends to discover the relationship between the public diplomacy narratives of the BRI and its implementation. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a well-acknowledged central economic and diplomatic policy of the Chinese government, which was proposed by President Xi Jinping in 2013.
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