My dissertation mainly focuses on the changing of China¡¦s soft power and tries to explain the reasons why Beijing loses its biding for Olympic Games in 1993. China¡¦s economic reforms have transformed its international status. Today China is already a country of rising power. In order to keep maintaining a peaceful international environment China has learnt to use soft issues to serve its national interests. Because changing China¡¦s image and undermining the scenario of a China threat were vital to Beijing and crucial to the future of its foreign policy, the analysis concerning China¡¦s rise should not focus entirely on the economic and military power. It is better for us to aim at filling that gap in knowledge about China¡¦s soft power and its increasingly sophisticated diplomacy. According to Joseph Nye, soft power is attracting force derived mainly from intangible resources such as national culture, political values, and its foreign policies. It is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. Nye states that technological advances have led to a dramatic reduction in the cost of processing and transmitting information. The result is an explosion of information which leads to scarcity of attention. Therefore, attention becomes the scarce resource. Nye also finds that publics have become more wary and sensitized about propaganda. Governments are often mistrusted. Therefore, Nye suggests that governments to work with non-state actors, such as NGOs in international affairs. However, there are a lot of arguments about how to measure the soft power of a country or a private actor. Since converting resources into realized power in the sense of obtaining desired outcomes requires well-designed strategies and skillful leadership, I state that soft power results from the structural forces and media technology in the system. Through development of the analysis structure of soft power, including media technology, institution, and material resources, I examine several cases to prove that China is gradually enhancing its international position by means of changing its institutions and reinforcing its international communication abilities. Today, special events are more than just well-known athletic competitions and cultural performances. International Olympic Committee is an important non-state actor with charm and soft power in the international society. I use three chapters to deal with the topic that Beijing bided for 2000 and 2008 Olympic Game. My argument is that the issues of Deng Xiaoping¡¦s successor and overheated economic problem leaded to China¡¦s lost in biding for the Olympic Game in 1993.

Bachelor's thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

This dissertation explores the news making process at CCTV-9, the Beijing-based global English language service of China Central Television (CCTV). My interest in this topic was triggered by the strange manner in which so much debate about media reform in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) elides any real discussion of the contribution of journalists themselves to reform, which is almost invariably treated as something that happens to media from outside of, or regardless of, what journalists do. My aim in this research was to address this lapsus and foreground the work of journalists to show how it contributes to the changing institutional framework in which their work is embedded and therefore contributes to media reform. Drawing on ground-breaking work on bounded innovation and resistance by Pan Zhongdang and Lu Ye in this emerging field, I utilize concepts derived from their use of Michel de Certeau and discuss these concepts in light of the works of Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault to show how journalists at CCTV-9 exercised control over their work, despite their function as mouthpieces of the news and publicity system operated by the Communist Party of China and PRC government. I am not suggesting that PRC journalists are dissidents. However, my research did suggest that the mundane practice of journalism, even in so constrained a media environment as that of the PRC news system, can alter the manner in which news is made and thereby contribute to media reform. Utilizing participant observation of the CCTV-9 newsroom in 2004-2005, interviews with a range of news makers, in-house documents and a survey of content, I construct a picture of news making at CCTV-9 that foregrounds what to more macro-oriented analyses of media reform in the PRC has remained inaccessible, the minutiae of everyday life in the newsroom, and the tiny, but not inconsequential changes brought about by the ordinary work of journalists. / text

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Due to the rapid economic growth and industrial development in China, the constantly soaring upGDP has made many people believe that the golden age of China has come. But along with the boomingdevelopment, the neglect and violation of the natural environment has brought intensive discussion and criticism.Moreover, during past decades, frequent natural disasters and extreme weathers resulting from human activitieshave made local dwellers suffer from economical loss, as well as physical harm. Thus more attention fromwithin the country has been drawn to the environmental issues; media reports, national debates and researcheshave been going on for years. Among which, the problem of air pollution has caught a large public concern,especially when the PM 2.5 in Chinese metropolises like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xi’an etc. exceeded900 micrograms per cubic meter. In previous analysis of PM 2.5 pollutants in developing countries, it has beenfound that most of those aerosol particles are from the burning of fossil fuels and biomass, and in China’s case,coal burning has been blamed largely, due to the fact that the use of coal takes up about 70% of total energyconsumption. Based on data analysis and chemical ratio examination, this thesis is to find out the connectionbetween PM 2.5 and Coal burning in China’s capital city Beijing.

This thesis explores the distinctive forms of journalism that have emerged in mainstream news websites in mainland China. Two case studies, the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009, are employed to identify features in Chinese and Western news online. Specifically, a comparison is made between the in-depth news sections of popular mainstream news websites in China and those in the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. The study finds that the Chinese version of mainstream web news genre differs significantly from the Western version. This thesis argues that journalists’ practice is strongly context dependent. Distinctive economic, organizational, social and cultural factors contribute to shaping Chinese web journalism in a way that contradicts the notion of a homogeneous worldwide journalism or of a single set of norms for journalism. The study challenges the dominance of the political explanatory framework that considers political factors as the most important approach to study Chinese web-based media. In the face of a sparse literature and sporadic studies concerning the development of the internet as a novel platform in China for news production and transmission, this thesis aims to bring more academic interest to an overlooked research area and to contribute to a broader understanding of the actual diversity of global communication research.

Chinese propaganda nowadays is focused on producing soft-sell messages international consumption instead of hard-core propaganda of agitation. emphasis on "image design" as Jiang Zemin coined it, rather than on propagation of Communist ideals. This shift from the past is brought government's new publicity strategy masterminded by Deng Xiaoping. strategy Chinese media have been enlisted in the ideological construction national images. Image construction for the nation-state has become the Chinese government and its news media in terms of international communication. This shift is symbolic of the rapid changes taking place in China. I draw Andrew Wernick's notion of "promotional culture" (1991) to describe changes, and in particular, their impact on government publicity, domestic reporting, and international journalism in China. I argue that a form of "promotional culture" has made a positive impact on government publicity as much on international journalism in China. The shift of focus in propaganda more of a government initiative than a spontaneous pursuit of international journalism in China. The latter still practices government scripts rather creative in form and diversified in content as is domestic reporting. This examines government publicity materials and news media reports concerning Beijing's Olympic campaign to reveal this extension of promotional government publicity and its implications for Chinese journalism.

Thesis (M.Phil.)--Hong Kong Baptist University, 1998. / Thesis submitted to the Dept. of Government and International Studies. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-82).

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, 2004. / Includes bibliography.

Univ., Diss.--Hohenheim, 2003.