My thesis paper mainly focuses on the China cultural diplomacy and its soft power policy. China¡¦s economic reforms have transformed the international status. China is raising power recently. However China suffered the question about the political validity and the doubt of China threat, in order to keep maintaining a peaceful international environment, China has learned to use soft issues to serve its national interests. Cultural soft power is the best choice for China in such situation. According to Joseph Nye¡¦s idea, soft power is attracting force derived mainly from intangible resources such as national culture, political values, and its foreign policies. This thesis discovered that Beijing although wants to remold the civilized great nation image, it has to deal with the domestic belief crisis. Even, China on the one hand must construct the opening national image; on the other hand still continue to suppress the domestic Internet opinion. The Chinese Communist Party which cultivates the soft power is the destroyer. China ignores that the cultural diplomacy intrinsic essence is to sell the truth. China packs the national image with the cultural soft power without thinking of the national prestige. Although China repeatedly emphasizes the harmonious peace, the international society is still filled with anxiety about the China's power.

Bachelor thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

This research provides a sociological investigation of an elite disability sport competition known as the Paralympic Games. A quadrennial multi-sport competition for individuals with specific impairments, the Paralympic Games, is explored in this thesis through the method of semi-structured interviews. Individuals interviewed included current and former Paralympians, active and retired disability sport administrators as well as social researchers of disability and disability sport. A number of themes surface in this research which identifies and begins to explore the relationships between the core constituents which influence the Paralympic Games. Assertions about which bodies have a legitimate claim to be involved in Paralympic sport, alongside how impaired bodies are used to create an elite disability sport spectacle, such as the Paralympic Games, remain contested by members and organisations that influence, through consensus and conflict, the development of the Paralympic Movement. The Paralympic Games, of course, has not developed in isolation, but in the context of wider developments across sport. In relation to this the positive and negative influences of the International Olympic Committee upon the Paralympic Games are considered. At the core of the thesis, critical analysis has been generated through the use of the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu. In particular Bourdieu's related concepts of habitus, capital and field, in conjunction with previous research into the Paralympic Movement and the extant literature in the field of disability studies, are used to illuminate the existence of a Paralympic field. The possible manifestation of a Paralympic field is explored through the empirical data collected. As a result this thesis highlights the nexus between the sociology of sport and disability studies. Through the fusion of these fields, and by grounding them in a robust theoretical framework, it is hoped that this research will add positively to the literature in this emerging specialism of the sociology of disability sport.

This research examines the use of volunteering at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games for the creation of human, social and political capital at individual, organisational and societal levels. Despite a long tradition of Olympic volunteering, this has not been investigated so far. The concept of volunteerism at Beijing 2008, in fact, was constructed upon multiple contexts including the Olympic Movement, Chinese society and an international understanding of the ternl (BOCOG, 2005). Hence, volunteerism as an under-investigated concept is firstly studied individually in each of these contexts. The frameworks underpinning this research include Getz's (2005) human resource planning process which explains how specific policies for managing event volunteers are formulated for fulfilling its vision(s); and theories of social, human and political capital as developed by Putnam (2000), Bourdieu (1986; 1991) and Coleman (1988) respectively. Multiple qualitative case study strategy is adopted for this investigation, following a constructivist paradigm. The subjective and interactive epistemology is constructed upon the knowledge and experiences of a total of fifty-seven infoIDlants, most of whom were directly involved in the Beijing 2008 Olympic Volunteer Programme. The research findings illustrate that the Chinese state and BOCOG's interpretation of the concept of volunteerisrn was manifested in organisational visions for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Volunteer Programme. These visions were accomplished through a range of management policies, which in fact placed volunteerism at Beijing 2008 in line with the maturity stage of volunteerism in the Olympic Movement. During the course of the management practices, social, human and political capital were created in varying degrees at all of the three levels. It was also evident that participation and training were the critical processes in the creation of different forms of capital. Moreover, the findings suggest that the created social, human and political capital have both positive and negative effects on those involved, while full possible long-term effects are yet to become apparent. This research makes distinctive contributions to the body of knowledge. It adds six-dimensional conceptual frameworks for both volunteerism in general and Olympic volunteerism in specific. Investigation into how volunteering for the Beijing Games has been used for the creation of social, human and political capital at individual, organisational and societal levels is deemed to be original. Research findings will contribute to the development of volunteerism in the Olympic Movement and future Olympic volunteer programmes. Suggestions for future research are also proposed to investigate on further issues of issue of the use of volunteering for the creation of social, human and political capital at future Olympic Games as well as other mega events.

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As a physical education teacher educator and Olympic educator I have become conscious that many physical education teachers have heard of Olympism, but are confused about what it encompasses. Furthermore they are challenged to understand how to teach Olympism in their physical education programmes. The potential of the educative and social value of Olympism is, as yet, unfulfilled. My study is about the content knowledge teachers require for teaching Olympism, the successful pedagogies they use, and the meanings that students derive from putting Olympism into action within, and outside of, the gymnasium. My qualitative case study uses teacher and student interviews, and observations to gather data as it follows the teaching and learning of Olympism in the Year 9 physical education programme of a New Zealand secondary school. In my attempt to understand what teachers need to know and do to make Olympism a reality in physical education programmes I have drawn on aspects of Shulman‟s (1987) seminal framework of teacher knowledge, to understand the content knowledge needed for teaching Olympism, the pedagogical content knowledge required, and the knowledge of students and their characteristics as they learn about Olympism. My findings reveal that teachers require various forms of content knowledge to teach Olympism, such as knowledge of students and their needs, a clear definition of Olympism for the setting, Olympism as a personal life-stance, ethical situations in games, and a holistic physical education curriculum. Pedagogies that the teachers used were found to be the transformation of Olympism into manageable concepts for teaching, the use of experiential and social teaching models in games contexts, and the extensive use of questioning and discussion strategies to develop critical thinking. Evidence shows the range of the students‟ learning, and the development of deeper meanings of Olympism. The students regarded the teacher as a role model of Olympism, and varied in their ability to transfer Olympism understandings into their wider lives. My detailed account of how teachers understand and teach Olympism, and the extent to which students apply their knowledge in class and beyond, offers a practical example of what Olympic education can look like when it has Olympism at its core. Such teaching I have named Olympism education.

The purpose of this study was to understand the governance of Olympic Games legacy. Legacy is broadly described as “all planned and unplanned, positive and negative, intangible and tangible structures created by and for a sport event that remain for a longer time than the event itself” (Preuss, 2007a, p. 86). The specific objectives of this study were: a) to map the historical evolution of legacy throughout the modern Olympic Movement (OM) (i.e., 1896-current day) in order to contextualize and conceptualize the major trends (e.g., changes in legacy, network actors/stakeholders, governance structures and processes) over time; b) to understand, explain, and compare/contrast the network governance of Olympic legacy, using Australian and Canadian case settings; and c) to critically analyze the overall structure and process of the governance of legacy within the OM focusing specifically on the aspects of performance, transparency, accountability, and participation to build a framework and provide policy recommendations for the governance of legacy in mega-events. In order to accomplish these objectives, a historical review of legacy within the OM and two descriptive case studies (Sydney 2000 and Vancouver 2010) were built using interviews and archival materials. Findings showed how the growth of the Games has culminated in the increased use and importance of legacy, leading to greater concept complexity. This resulted in the emergence of several trends including: new legacy themes, heightened interconnectedness, and formalization of governance mechanisms. Institutional theory was then applied to further explore the emergence of legacy and its habitualization, objectification, and sedimentation as an accepted norm in the Olympic Field. The examination of the legacy governance networks in the two cases showed four legacy network governance phases: legacy conceptualization, legacy planning and implementation, legacy transfer, and post-Games legacy governance, as well as a number of governance mechanisms (e.g., contracts, policies) that had an impact on the overall governance of the event’s legacy. Finally, a critical analysis of the governance of Olympic Games legacy was completed. The end result of the research project was a theoretical framework detailing the levels and fluidity of legacy governance in the OM.

This thesis examines the emergence of Olympic sport aid policy in the early phase of its establishment in 1961 with the founding of the Commission For International Olympic Aid (CIOA) and the Olympic Solidarity (OS) in the early 1970s. The study aims to explore the global process of cultural flows of Olympism and modern sport, and the international relations involved in constructing, modifying or resisting the Olympic 'message'. A tentative conceptualisation of 'aid donors' (core and semi-periphery) and the 'aid recipients' (peripheral states) is outlined in relation to the global sport interaction between nation states. At the macro level, it is clear that the bi-political order of the Cold War, the decolonisation process, and the development aid projects provided to the newly independent countries in Africa and Asia influenced agents' approaches in forming the sport aid policy and the promotion of Olympic institutions. At the meso level, the IOC relations with UNESCO, IFs, regional games and National Olympic Committees and the emergence of hyper nationalism, commercialism and professionalism impinge on the creation of the global sport aid programme that emphasises the hegemony of the Olympic movement. The research subscribes to critical realism as its ontological and epistemological base and the principal method employed to investigate is a form of qualitative content analysis using a protocol drawn from ethnographic content analysis. Inductive and deductive techniques were utilised to analyse 355 official documents and agents' correspondence in English, French and German gathered from Olympic Museum archives and facilitated by the application of QSR NUD*IST software for qualitative data analysis. A socio-economic and political account of the postcolonial era is provided as viewed through 'prism' of modernisation, cultural imperialism, dependency and figuration theories. The thesis provides an approach to the evaluation of the global diffusion of sport and Olympism through the aid programmes revealing complex responses and engagement with global processes, contextualised by (in some ways) homogenous and (in others) heterogeneous nature of the global sport.