Research On China 's Foreign Cultural Strategy (2000-2015)

In China’s global strategic framework, the cultural strategy is one of the very important ingredients. When China is getting more and more involved in the world’s stage, and China’s national strategic interest expands to all corners of the globe, it becomes crucial to further emphasize the critical role of cultural soft power, and to evaluate the strategic impact of culture on the national development.In the next phase of international competition, culture will be the form through which big countries show their strength. Whoever can get their own culture followed as the mainstream, whose development will win the crowning strategic competitive edge. After having been developing very fast for more than 30 years, China now is the second largest economic giant in the world. However our cultural impact can’t match the economic power, which to some extent has prevented our momentum to become the global leading country. Therefore China has to urgently construct her own foreign culture strategy to better transmit Chinese culture so that the country can develop more comprehensively.This dissertation is motivated to study the theoretical basis of constructing China’s foreign cultural strategy, to summarize and evaluate what’s been done on the foreign culture exchange and practice since the new century, and based on that to give some suggestions about how China performs the foreign culture strategy in the next steps. The comprehensive investigation and analysis to each of those aspects are organized into 6 chapters.Chapter 1 is devoted to construct the analysis framework of foreign cultural strategy. The emphases are put on the discussion of the strategic value of culture, and the concepts of cultural strategy and foreign cultural strategy, based on which expounded are the roles of foreign cultural strategy in the development of big nations. The relation between culture and strategy, how culture becomes a strategic means, and the concept of cultural strategy are clarified in this chapter, which therefore establishes the theoretical basis of following chapters.Chapter 2 is devoted to from historic point of view figure out the key elements of our traditional culture and its strategic value for modern China. Following the logic procedures of case analysis, argument extraction and both side exposition, the features of foreign cultural exchange in China’s ancient time are analyzed through three famous cases. Based on that the key elements of China’s traditional culture are expounded, including moralism, coexistence in diversity, integration of family and nation, and globalization. Further more analyzed are some aspects in our traditional culture, which can prevent the process of modernization, such as lack of initiative pursuit, over emphasis on ethic, and too heavy inertia. In this chapter it suggests that those aspects are the strategic disadvantage of our culture to be in a global competition. We have to pay enough attention to the pros and cons of our culture so that the strategic plans can work better in the next steps.Chapter 3 is devoted to discuss China’s hard exploration on cultural construction during the transforming period, and ideas of foreign cultural strategy came up in the new century. Firstly objectively analyzed is the path of exploring the cultural construction during the nation’s reform and open to the outside world, including some lessons such as the serious unbalance between economic and cultural constructions, ignorance of traditional culture, lack of dissemination ideology, and one-side development of cultural industry. Then discussed is the introspection of our cultural construction and recognition of the value of cultural strategy, which came up with the prospects of foreign cultural strategy in the new century. In this chapter it’s suggested that since the 15 years of the new century as the leader of China’s cultural construction Communist Party of China have been keeping the pace with times in the cultural ideology, which is right becoming the guiding principle of nation’s practice of foreign cultural strategy.Chapter 4 discusses the achievements, shortcomings and strategic suggestions for the practice of China’s foreign cultural strategy in the first 15 years of the new century, from five different aspects which are foreign cultural exchange, foreign cultural trade, educations for foreign students, Confucius Institute and China Cultural Center. It is concluded in this chapter that China has made significant achievements on the practice of foreign cultural dissemination in the past 15 years. China’s cultural popularity and competitiveness have been rising rapidly. The cultural trade has been in the strategic developing phase. More attentions have been paid on the educations of foreign students. The fast development of Confucius Institute and China Cultural Center has found the excellent basis for the next step strategy. Nevertheless during the past practice of foreign cultural dissemination, there still appear the problems of low efficiencies, low profits and lagging of ideologies. In the guideline of new dissemination conception and new strategy, there’s vast room to raise the cultural dissemination undertaking.Chapter 5 is devoted to evaluate the practice of China’s foreign cultural strategy since the new century. The aspects to be evaluated are mainly including China’s nation image and the international impact of Chinese culture. The nation image consists of both positive and negative sides. The cultural impact is evaluated from four aspects, impact of traditional culture, international influence of Chinese language, impact of selecting China as destination of abroad education, and influence of Chinese modern film and TV culture. Based on the investigation of statistical data, China’s nation image has been improved a lot in the past 15 years. It’s been gradually recognized that China is an open and responsible big country. But given the prejudice and intended discredit by western countries, our nation image’s construction is still not optimistic. On the other hand, as China’s national strength grows, the popularity and impact of Chinese culture are going up continuously, although have not yet changed inherently in the background of dominant western culture. In the next steps, China has to further consolidate domestic cultural basis, and strengthen the control of right to speak and the construction of dissemination ability, so that the hard power can be better converted to the soft power.Chapter 6 prospects the future of China’s foreign cultural strategy from the macroscopic, medium-scopic and microscopic points of view, through the discussion on the domestic and international background of current practice, key elements of the practice and path of the practice of China’s foreign cultural strategy. It’s suggested in this chapter that China’s construction of foreign cultural strategy for the new period is urgent and in the right moment, while the keys of construction should closely base on both the domestic and the international circumstance, to spread modern China’s concepts of values, to develop traditional culture and to expand the cultural industry. The concrete path of practice includes further establishing foreign cultural exchange, developing cultural trade and investment, and strengthening the construction of spreading ability. In the end the relation between China’s foreign cultural strategy and realizing China’s Dream is discussed.The innovation of work in this dissertation is that a systematic research framework, which includes strategic theory, historic cultural origin, exploration of modern cultural construction, and practice and evaluation of foreign dissemination in the new period, has been established focusing on the construction of China’s foreign cultural strategy in the new century. The course and experience from developed countries are investigated as reference and enlightenment. The theory and practice path of our nation’s foreign cultural strategy have been comprehensively analyzed. And for the next steps China’s foreign cultural strategy, promising framework of theory and practice is proposed to help China’s culture better move forward to the global stage and help China’s national power keep rising comprehensively.