W.k.che Media In The Role Of China-eu Relations

In the reality of global politics, every actor takes national interest as the target of foreignpolicy. The coming information revolution, however, has played or more exactly, is playing animportant role in changing the nature of international relations. In post-modern period, soft power,comparing with pure hard power, has more influence in the process of implementing foreignpolicy. The states in global politics paid close attention to raise its soft power through improvingor constructing a good national image. State branding has become one critical element of softpower, which directly affects the foreign policy-making process. In the recent decades of years,scholars from China and western countries did a lot of studies on the relationship of news mediaand national image; they found that national image played a great role in bilateral relations. Buthow or in what extent the mass media affects foreign policy is not yet much discussed in thesestudies. The paper tries to explain the interaction between news media and foreign policy, throughthe longitudinal study of China-EU relations after the end of Cold War. This research analyzed theinteraction models between news media and foreign policy——CNN Effect and Index Hypothesis,in the context of multilateral organization——European Union, which filled the blank of the studyin media influence in China-EU relationship.First, the research discusses the interplay of soft power and the news media in internationalpolitics by focusing on the influence of the soft power on a country’s attractiveness, an imagewhich the news media have represented in the country’s foreign relations, with a focus on China’ssoft power.Second, the research analyzed the interaction models of news media and foreign policy.There are two models——CNN Effect and Index Hypothesis in the interaction of news media.The first is that the media has an impact on the policy-making process and can drive foreignpolicy-making in some way, while the second argues that the media and foreign policyrelationship works the other way around, and it is the government that shapes the media coverage.Third, on the basis of the media content analysis, the research further analyzed the changingimages of China and EU through the coverage of EEC/EU in People’s Daily from1989-2005andthe interviews of EU officials. The research explored the influence actors of news media coverageand of the EU officials’ perspectives of China.Fourth, the research analyzed the content of government foreign policy paper from China andEU. On the basis of the foreign policy paper analysis, the research further investigated the modelsof the relationship between the media and foreign policy in the context of EU-China relations. The research shows that on China’s side, the coverage of EU is oriented by government foreign policy,but the media, to some extent also, has autonomy in their reporting; On the EU side, at the macrolevel, the media influences the EU’s making of its comprehensive Commission policy paperstoward China.