A Research On City's International Conference Brand As A Supporter Of Local Public Diplomacy

As public diplomacy is playing a more important role than ever,local governments start to communicate with specific overseas publics regularly by creating periodically-run international conference brand of the city,which has become an interesting phenomenon in current international relations.However,very few researches have been focused on this area as scholars haven't made enough investigations on either the supporters of local public diplomacy or the use of international conference brand in public diplomacy.To better explore the value of city's international conference brand as a supporter of local public diplomacy and explain how it works,the research is conducted in three steps by taking the Shanghai International Business Leaders' Advisory Council for the Mayor of Shanghai(IBLAC Shanghai)as a case study: The first part finds out possible advantages city's conference brand may possess in its way to support local public diplomacy compared to other supporters,and then verifies that the advantages exist in real practice.The second part explains how the conference brand functions as a supporter to the local public diplomacy and why it has the advantages by using the simplified analysis method.By adopting statistics chart analysis as well as correlation test,this part also tries to judge where the driving force of the city's conference brand comes from and what kind of problem the conference may encounter in its future development.The last part of this dissertation tries to make suggestions on how the city can help its conference brand become even more attractive by drawing experiences from top international conference brand such as the World Economic Forum and others.As to the conclusion of the research,first,city's conference brand has advantages in its efficiency,impact,target scope and number of short-term rewards in the process of supporting local public diplomacy.Second,the conference's attraction to its target group mainly comes from the host city rather than the meeting itself.Third,as the city's conference brand may lose its motivation for further development in current system,the local government could try to upgrade the supporter by unleashing its systematic attraction,which will help make the local public diplomacy more influential and fruitful.