Research On National Identity Under The Influence Of Soft Communication

With the deepening of globalization, cultural communication and conflicts make the identity of nation-state confront with new crisis. Every state is ceaselessly seeking for the orientation under both international and domestic background. States need a certain means to definitude and deepen national identity. In related researches involving national identity, people hold different point of views on the forming and influencing factors to national identity, that the three factors can be commonly accepted includes system factor, culture inheritance and ethic group factor. Mass media functional theory states that mass media are equipped with strong force on the formation, maintenance and transformation of social prejudice. Soft communication as a composing part of mass media, not only has the strong force, but also can operate via mass media theory in a subconsciously way. Thereby, we can imagine that a state can take advantage of soft communication to indirectly affect the formation of national identity through system, culture and ethnic group. This paper takes the perspective of that soft communication is an issue of national identity because of the close relationship between soft communication and system, culture along with ethnic group. At the same time soft communication has the characteristics of imperceptible influence, connotation and is close to people, which has great advantage in the process of influencing the evolvement of national identity.Actually, many states has already made use of soft communication to solidify national identity as well as influence the identity of other states, however, there has been little systematic discussion on the issue of soft communication effect on national identity. Therefore, this thesis aims to parse the method and effect of soft communication respectively from the levels of system, culture and ethnic group through summarizing experience on this subject at home and abroad. The paper covers discussions such as analysis on how soft communication discovers the connotative public opinion and conduct supervise on system as well as make use of the characteristic of "safety valve" to release social antagonistic sentiments thus to solidify national identity; how to use soft communication to enrich communication ways and to transform to the excellent platform for culture inheritance, and develop public media education to counteract negative influence on national identity brought by globalization; how the closeness of ethnic group be softened to counteract the problems of conflicts among multi identities generated from strong tendency of propagation. With detailed analysis, deep discussion in this paper, the author hopes to provide some reference advice on solidifying national identity through soft communication to the government.