National Behavior And National Image Construction

Globalization has made the distance shorter between average individuals as well as countries. That brings a drastic change to the definition of diplomacy, a contact that people have with the outside world. There are more individuals, more contents and more flexibility involved. The paper aims at a specific behavior as we call "sub-national diplomacy", which means a city’s involvement in diplomacy-related activities. The paper also focuses on how a city can promote its image and interact with the mass communication outlets.A city becomes a defacto international body by means of getting authorization from its mother country, interacting with other international bodies and exercising its global influence. And that kind of international body has nothing to do with sovereign issues but economic and social affairs instead. And the partners involved in "sub-national diplomacy" are also mostly such international bodies. So far, major international city’s sub-national diplomacy has made up a big part in the national diplomacy.A city’s image also makes up a part of a country’s image. Any city image can, to some extent, reflect a country’s image, especially that of an international city. The city image involves factor including economy, government and citizens. Led by a government, a city can take various approaches to affect international audience to promote its image. And that’s exactly how a city government can do in terms of global communication, with media communication a most important way.The paper takes Shanghai as an example to demonstrate the viewpoints mentioned above. Over the past30years of reform and opening up, Shanghai has seen a faster growth in internationalization, and has basically become an international city. And ever since the end of Qing Dynasty at the beginning of the last century, Shanghai has always been a pioneer in terms of building its international image and fame. Such achievements have been even more obvious over the past three decades. That can be reflected via the successful holding of international events and a mature press release mechanism for overseas media outlets to better inform the world public of Shanghai and China. The paper looks back at how Shanghai has taken good advantage of media to promote its international image and made analysis based on all these media interaction.The paper also introduces three examples. They involve the development of Shanghai’s foreigner-oriented media’s development and effect, major overseas media’s coverage about Shanghai, and foreigners’ view of Shanghai’s city image. They enable us to see more clearly the status, the achievement as well as the shortcoming of Shanghai’s use of media to promote its global image. The paper tries to conclude with experience and lessons from these examples and provide advice for such activities in the future.