Analyse The Chinese Government Of "China's International Liability" External Position Convincing

Since Zoellick, former US Deputy Secretary of State, called China a"stakeholder" in2005, the international community, mainly the western countries,have continuously asked China to shoulder more international responsibilities.Properly dealing with this issue requires the Chinese government to make apersuasive foreign declaration on this issue to win more diplomatic initiative, savediplomatic cost, and improve the foreign environment of China. This paper attemptsto carry on statistical analysis to observe the persuasion of China’s foreigndeclaration，with Carl I. Hovland’s Persuasion Theory as the theoretical basis, and the2006-2012records of foreign declaration on the issue of “China’s internationalresponsibility” in the website of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of PRC as study samples.According to statistics and analysis, although, China’s persuasion on this issue hasincreased during2006-2012and there have been outstanding samples of declaration,the overall persuasion is weak and the improvement of persuasion is also veryunstable and slow. This paper deems that, it’s difficult to improve China’s persuasionon this issue, but there are possibilities and large space for improvement.According to Hovland’s Persuasion Theory, the Communicator Factors, theAudience Factors and the Information factors are important to the improvement ofpersuasion, and the Information factors are the most vital ones. Information factorsinclude “Organization of Arguments, Reason and Emotion, Overt Expression andImplication, Positive and Negative Arguments, and Fear-Arousing Appeals”. Theapplication of those factors is close to the persuasion. Statistics show that in itsforeign declaration, the Chinese government fails to apply the Information factorswell, especially the factors of “Reason and Emotion, Positive and NegativeArguments, and Fear-Arousing Appeals”. This paper deems that the reasons forirrational use of the Information Factors are the impact of the document routines indomestic propaganda, the impact of the foreign policy of “keeping low profile” in thenew era, and the impact of traditional concepts of communication.