The Research On Discourse Power In Chinese International Maritime Affairs

A nation’s discourse power in international marine affairs means by integrating thenation’s own idea into global circumstances to gain maximized positiveacknowledgements of members of the international community, the ability to constructinternational rules and order through discourse channels in specific fields of marineaffairs such as “the propositions of different countries and development of maritimeinternational law”,“maritime, navigation and maritime safety”,“marine environments”,“marine science and technology”,“international cooperation and the coordination”.Since UN Convention on the Law of the Sea came into effect, while negotiation,cooperation and consultation has replaced the role of traditional conquering as themain approach to solve maritime dispute, discourse power instead of military powerhas also become a focus of concern of maritime countries.Since reform and opening up, China has greatly improved its discourse power bystrengthening the engagement in international maritime affairs, and taking a huge stepforward in the quality of the dissemination rhetoric, the participation and theconstruction of the speaking platform. However, both China’s status and ability ininternational marine affairs do not match with each other, so discourse power of Chinais still not powerful enough. There are five reasons for this situation: the singlecharacter and the fuzzy localization of the discourse communication subject; the lowquality of the discourse content, lacking sufficient official interpretations and academicstudy; the weak ability of the discourse communication making voices from Chinahard to be heard in global community; the poor pertinence in communication by theignorance of effect study; the suppression of western marine powers due to theconflicts of ideologies and states’ interests.Traditional western marine countries has long before emphasized on improvingdiscourse power in international maritime affairs to protect their maritime rights inwhich case has large amounts of experience for China, including five aspects: the clear self identification of the subject; the proactive motivation of the subject; attractingmultiple subjects’ participation; high quality of discourse content; powerful ability ofparticipation in the speaking platform.Aming at current problems in Chinese discourse power in international marine affairs,from the experience of western maritime powers, the author proposes strategies asbelow: improving Chinese own quality of maritime discourse, focusing on theimprovements of discourse attraction and appeal; focusing on constructing multiplesubject in international maritime discourse, cultivating the development of maritimeNGOs, encouraging participation of international maritime affairs on the basis ofclarifying communication subjects, realizing the diversification of communicationsubjects; enriching ways of discourse transmission, taking care of the relations withvarious maritime countries properly, strengthening the international communication ofmaritime discourse among governments, also we should empower communicationability on international speaking platform. Meanwhile, we should pursue maritimediplomatic engagements to intensify the transmission of international marine discoursein civil society. We should take all our forces into the construction of internationalspeaking platform on such basis.