The Empirical Study On Iran’s State Image

With tlie advance of globalization, the interaction of theinternational community is increasingly close. As an extremelyimportant intangible asset of the country, state image is animportant manifestation of the country’s soft power. Positive stateimage contributes to a country’s access to SnternationaB trust,promote international cooperation, and create a favorable externalenvironment for peaceful dev@lopmersta If contributes to theachievement of strategy both home and abroad, and it means higherreliability and greater voice in international community, In addition,it will help to improve the public’s national confidence and cohesion.To comply with the development tendency of the time, everycountry pays more and more attention to shape and optimize theirstate image.8n China, the study of state image is an emergingsubject which originated in the late1990s. The state image includesthree status: actual image, media image, and cognitive image.This paper aims to analyze the contemporary Iran’s state imagein China, which based on the related theoretical study andcombined with social investigation. Using the media sociologytheory and content analysis to analyze the Iran’s state image whichwas built by China’s mainstream media; using questionnaires gets the Iran’s image in Chinese people’s awareness; and analyze theIran’s image in eyes of Chinese Internet users by observation. Thenthrough the statistical analysis of the obtained data, it will helps toform reasons for such state image, and the hardware basis of theimage formation, in other words, the objective existence of thestate(include economic, political, culture, etc) should be studiedand analyzed.In contemporary, Iran have been caught much attention for itsnuclear issue and the issue of petroleum. In Western media reports,Iran is a country that oppressive, closed, extreme and terroristic, atthe same time, it is rogue state and axis of evil. Based on the surveyand analysis of Iran’s state image, this paper holds this view:western countries and their media reported Iran from their owninterests, and there are bias and misleading when western mediareported the country which is quite different from them in ideology.Iran just looks like "the demonized China". That is to say, there are"misunderstanding" and "distorted" to Iran’s image in westerncountries.The paper can be divided into five parts: The first part aims toexplains the purpose and significance of this study, introduces thetheoretical results about the state image both home and abroad,and explain the theoretical perspective; the second part explainsthe methods and ideas of this study, then proposed the hypothesis;the third and fourth part, summed up Iran’s state image in Chinathrough the description and analysis to the survey obtained data;The fifth part, come to a conclusion and verify the hypothesis, thenthrow out some targeted suggestion on the basis of the conclusions and China’s actual situation, for the purpose of providing somereferences for optimizing China’s state image.