China's Crafted National Image In Pakistan Through Public Diplomacy Practices

Public diplomacy is practiced to interact with foreign publics with the intention to bring about a positive attitude towards its ideals,culture,institutions,goals and policies and it is carried out in full sight of media and public through state and non-state actors.One of the important reasons is to captivate in public diplomacy is the desire to be noticed in a positive manner and in this regard,China seeks understanding for its political system and policies and thus wants to project its desirable image.This thesis studies the public diplomacy practices of Chinese state and non-state actors which shaped the national image of China in Pakistan.The focus of this study is on the content analysis of the news media specifically of Pakistan that covered the diplomacy practices of China during the past eleven years(2008-2018)in addition to its projection of the Chinese national image in diverse perspectives with different attitudes(such as positive,negative and neutral).In total,2210 articles(1105 from The Nation and 1105 from the Dawn)were studied and the data was fed manually to the MS Excel sheet for further analysis.In addition,this study is inspired by the political aspect of the Bouldsing's theory "Organic theory of knowledge" which states that"politics is a process of image formation under the spur of messages transferred by different networks of communication".With regards to this theory,public diplomacy practices of China in Pakistan were studied,as Chinese actors have been active in conducting different diplomatic activities which resulted in their national image formation.Chinese national image was divided into five different categories such as political,economic,social,cultural and technological,based on the diplomacy practices in these areas.The results show that the Chinese national image in these five areas was projected highly positive which came into being as a result of Chinese state and non-state actors' diplomacy practices.Neutral and negative projections were found to be much lower against these diplomacy practices.Interesting results were found in cultural diplomacy that none of the diplomacy practices were portrayed negative.Further,it was found that the overall contributions of state actors were higher than that of non-state actors with exception to social diplomacy and its image projection.Different trends were recorded in different years of the national image while the overall image was found to be "Economic" which was due to the peak number of economic activities after the initiation of CPEC project.This mega project opened numerous venues for trade and investment opportunities for both countries,which were highly viewed favorable in Pakistan.CPEC's contribution was found in all major sectors of Pakistan which the newspapers covered and projected it highly positive.Economic image is followed by political and technological images in addition to cultural and social images which were based on the number and intensity of diplomacy practices in these areas.Despite the fact that Chinese image was projected highly favorable,still there is need of further development in social and cultural areas of diplomacy.