One Rising China, Multiple Interpretations: China's 60th anniversary celebration through the lens of the world's printed media
What does a rising China mean to the world? While some countries take China as a salient threat, others regard China as their role model for development and governance. However, limited research has offered a systematic comparative analysis in this regard. China's spectacular celebration of its 60th anniversary uniquely showcased its increasing military might, mounting economic wealth and carefully-maintained mass support. Taking advantage of simultaneous worldwide news coverage of this all-in-one event, we scrutinize how different societies responded to a rising China. We find significant variance in the news coverage from 42 top printed media in 21 sampled societies. Moreover, these societies' political features affect their newspapers' reporting styles the most. This analysis significantly enriches our understanding of the rise of China.
China’s Power from a Chinese Perspective (I): A Developing Country versus a Great Power
China’s self-image of its power has evolved from a developing country after the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s to a great power after the global financial crisis in 2008. Chinese leaders have not defined developing country versus great power in terms of absolute economic or military capacities. Instead, they have taken a structural realist approach to define power in relative terms as the general capacity of a state to influence the behavior of others or as the ability to get others to do what they otherwise would not do. In the structural realist image of international relations, the state is under imperatives to increase, decrease, maintain, or use the capacity, depending on whether it views the trend in the international balance of power or its own strength vis-a-vis its adversaries as favorable or unfavorable. Chinese leaders are always sensitive to liliang duibi (力量对比 balance of forces) in the world. “Chinese leaders are in essence realists. Their making of Chinese foreign policy often starts from a careful assessment of China’s relative power in the world.”1 In this case, when Chinese leaders identify China as a “developing country,” they actually talk about China’s relative weak power position in comparison with the United States and other great powers as well as some of its neighbors. When they identify China in term of great power, China, in their mind, has built more or less equal capacity of the United States and other great powers and can influence their behavior and get the weak neighbors to do what they otherwise would not do.
Confucianism and Democratic Values in Three Chinese Societies
Since the third wave of democratization reached East Asia in the 1990s, whether the new democracies of East Asia could consolidate their democracies has been an issue of interest. While proponents of Asian values pointed to the cultural specificity of Confucian political culture and argued that democratic values may not truly take root in East Asia, proponents of modernization theory saw democratic values as the natural outcome of economic development. This study aims to ground this debate in an empirical study of Confucian and democratic value orientations in three Chinese societies: mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. We develop indices based on survey research measuring Confucian and democratic values, and use these to analyze their distribution across the three Chinese societies. We also use them in conjunction with a multivariate analysis to uncover the causal structural relationship between Confucian values and democratic values. Our results show that Confucian values have a negative influence on democratic values and vice versa, but also show that modernization is a strong contributor to democratic consciousness. There are grounds for optimism for the future of democracy in Chinese societies, as education has an important role in the development of democratic consciousness, and these will continue to dampen Confucian values in line with modernization.