Intended, Mediated and Received Frames

This book has investigated the role of China's international broadcasting in the country's overall soft power strategy. With CCTV NEWS and China– Australia relations as a case, the study takes into consideration the two ends and three stages in the process of framing China in the context of a rising China and the imbalance of information flow. It provides a humble attempt to develop a communicative approach to analysing soft power.

Intended frames

First, the book addresses China's intended images in the framing process. China's intended frames to the world have been examined at two levels: at the first level, the Chinese public diplomacy elites’ frames of domains of societal activity where society is able to demonstrate virtuosity that can accumulate soft power strength – economy, culture and science and technology, and the controversial domain of the political system – were examined; at the second level, the state perspective was examined through the case study of the framing on BRI in state documents. It was based on the assumption that public diplomacy plays an important role in framing a country's information, image in the context of noopolitik, and will project soft power. As discovered in the interviews with Australian participants, this level of framing did have some congruence with an individual's framing of specific issues.

The findings show that among public diplomacy elites, the framing of China was generally complicated, mirroring the current situation of China which is at the junction of integrating to the world stage while rapidly ascending in status. The complexity in public diplomacy elites’ frames was also reflected in their perceptions of the selected fields of economy, culture, political system and science and technology. Judgements on the various themes and diverse attitudes towards their relevance to public diplomacy elites arose from the interviews, but there was no consensual position on any single theme. For each frame, both positive and negative themes were identified. However, underpinning the various attitudes was the fact that all the participants were positioning themselves to consider the projection of China's image based on China's current situation and to try to understand the outward oriented information/ image- delivery questions.