Gary Rawnsley

• Aberystwyth University

Soft power is one of the most familiar, yet misunderstood concepts in international relations. It is often used to describe cultural attraction and familiarity with a place in the belief that ‘to know us is to love us’. However, this paper calls for a reappraisal of soft power to focus more on political culture and behaviour – the power of example....

International broadcasting remains a key activity in public diplomacy. In this Introduction I discuss how international broadcasting has long been associated with the projection of foreign policy interests, from an instrument of empire building in the 1920s and 1930s, through the Cold War and beyond. In particular, the Introduction evaluates how mo...

China and Russia have devoted significant resources to developing their international broadcasting capacity as an instrument of public diplomacy. Focusing on CCTV-N (China) and RT (Russia), this article discusses the strategies each has developed to communicate with international audiences and further the foreign policy ambitions of policy makers i...

The study of Chinese media is a field that is growing and evolving at an exponential rate. Not only are the Chinese media a fascinating subject for analysis in their own right, but they also offer scholars and students a window to observe multi-directional flows of information, culture and communications within the contexts of globalization and reg...

This paper analyses how Taiwan exercises “soft power” and uses public diplomacy to engage with the international community, and to compensate for the absence of formal diplomatic relations with major powers. The research suggests that Taiwan's strategies of international engagement are constrained by its external and internal political environments...

This paper analyses how Taiwan exercises ?soft power? and uses public diplomacy to engage with the international community, and to compensate for the absence of formal diplomatic relations with major powers. The research suggests that Taiwan?s strategies of international engagement are constrained by its external and internal political environments...

This paper compares the soft power capital and public diplomacy strategies of Taiwan and the People's Republic of China. The premise is that Taiwan's international status and the absence of formal diplomatic recognition by major powers are a serious constraint on Taiwan's ability engage in meaningful outreach with the global community. The focus of...

Investigative Journalism in China: Eight Cases in Chinese Watchdog Journalism. Edited by BandurskiDavid and HalaMartin. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010. vi, 184 pp. $50.00 (cloth); $28.00 (paper). - Volume 71 Issue 2 - Gary D. Rawnsley

The media are essential for sustaining the vitality of democratic institutions, processes and cultures. They facilitate political interest, mobilization and participation, provide channels for both vertical and horizontal political communication, and support processes of transparency and accountability. The media’s ability to connect with, and poss...

The film Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou and released in 2002, is widely regarded as the first globally successful indigenous Chinese blockbuster. A big expensive film with multiple stars, spectacular scenery, and astonishing action sequences, it touched on key questions of Chinese culture, nation and politics, and was both a domestic sensation and a...

This article assesses the present state of political communications in Taiwan through a close analysis of the perceived relationship between journalists and politicians. This relationship is examined within the context of media commercialization. Based on the assumption that in cultures of democratic political communication the interaction between...

Celebrity in China. Edited by EdwardsLouise and JeffreysElaine. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010. xi, 286 pp. $25.00 (paper). - Volume 70 Issue 2 - Gary D. Rawnsley

The Chinese entered the Korean War one year after the creation of the People’s Republic of China. Given the considerable economic, social and political problems facing the new state after decades of foreign occupation and civil war, how did the new Communist Government of China persuade both the people and the military to intervene in a foreign war...

This chapter examines the role of the media in processes of democratization. It considers the media’s political, economic, and social environment both in their domestic and international contexts. It also explains how new communications technologies have made it increasingly difficult for authoritarian regimes to hermetically seal their borders to...

Political Communication and Democracy provides a wide-ranging and inclusive study of political communications that uses current political events and debates to illustrate its arguments. Looking beyond the narrow view that political communication concerns only the media and spin doctors, Gary Rawnsley examines the subject in its myriad forms: politi...

This article considers the operational utility of computer-based information warfare across the Taiwan Strait. It reviews the capacity of both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan to wage offensive and defensive information warfare, and acknowledges that both sides have invested and continue to invest considerable amounts of resources into dev...

This paper analyses the development of public television in Taiwan. It argues that media liberalisation and political democratisation were, on their own, insufficient conditions to encourage the growth of media with links to civil society. Democratisation in Taiwan was essentially an elite-driven process (elites in power and in opposition); in turn...

Shortly after delivering this speech in 1993, Rupert Murdoch decided to pull BBC World Service Television from the Star network’s AsiaSatl, depriving audiences in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong access to BBC programming. At the same time, Murdoch invested US$5.4 million into Renmin Ribao (The People’s Daily), the official newspaper of the Chinese Comm...

One way we can begin to appreciate the role and importance of political communication is by examining the way that it has been discussed in, and developed by, political theory. This provides the foundation for our understanding of how different political systems have used and abused communication, but more importantly, it undermines the idea that p...

So far, this book has addressed the allegation that popular participation and interest in politics are declining in representative liberal-democracies. We have also seen how a growing sense of powerlessness and dissatisfaction with political parties has developed alongside an extraordinary increase in extra-parliamentary activity that might channel...

To appreciate the importance of public opinion in modern democratic politics, it is not enough merely to understand what it is and how it is formed. We must also consider the aggregation of public opinion and some of the means of expressing it. After all, the issue is not so much what public opinion is, but rather why and how it should be communica...

The titles of some recently published books say it all: Why People Don’t Trust Government (1997); Disaffected Democracies (1999); What is it About Government that Americans Dislike? (2001). The ancients would shudder at the very thought: democracy in crisis? Surely not. However, there is a growing consensus that citizens of all democratic political...

The theoretical basis for understanding political communication is clearly valuable; all the political theorists who have given the issue any consideration agree that communication has, to varying degrees, a function in political development and processes. Moreover, there is an underlying consensus that communication does allow for popular particip...

Writing in 1993, Harry Rheingold in the quotation above captures the idealism that pervades discussion of the social and political impact of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), especially the Internet. Their widespread use and potential have suggested nothing less than a revolution in political communication: their speed, their promise o...

Media reform is a valuable indicator of democratisation. It provides an abundance of information about the levels of freedom, tolerance, social justice and pluralism within a political system. This article reviews the changes in the Taiwanese media that have occurred since the lifting of martial law in 1987 and considers how the media are faring at...

The situation of the media is a valuable indicator of democratization. It provides extensive information on the levels of freedom, tolerance, social justice and pluralism within a political system. This article reviews the changes in the Taiwanese media since the repeal of martial law in 1987, and provides an overview of the situation at the beginn...

This article analyses trends in election campaigning in Taiwan with particular reference to the landmark 2000 presidential election, when the Kuomintang's 50-year monopoly on power finally ended. It examines the growing professionalism in election campaigning that stands alongside, and is shaped by, the systemic and institutional features of Taiwan...

This book examines the role played by political communications, including media of all kinds - journalism, television, and film - in defining and shaping identity in Greater China; China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas Chinese. In the context of increasing cross-border interactions of people, investment and commercial products between the component...

1. Introduction Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley 2. The Meaning and Significance of Greater China John F. Copper Part One: The People's Republic of China 3. Peddling Party Ideology for a Profit: Media and the Rise of Chinese Nationalism in the 1990s Yu Huang and Chin-Chuan Lee 4. Modern Political Communication in China Neil Renwick and Qin...

The objective of this research is to reconsider Chiang Kai-shek?s responsibility in causing and resolving the 28 February 1947 Incident (2-28) using a range of the new archive material now available to historians in Taiwan and to provide our own interpretation of the secondary literature on the Incident. Moreover, we are concerned with reintroducin...

The role and responsibility of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in the 28th February 1947 Incident (2-28) has always been viewed as a sensitive issue. Several factors have contributed to this: one is the hesitation in ascribing blame for such atrocities to the man still considered by many as the saviour of Taiwan, if not China. In fact, a minor school...

By examining the way the ruling Nationalist Party (KMT) dominated Taiwan?s three mainstream television stations before the introduction of political reform in the mid-1980s, the book provides an insightful investigation of how the media can be used as an instrument of both political power and emancipation. This new approach challenges many accepted...

Superimposed on the labyrinthine organization detailed in the last chapter, there exists yet another layer that comprises the assorted media outlets used to promote the ROC to an international audience. These are all official channels, responsible to the GIO and therefore to the Executive Yuan. By engaging in both propaganda and media diplomacy (de...

The Republic of China was established by the Nationalist (Kuomintang or KMT) government in Nanking in 1912, but was forced to relocate to the island province of Taiwan in 1949 after the victory of the Communists in the Chinese civil war. The KMT viewed the move as temporary, maintaining that it alone was the legitimate government of all China. It w...

In 1952, H. Maclear Bate wrote, ‘if any Government ever lacked an adequate propaganda organisation, it is Chiang Kai-shek’s … a clever propagandist would find an inexhaustible fund of material in Formosa which could be capitalised’, and he concluded by observing, ‘Never has so little been done with so much.’2 This chapter and the next will confront...

As of December 1996, the Republic of China on Taiwan enjoyed formal diplomatic relations with 32 other states. By April 1998, the number had fallen to 28 (the details follow this chapter). The largest and most important was South Africa which had always maintained consular relations with Taipei, and upgraded its representation to ambassadorial leve...

In 1952, an American journalist stationed in Taiwan, H. Maclear Bate wrote, 'if any Government ever lacked an adequate propaganda organisation, it is Chiang Kai-shek's. ... a clever propagandist he said, would find an inexhaustible fund of material in Formosa (Taiwan) which could be capitalized', and he concluded by observing how 'Never has so litt...

This volume brings together for the first time the work of leading British and American scholars on Cold War propaganda in the 1950s. Approaching the subject from a variety of backgrounds and subject areas, the contributors discuss how the discourse, culture and diplomacy of the Cold War were determined by a recognition that propaganda provided the...

This article explores how China's military exercises influenced the campaigns of the candidates in Taiwan's first presidential election in March 1996. It draws on our understanding of election campaigning in the West to demonstrate how candidates responded to (1) the advantages of incumbency; (2) the requirements of the modern mass media; (3) negat...

The showdown over Cuba, together with the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, produced a refreshing new element of stability within the international system; the Cold War in Europe had reached an impasse, and each side was now more certain than ever of its relations with the other.

Throughout 1957, the repercussions stemming from the coincidence of the Suez crisis and the Hungarian uprising continued to make western statesmen nervous. Thus the launch of the first man-made satellite by the Russians on 4 October 1957 was an added concern, although American propaganda desperately played down its significance. Sputnik, as the sat...

The Suez crisis of 1956 marked the most serious challenge to British interests since the conclusion of the Second World War. It was characterised by a series of events shrouded in secrecy and clouded by disinformation, a foreign policy scarred by the efforts of a complicated interstate collaboration, and fatal military and diplomatic blundering whi...

While Britain was struggling to manage the Suez crisis and come to terms with its weakened status in international affairs, Eastern Europe was in ferment. The 1956 Hungarian uprising in particular had enormous implications for western foreign policy and for international radio broadcasting. Miklos Molnar has written that ‘never before had a medium...

The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 affords an excellent opportunity to scrutinise alliance relationships during the most critical phases of international history. The recently declassified documents at the Public Records Office suggest that although Britain's role in the crisis was limited to consultation with the United States and did not actively p...

La situation des médias constitue un indicateur précieux de la démocratisation. Elle fournit de nombreuses informations sur les niveaux de liberté, de tolérance, de justice sociale et de pluralisme dans un système politique. Cet article passe en revue les changements intervenus dans les médias taiwanais depuis l’abrogation de la loi martiale en 198...