Abstract
In China today, the idea of “soft power” has become important in various realms of society. We analyze the nexus between climate change and soft power with specific emphasis on China. First, we will discuss the concept of soft power, its role in the Chinese context, and the reasons why China has had difficulties to gain soft power up to now. Second, we lay out how international climate change politics are an important arena in which soft power can be won and how the issue has gained importance in China. In a third step, we discuss how the current political environment, in which the US government has changed its stance on climate change and international climate politics, impacts China. Our thesis is that the current political situation represents a “window of opportunity” for China to expand its soft power substantially both in degree and scope. In line with this thesis, so far, China has reacted swiftly after the election of US president Donald Trump and aims to present itself as the future climate leader.
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Notes
In addition, authoritarian countries such as Russia or China advance their own, potentially politically motivated interpretations of the concept in ways that conform to their foreign and domestic policy interests (Edney 2012).
The CKNI database 9305 journals and other forms of academic publications such as dissertations or proceeding. The data was exported and then analysed and visualized in R. Mingjiang (2008) and Wang and Lu (2008) also analysed in their articles the popularity of the concept with data from the CNKI database. We include an updated version of this analysis in our article.
The database covers more than 630 national and local Chinese newspapers. We used the analytics index tool of the CNKI database. The data was exported and then analysed and visualized in R.
Only articles were counted that fully mentioned the search term.
Such rankings have to be taken with a grain of salt because they reduce soft power as a non-tangible element of international relations to a few measurable indicators. Also the weighting of the indicators (e.g. cultural aspects have a lower weight than social media use of head of states) shows that the creators of the ranking are mostly interested “public relation” parts of soft power.
The name “South China Sea” is highly contested. Each country in the area has its own name for the sea.
All three search terms were used together in order to compare the popularity. The absolute search volume is not shown. However, we can compare the volume of the three keywords to each other.
The increased environmental awareness of the Chinese public is perfectly illustrated by the documentary “Under the Dome”, produced by former journalist Chai Jing. When she released her documentary in Spring 2015 on the Chinese Internet, the video went viral with over 100 million views in the first 24 h Yang (2015).
All three search terms were used together in order to compare the popularity. Google trends does not indicate the absolute search volume. However, the highest peak in a time series of all search terms together gets the value 100 and all other values are calculated in comparison to this peak. In our case this makes sense as we want to compare different issues. The data was exported and then analysed and visualized in R.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the two anonymous reviewers as well as Marko Kovic for their substantial feedback. Our article is based on a short blog post written by Adrian Rauchfleisch in January 2017: https://zipar.org/current-events/climate-change-and-chinas-window-of-opportunity-to-gain-soft-power/.
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Rauchfleisch, A., Schäfer, M.S. Climate change politics and the role of China: a window of opportunity to gain soft power?. Int. Commun. Chin. Cult 5, 39–59 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-018-0114-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-018-0114-9