Scholarly record

FOREIGN POLICY AND STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION: STRATEGIC MESSAGES IN SPEECHES OF PRESIDENT OF THE PRC XI JINPING

M. Daugulis

Abstract

Strategic communication and foreign policy are fields interlacing with high intense in latest years. Reasons behind this phenomenon are technological possibilities to spread the message, and, nevertheless, foreign policy visibility via open and active international society. The same time actors and agents playing in the foreign policy field have various interests. Such effects as informational noise, disinformation, propaganda, and provocation (under circumstances of hybrid-warfare) largely puzzles global informational field. Under such conditions even more grows role of particular speeches of world leaders, where they use possibility to address both international and national level of society. Xi Jinping, the President of the People's Republic of China, continues the pattern created by previous President of the PRC Hu Jintao - to outline China's strategic prospects and views on the international order and foreign policy in precisely addressed speeches. Hu Jintao firstly outlined, so called, China's Dream and peaceful development concept in 2004. In 2018 Xi Jinping restarts those concepts and draws new strategical aims in vision on China's development, its place in international order and geopolitical prospects. In this particular article author analyses strategical messages included in speeches of Xi Jinping, more precisely on those, which can be marked as a novelty comparing with previous strategical concepts of China. As a metatheoretical framework for article serves post-positivist approach - constructivism according to interpretations of Nicholas Onuf and his followers. Within empirical data author includes speeches of Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping on international order and foreign policy issues. Nevertheless on theoretical level analysts of China's strategic foreign policy are taken under consideration. From chronological perspective and dynamics of China's foreign policy since Hu Jintao, research issue is precisely formulated by Barry Buzan with his question – is peaceful rise of China possible by definition. B.Buzan sticks to the label peaceful rise because, from his perspective it is a more accurate statement of the issues than the more anodyne and diplomatic peaceful development which is dominated in official Chinese discourse. From B.Buzan's perspective peaceful rise includes concept of a growing power which is able to make both absolute and relative gains in both its material and its status positions, in relation to the other powers in the international system, and to do so without precipitating major hostilities between itself and either its neighbours or other major powers.[1] Because of peaceful development also China's Dream is a concept with peaceful nature in the core, at least from China's perspective. Nevertheless, shifts of messages in Xi Jinping's presidency, reformulating China's Dream (or strategic purposes), allows to look at concept of peacefulness for the baseline for comparison or characterization of dynamics of strategic messages of China. Scientific method used in the particular article is qualitative - discourse analysis. This is the reason why author analyses Xi Jinping's strategical messages from deviation perspective – what are novelties in Xi Jinping's speeches that differs from Hu Jintao's peaceful development conditions.

Publication details

Back to publication list