IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/rsrsxx/v8y2021i1p162-177.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Understanding the soft power of China’s Belt and Road Initiative through a discourse analysis in Europe

Author

Listed:
  • Julie T. Miao

Abstract

Taking a spatially sensitive approach to evaluating China’s quest of soft power, this paper conducted a media discourse analysis of European countries’ perceptions of China’s growing international influence in general, and its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in particular. Preliminary analysis reveals regional diversity in media coverage of the BRI that was partially caused by a country’s position as a ‘discourse leader’, ‘discourse responder’ or ‘discourse follower’. In terms of the contents, this paper noticed a huge discrepancy among the European countries towards the potential impacts of the BRI and China’s rise in international affairs, and recorded a shift from a rather positive to a cautious attitude among the European Union’s leaders. It is suggested that China’s spatially blind approach to using soft power to promote BRI in Europe may be partly to blame for its limited success so far.

Suggested Citation

  • Julie T. Miao, 2021. "Understanding the soft power of China’s Belt and Road Initiative through a discourse analysis in Europe," Regional Studies, Regional Science, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 8(1), pages 162-177, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:rsrsxx:v:8:y:2021:i:1:p:162-177
    DOI: 10.1080/21681376.2021.1921612
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/21681376.2021.1921612
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/21681376.2021.1921612?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fredrik Sjöholm, 2023. "The Belt and Road Initiative: Economic Causes and Effects," Asian Economic Papers, MIT Press, vol. 22(1), pages 62-81, Winter/Sp.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:rsrsxx:v:8:y:2021:i:1:p:162-177. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/rsrs .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.