"Charm offensive" Revisited: China's Soft Power Resources and Its National Image

Abstract

This thesis investigates how China's soft power resources influence its national image, controlling the impact of its hard power resources. It operationalizes China's soft power resources as its culture, political values and foreign policy, and operationalizes China's hard power resources as military and economic strength. Foreign country's impression of China is operationalized as China's national image. The regression models indicate that China's national image is influenced by both its hard power and soft power resources. China's soft power resources do work to affect its image, although in a lesser degree compared to its hard power resources. Not all the power resources could transfer to the expected outcome. It concludes with some policy implications for China's image building.