CHINA GLOBAL TELEVISION NETWORK: CHINA IN THE SPECTRUM OF POWER

Abstract

The rise of China has seen the country play a bigger role in the global economy, raising suspicion among the Western world in response to China’s rapid economic dominance. One of the dominant discourses regarding China’s rise is the “China Threat Theory,” which essentializes China’s rise as a military and economic threat to global stability, peace and humanity, with intentions of toppling the global order and its international norms of liberty, freedom and democracy. Another dominant discourse in response to this is “China’s Peaceful Rise”, which essentialises China’s rise as one that seeks peace, stability, economic integration and multilateralism, void of hegemonic ambitions nor a desire to topple the global order and international norms. In this thesis, I will hence use the state-owned English media outlet Chinese Global Television Network (CGTN) as a case study to examine the tensions between these two images with a particular focus on the way in which China utilizes CGTN's COVID-19 coverage to soften its image and create a positive public perception of its rise to audiences outside China. I contend, however, that the idea of soft power is rather limited in conceptualizing CGTN's coverage of the vaccines and the underlying rise of China. Therefore, I propose the analytic framework of the spectrum of power, with the integration of soft, sharp, and hard power lenses to rethink the rise of China. I argue that doing so allows for a greater understanding of China’s rise beyond dominant discourses of “China Threat Theory” and “China’s Peaceful Rise.”