In politics, soft power is the ability to co-opt rather than coerce. It involves shaping the preferences of others through appeal and attraction. Soft power is non-coercive, using culture, political values, and foreign policies to enact change. In 2012, Joseph Nye of Harvard University explained that with soft power, "the best propaganda is not propaganda", further explaining that during the Information Age, "credibility is the scarcest resource".
In international relations, public diplomacy broadly speaking, is any of the various government-sponsored efforts aimed at communicating directly with foreign publics to establish a dialogue designed to inform and influence with the aim of building support for the state's strategic objectives. These also include propaganda. As the international order has changed over the twentieth century, so has the practice of public diplomacy. Its practitioners use a variety of instruments and methods ranging from personal contact and media interviews to the Internet and educational exchanges.
Cheng Nan-jung was a Taiwanese publisher and pro-democracy activist. He was the founder of the Freedom Era Weekly. He is most known internationally for setting himself on fire in support of freedom of speech.
Propaganda in the Republic of China has been an important tool since its inception with the Xinhai Revolution in 1912. The term xuanchuan can have either a neutral connotation in official government contexts or a pejorative connotation in informal contexts. Some xuanchuan collocations usually refer to "propaganda", others to "publicity", and still others are ambiguous. It also was an important tool in legitimizing the Kuomintang controlled Republic of China government that retreated from Mainland China to Taiwan in 1949.
Giles Scott-Smith is a Dutch-British academic. He is a professor of transnational relations and new diplomatic history at Leiden University and serves as the dean of Leiden University College The Hague.
Nicholas J. Cull is a historian and professor in the Master's in Public Diplomacy program at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. He was the founding director of this program and ran it from 2005 to 2019.
Taiwan Television Enterprise, Ltd., commonly known as TTV and formerly known as Central Television and Voice of Taiwan, is the first terrestrial television station in the Taiwan. It was established on April 28, 1962, and started formally broadcasting later that year on October 10, 1962, as free-to-air. It is the first television company in Taiwan.
The University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) is a sino-foreign cooperative university in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China. It is run in partnership between the University of Nottingham and private Zhejiang Wanli Education Group. All its programmes lead to University of Nottingham degrees.
Xu Lin is a Chinese vice-minister-level official serving on the State Council. She has held the post of Chief Executive and Director of the Confucius Institutes worldwide since 2004. She is Director General of the Hanban, or Chinese National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language.
The Braga incident was a 2014 academic scandal in which Xu Lin, the Director-General of the Hanban and Chief Executive of the Confucius Institute Headquarters ordered her staff to remove pages referring to Taiwanese academic institutions from the published program for the European Association for Chinese Studies July–August conference in Braga, Portugal, claiming the materials were "contrary to Chinese regulations", which The Wall Street Journal described as the "bullying approach to academic freedom". The incident led to renewed criticism of Confucius Institutes.
Steve Tsang is a Hong Kong-born political scientist and historian whose expertise includes politics and governance in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the foreign and security policies of China and Taiwan, and peace and security in East Asia. He is the current Director of the SOAS China Institute at the SOAS University of London.
Katarzyna Emanuela Pisarska is a Polish social entrepreneur, civic activist and academic, specializing in diplomacy and foreign policy.
Roger Woods is a British contemporary historian who specialises on 20th-century German political history.
Andreas Martin Fulda is a German political scientist, sinologist, sociologist, and an expert on China–EU relations. He is currently an associate professor of politics at the University of Nottingham and a senior fellow at the University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute and China Policy Institute of this university. Fulda is a foreign affair advisor of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC). He had lived and worked in Mainland China and Taiwan as a staff of the China Association for NGO Cooperation (CANGO) for eight years. Fulda frequently comments on current Chinese affairs in the media and he is a fierce critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Fulda argues that German universities do not need to rely on Confucius Institutes to organise events on China. His book The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong (2020) led to a smear campaign against him. Andreas Fulda sharply criticizes German chancellor Olaf Scholz's visit to China.
Xu Yafen is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) politician and university administrator. She is a member of the 11th CCP Conference of Zhejiang Province and chair of the board of the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, a partnership with the British University of Nottingham, and chair of the Chinese Zhejiang Wanli University. Xu is also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University and a research fellow at the Human Science Institute of the Chinese Academy of Management Science. In 2017 she was honoured by the University of Nottingham, who named a building at their Jubilee Campus after her.
Gregory J. Moore is an American political scientist specializing in international relations, international security and Chinese politics and foreign policy. He is currently Stanton Fellow at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO. Prior to that he was a professor of global studies and politics at Colorado Christian University, and taught political science and international relations at universities in China such as Zhejiang University and University of Nottingham Ningbo for roughly a decade.
Jonathan Sullivan is a British political scientist and Sinologist who researches political communications in China, Taiwan and other East Asian contexts, China's Internet and cyber-nationalism, studies of the Confucius Institutes, and China's politics of celebrity culture, hip hop and football.
Richard James Aldrich is a British political scientist and a historian of espionage who has written intensively about intelligence and security communities.
Ming-Yeh Tsai Rawnsley is a Taiwanese media scholar, writer, and former journalist and TV screenwriter. Since 2013, she has been a Research Associate at Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS University of London. She is also Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham (2014–present), Research Fellow at the European Research Centre on Contemporary Taiwan (ERCCT), University of Tübingen (2015–present), and Research Associate at Academia Sinica, Taiwan (2018–present). M-Y T. Rawnsley is the Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Taiwan Studies and associate editor of East Asian Journal of Popular Culture (2013–present).
International Journal of Taiwan Studies (IJTS) is a hybrid open access biannual peer-reviewed academic journal in English hosting by the Centre of Taiwan Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. This journal covers all aspects of Taiwan Studies, including social sciences, Taiwanese art, Taiwanese literature, culture of Taiwan, history of Taiwan and humanities, and interdisciplinary topics. It is published by Brill Publishers and cosponsored by Academia Sinica and the European Association of Taiwan Studies. Its Editor-in-Chief is Ming-Yeh Rawnsley. It is established in 2018 and abstracted and indexed by Scopus.
