Last week I attended the Reputation Institute’s 12th annual conference, held this year in Beijing. My presentation focused on China’s public diplomacy strategy in Japan.

As everyone knows, China-Japan relations have hardly been smooth in the past and at the moment there appears to be a gap opening up between increasingly positive relations at the political/business level on the one hand, and media polls indicating rising levels of mutual animosity amongst the general publics in the two countries on the other hand. I would be extremely wary, however, of such media polls. Often they are driven by newspapers’ own political agenda; the timing of the surveys can create misleading results; the phrasing of the questions can produce biased responses; and the editorial/journalist analysis of the findings can be misleading. In other words, all the potential manipulation inherent in any type of survey research comes into play.

While waiting at the departure lounge of Beijing’s shiny new Terminal 3 for my flight back to Tokyo, I saw on one of the TV screens a great example of China’s internal nation branding. It has been widely reported in the western media that China’s ruling Communist Party has gained much respect from the Chinese people due to its rapid and determined response to the terrible earthquake disaster that recently occured. The army has been rapidly mobilised in the earthquake relief effort and prime minister Wen Jiabao has been praised for his personal dedication to the relief effort. But the coverage of the relief effort that I saw on the Chinese TV channel at the airport was different to the coverage in the western media. On the Chinese TV channel, film production techniques were used to dramatise the relief effort. Slow motion was used to show rescuers running to waiting ambulances and helicopters, carrying on stretchers victims rescued from the earthquake. The use of slow motion is a simple technique but very effective; it certainly heightens the emotional impact of the scenes being shown. Also, the editing of the pictures was very tight, cutting quickly from one rescue scene to another, emphasising the scale and skill of the coordinated relief effort. Watching those moving and inspiring pictures, it was not hard to understand why the wider Chinese population would feel great pride at their country’s response to this immense tragedy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 5:53 am and is filed under Nation Branding Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.