In the context of globalization, China has begun to show its great power style on the world stage, and China's foreign cultural exchanges have taken on new characteristics and tasks. China is gradually shifting from strengthening its «hard power» to «soft power». In recent years, while China has been hosting various international events and making its voice heard at international events, President Xi Jinping has been emphasizing Xi Jinping's thought of socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era at different times and different stages, both at home and abroad. In this paper, the mass media in Russia is selected as the object of study. Through the analysis of 266 reports on Xi Jinping's cultural thought for a new era in China in the three years from 2016 to 2021, the current situation of the dissemination of this thought abroad is investigated, and corresponding solutions to the existing communication problems are proposed. To better promote Chinese culture and create a lovely, conceivable, and respectable image of China overseas.
Keywords: Xi Jinping's thoughts, Chinese culture, media
Methodological Process
This paper takes Russian mainstream media as the research object, collects Russian mainstream media as the source of public opinion, retrieves the reports related to Xi Jinping's concept of cultural thought for a New Era by searching the official website, and after the public opinion analysis of the relevant reports of Russian media, aims to discover the focus of attention and acceptance of Xi Jinping's cultural thought for a New Era by Russian media, and explores the countermeasures to promote the dissemination of Xi Jinping's cultural thought for a New Era by Russian media. The selected media coverage time points are all the keyword reports between 2016 and 2021.
The keywords «Xi Jinping, cultural thought» were searched in the database of periodicals(CNKI) [1], and 765 pieces of information were obtained. ", «Xi Jinping's Socialist Thought with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era», «traditional culture», «cultural construction», etc.
As can be seen visually through the publication year division icon, the number of relevant literature rose year by year after 2013, and more and more scholars began to attach importance to China's excellent traditional culture after cultural self-confidence was mentioned several times during the lecture at Peking University in 2015. In the report of the 19th National Congress, the General Secretary emphasized cultural self-confidence and promoted the prosperity of socialist culture putting forward a series of new ideas and perspectives, also because of the change of the year to the year of Sino-Russian media exchange related literature reached its peak in 2018.
By summarizing, we can see that the relevant studies by domestic and foreign scholars on the Russian media's coverage of China have the following characteristics.
1. most of them take the China-related reports in a certain news media as the research object, mainly using the content analysis method to summarize and conclude the themes, positions, and keywords of the China-related reports, in an attempt to show the image of the Chinese state shaped by the media.
In terms of sample size, it includes the comparison of a specific media in China and Russia and the comparison of reports of several Russian mainstream media in the same aspect; in terms of perspective, the study is diversified, and the perspectives of national image, economy, audience and news management can be flexibly used in the comparative study.
3. These studies involve first-hand data and information, based on which forecasts are made and conclusions are drawn. This has not only become an important reference factor in the choice of China's communication strategy with Russia but also provided a valuable reference for other studies of the same type and interdisciplinary research.
The keywords «Orthodox Church, Sino-Russian relations, Confucius Institute» are mostly found in the 180 results of the keyword search on the Internet, but there is a shortage of research on the dissemination of Xi Jinping's cultural thought for a New Era. The number of reports by domestic scholars on the overseas dissemination of Xi Jinping's New Age culture is relatively small. However, we need to pay attention to how Chinese culture, how to make the Chinese voice heard in the international arena, and how to disseminate the ideas of the new era overseas under the relevant themes.
Number of reports and trends
The FACTIVA multilingual database developed by Dow Jones is a global news and business database developed by Dow Jones and contains more than 30,000 information resources published in 28 languages in nearly 200 countries and regions. [2] More than 100 types of publications are available in Russian, including Russian mainstream media such as «Facts and Arguments», «Interfax», «TASS», «NTV TV Website», «Rossiyskaya Gazeta», «Kommersant», «Rossiyskaya Gazeta», «Independent» and «Pravda».
On the webpage, the keywords are «cultural confidence», «ecological civilization», «beautiful China» and «mutual appreciation of civilizations» and the time limit was set to 2016–2021. Since Factiva can directly filter repetitive class texts or essentially the same type of texts, the final screening yielded 266 relevant news articles, figure 1.
Fig. 1 Trends of media coverage in Russia from 2016 to 2021
All relevant reports in the Russian region during the 5 years were obtained: a total of 36 in 2016, 53 in 2017, 46 in 2018, 50 in 2019, 31 in 2020, and 50 in 2021. Analyzing the annual volume of reports, we can see that the trend of reports about cultural directions has been increasing in recent years and reached its peak in 2017, which may be explained by the fact that 2016–2017 was the year of media exchanges between Russia and China, during which the volume of Russian media reports about China increased significantly.
However, in 2020, the volume of coverage was the lowest in the past five years, probably due to the outbreak of the new crown epidemic that prevented cultural exchange activities between the two countries offline, but it still reached a relatively significant number of 31 articles.
Text screening explores the reasons for the increase in the number of reports each year, among which China and Russia held the Year of Science and Technology Innovation in 2019–2021 and successfully concluded on November 26, 2021. Under the framework of the Year of Science and Technology Innovation, more than 1,000 events were jointly held between the governments and universities of the two countries, which invariably spread the new era of Chinese culture and increased the number of reports. In the years 2020–2021, when the world is ravaged by the new crown, China has set an example for the world in the fight against the epidemic by providing standard methods of epidemic prevention and actively developing vaccines, so the reports about the keywords of epidemic prevention and fight against the epidemic also occupy a significant proportion in the years 2020–2021.
Topics of news
The following thematic classification chart was obtained through statistics, Table II. It can be found that the themes of foreign relations and domestic politics account for the largest proportion of all coverage, with 26 % and 28 % respectively. It is worth noting that there are a few special themes among all the themes, namely, «higher education», «epidemic outbreak» and «Olympic Games». These three themes coincide with the development of major events in Russia and China in recent years.
Fig. 2
In 2020–2021, the Year of Science and Innovation between Russia and China, despite the epidemic and the impossibility of offline cooperation, has shown unprecedented resilience. 250 events have been organized in 2020 within the framework of the Year of Science and Innovation between Russia and China.
Several activities from 2020 to 2022 are organized based on Russian and Chinese universities, such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Xinjiang University, and other Chinese universities; on the Russian side, there are well-known high schools such as Moscow State University, Moscow State Pedagogical University, and Russian People's Friendship University, and the format has shifted from offline to online. The cooperation program includes activities in some fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, information, and biotechnology, and also encompasses epidemic prevention and anti-epidemic, vaccine development, etc. According to the official website of the Russian Federation for science and higher education, more than 30 events against coronavirus were held in the framework of Russian-Chinese cooperation in science and innovation. [3] That's why the term «higher educational institutions» appears frequently in the reports of the next year.
In 2022, China will host the XXIV Winter Olympics, making it the ninth country to host both the Winter and Summer Olympics and Beijing will be the first city to have hosted both the Summer and Winter Olympics, making it a veritable «city of double Olympics». The Russian media has also been covering a lot of news about the Beijing Winter Olympics in advance. Topics related to the Winter Olympics include «Winter Olympics venues», «Winter Olympics spirit», «Winter Olympics mascots», etc.
Problems of Russian media coverage
Today, as Russian-Chinese relations continue to develop, there is a lot of coverage of General Secretary Xi Jinping's ideas on Chinese culture in the Russian media, which is largely positive, but there is still a lot of room for improvement in the future of cultural exchanges between Russia and China.
First of all, Russian media reports about China are basically «fetishistic», and many of them are quoted from Xinhua. Few journalists have reported on China's cultural connotations and national self-confidence in-depth, and have not deeply understood and explored these cultural connotations. For example, on November 17, 2020, President Xi Jinping's speech at the 12th meeting of BRICS leaders was directly quoted by «Большая Азия», without in-depth coverage.
Secondly, the direction of coverage is still very political, and the audience is relatively fixed. Russian media coverage is based on high-level cooperation mechanisms such as leaders' meetings, regular meetings of prime ministers, and strategic security consultations, which have formed a high level of political mutual trust. However, led to political relations, China and Russia have achieved equally fruitful cooperation in the fields of cultural exchange, cultural export, and media exchange, but these achievements have not received much attention from the Russian media. Together with the fact that there are indeed great differences in cultural understanding and cultural development between China and Russia, this has led to the failure of the Russian side to fully understand the Chinese culture for a New Era, thus limiting the coverage and dissemination of this idea by the Russian media.
Countermeasures and suggestions
Combining the current communication status of Russian mainstream media, this study believes that efforts can be made in the following three aspects to enhance the communication effect of Xi Jinping's new-age Chinese culture to Russia, thus promoting further understanding and dissemination of the concept in Russian media.
The first is to develop new highlights of Sino-Russian cooperation, fill in the shortcomings of cooperation, solve problems in various fields of cooperation between the two countries, and provide material for Russian media to report on Xi Jinping's traditional concept of China for a New Era. Deepen the consensus on this concept between the two sides with the help of government diplomacy.
Secondly, telling the Chinese story well, presenting the real, three-dimensional and comprehensive China, bringing a new cultural experience to the Russian community and arousing its strong interest. In the practice of discourse, in addition to the presentation of political elements, it is more important to strengthen the rendering of cultural aspects and present a distinctive contemporary and cultural flavor.
Third, promote the diversification of communication forms and communication channels to enhance China's foreign communication capacity. Base on the Chinese experience and tell the stories of ordinary people. Now there are many new media in China that are developing rapidly, and many excellent media people have emerged who can make use of the new technology for a New Era to tell the new Chinese culture.
References:
- CNKI. — Text: electronic // China National Knowledge Infrastructure: [website]. — URL: https://www.cnki.net/ (accessed 01.05.2022).
- POWERING THE PROFESSIONAL WORLD. — Text: electronic//factiva: [site].-URL:https://www.dowjones.com/(access date: 01.05.2022).
- Russia and China held more than 30 events to combat coronavirus in the framework of cooperation in science and innovation. — Text: electronic // ministry of science and higher education of the russian federation: [website]. — URL: https://minobrnauki.gov.ru/press-center/news/?ELEMENT_ID=43958 (date of reference: 01.05.2022).
