The Effects of China’s Educational Public Diplomacy

• In Event: China’s Overseas Influence: Mechanisms, Strategies, and Effectiveness

Abstract

States engage in public diplomacy in order to impact the attitudes and behaviors of citizens in other nations. But does public diplomacy work? This paper investigates the effects of Chinese government-funded language and learning programs hosted at U.S. high schools. The paper follows a group of U.S. high schoolers at two schools with Chinese Confucius Classrooms through an academic year and draws upon three iterations of an in-depth survey, interviews and focus groups, as well as classroom observations at the schools. The responses of students taking part in the Chinese program are compared to those of students who do not take part, and they are also compared to responses from an original national survey fielded by Dynata of teens aged 12-18 in the United States. Using this data, the paper highlights both the possibilities and the limitations of Chinese transnational public influence via educational programs. Furthermore, it presents an original theory of the micro-foundations of public diplomacy, offering a set of several mechanisms through which public diplomacy programs may affect individual-level attitudes.

Author

• Naima Green-Riley, Harvard University