China’s Image Management Abroad, 1920s–1940s: Origin, Justification, and Institutionalization

Abstract

These quotations, all from Chinese journalists with American training, give a glimpse of the prevalent concern among Western-trained Chinese regarding China’ s image abroad during its Republican period. Their writings also reveal their eagerness to deliberately shape this image through media directed at foreign audiences. They hoped through the use of such international propaganda to rescue China from what Edward Said later would call “the discursive violence” in the Orientalist representations of the “other.”4 In fact, the above three journalists, joined by other Western-trained Chinese, helped establish the International Department for the Kuomintang government in 1937 the first government institution in Chinese history mandated to coordinate overseas publicity—and thus transformed themselves from professional journalists into avid propagandists.