Struggling for Recognition? Strategic Disrespectin China’s Pursuit of Soft Power

This paper addresses the Chinese policy community’s interpretations of identities,which potentially shape the soft power policies of China. It couples soft power toidentity through a discourse analysis of the language used by the Chinese state inrelation to soft power. It builds on a number of earlier theorizations that associate softpower with identity as a discursive phenomenon. The results highlight the use ofstrategic disrespect in China’s soft power discourse. In the context of global culturalcompetition, and in particular the South-South cooperation framework, it is argued thatthe practitioners of the Chinese discourse present China’s‘Self’as a soft power and theWestern‘Other’as a hard power.