Xinhua, Diaoyu Islands Dispute and Sri Lanka

Xinhua, Diaoyu Islands Dispute and Sri Lanka

To inform the world about the islands dispute between China and Japan, Xinhua News Agency has played a great role. Setting a good image of China abroad as its main task, Xinhua's role in reporting of this case could be valued as Chinese side of the dispute without any doubts. With China's ambition to promote its soft power all over the world, Xinhua acts as a main vehicle that carries China's image across the borders. Could Xinhua successfully achieve its goal of promoting China's good image abroad by reporting this islands dispute? This article explores Xinhua's role in Sri Lanka with reference to the islands dispute.

1. Xinhua News Agency

The Xinhua News Agency serves as the official press agency of the People's Republic of China. It is subordinate to the State Council and reports to the Communist Party of China's Propaganda and Public Information Departments. This news agency employs more than 13,000 people, operates 107 foreign bureaus worldwide, and maintains 31 bureaus in China—one for each province, plus a military bureau. As most of the newspapers in China cannot afford to station correspondents abroad, or even in every Chinese province, they rely on Xinhua feeds to fill their pages. People's Daily, for example, uses Xinhua material for approximately 25 percent of its stories. Xinhua is a publisher as well as a news agency—it owns more than 20 newspapers and a dozen magazines, and it prints in eight languages: Chinese, English, Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese, Arabic and Japanese. Therefore, Xinhua's role in Chinese media could be valued as highly significant. (Xinhua News Agency, 2013)

2. China's Soft Power Ambitions

According to Joseph Nye, the concept of soft power describes the ability to attract and co-opt rather than coerce, use force or give money as a means of persuasion. Nye coined this concept in a 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. He further developed the concept in his 2004 book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. The term is now widely used in international affairs by analysts and statesmen. According to Suisheng Zhao (2009), this term first appeared around 1997 in Chinese scholarly discourse and has become a popular phrase since 2001. This popularity was raised to new height with the term was referred by former CPC General Secretary Hu Jintao during the 17th Communist Party Congress in 2007. (Soft power, 2013)

Introduction of Confucius Institutes all over the world and mounting an advertising billboard in New York's Times Square highlighted China's ambitions and it attracted many critics of this new emerging power into a single fold. According to critics, soft power resources of China are not sufficient enough to attract the rest of world into its fold in the long run though its presence in Africa is cited as a success.

3. Diaoyu Islands Dispute (Chinese Story)

During the second half of the year 2012, Diaoyu Islands dispute attracted the media attention to a greater extent. Those few tiny islands located very close to Taiwan, not so far away from China, and now under the Japanese administration were the focus of this dispute. Known as Diaoyu Islands in China, but as Senkaku in Japan, those tiny islets could raise a media-uproar because of international power of those two competitors. Taiwanese claim over the islands could view in parallel with China; therefore, it is meaningful to consider this dispute as a problem between China and Japan. Hence, in this article, this dispute is elaborated as a conflict between China and Japan.

Japanese claim over these tiny islands started with the first Sino-Japanese war. This war was fought over 8 months, from August 1894 to April 1895. This war was a clear indication of the failure of the Qing dynasty, and Japan won the war. For the first time, regional dominance in East Asia shifted from China to Japan (First Sino-Japanese War, 2013). According to present Japanese Government stand, these uninhabited islets were incorporated into Japanese territory in 1895 after careful surveys to make sure they were not owned by any person or another country (¥2 billion deal, 2012).

After this incorporation, a person called - Koga Tatsushiro, was given a lease to the islands and sent workers from Okinawa to operate a bonito processing plant and to gather albatross feathers. This industry remained there until 1937. But with the escalation of the war in China, he withdrew. The Senkaku Islands became uninhabited again.

After the war, with Okinawa under US military administration, Kuba and Taisho islands were