Campus of University College Cork, Ireland

This week, Prof. Julie Yu-Wen Chen visited School of Asian Studies at the University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland. During the visit, she gave two lectures. The first lecture was about how countries with Soviet legacy look at the rise of China. This lecture was given to students in the School of Asian Studies.

The second lecture is open for public. The talk is related to China’s soft power. With China’s rise as a powerful actor on the world’s political scene and its use of soft power diplomacy to project a peaceful image of its ascendency, scholars have been debating whether, and how, we can measure its soft power. Some scholars have taken an empiricist approach, looking at the cultural programmes and the development aids that Beijing has offered. Others, using a constructivist framework, have rejected the possibility of measuring China’s soft power and called for careful interpretation of the ideologies and world views that underline Beijing’s approach to creating soft power. Prof. Chen sought to provide a comprehensive view of the different forms of soft power diplomacy and discuss which of these are more suitable for an empiricist research framework and which for a constructivist one.