China’s Global role through cultural diplomacy: a study of Confucius Institutes

This dissertation examines the evolution of China’s global role through a critical analysis of the People’s Republic of China’s cultural diplomacy, with a particular focus on the Confucius Institute initiative and its development during Xi Jinping’s “new era.” The Confucius Institute project is positioned as a lens through which to investigate the interplay between China’s self-conceptualizations, representations, and expectations as a cultural global power and the responses these elicit from international audiences. Adopting a Gramscian-Arrighian perspective, the study conceptualizes cultural diplomacy as a mechanism of hegemony-building within a liberal international order in crisis. In the current phase of hegemonic transition, marked by heightened demands for order, the research interrogates whether notions of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization,’ as mobilized through the Confucius brand, may provide China with the ‘additional power’ necessary to steer the international system in directions aligned with its preferences. To pursue this inquiry, the research investigates the processes of interaction, negotiation, and relocation occurring within the Confucius Institute platform, through which China’s global role is continuously constructed and contested. Informed by interactionist Role Theory, the study adopts a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative analysis on the initiative’s global evolution with qualitative insights derived from semi-structured interviews mainly conducted with European Confucius Institute directors. The European context is indeed treated as a particularly revealing site for exploring how cultural and civilizational imaginaries inform processes of global role-making, as it embodies both a historical referent of Western civilization and a key site of, and participant in, the US-China competition. Ultimately, the study proposes the notion of ‘global role’ as a heuristic device for rethinking dominant paradigms used to study China’s rise, aligning with and contributing to the broader research agenda of Global International Relations.