Speaker: P. S. Morales
Chair: Professor Chang Xiangqun
Abstract
Latin America is a region that traditionally has been tied to the Western world on a cultural level. However, in the 21st century it is increasingly gaining the attention of some emerging powers and their desire to occupy a more significant role in the international politics. Among them, China has been building up international media outlets, which would serve as a strategic tool to spread its cultural influence across the globe. Following this idea, China’s policy makers have chosen Spanish as one of the languages used to explain China to the world, and in particular to more than 400 million people across Latin America, as well as North America, Europe and Africa.
By evaluating the media consumption attitudes across the region and the audience’s interest in international broadcasters, this study aims to analyse a series of cultural factors that may be undermining CCTV’s efforts to spread Chinese culture in Latin America. The aim is to explore how China may need to readjust its strategy towards this region, by presenting some of the findings of an ongoing research focusing on how audiences of international news broadcasters view China’s CCTV (lately rebranded as CGTN), comparing it to Russia’s RT and Iran’s HispanTV.
This research is based on a series of focus groups conducted in Mexico and Argentina between September and October 2016, whereby participants were shown video excerpts of CCTV-E, RT and HispanTV, all TV networks broadcasting in Spanish from China, Russia and Iran, respectively. This seminar will focus on evaluating factors that may be hindering China’s performance, such as cultural proximity and language, differences in journalism style and formats between China and Latin America, ‘globalisation’ and the power of pre-conceived country images hindering acceptance. At the same time, it will compare CCTV-E’s performance to the different strategies adopted by RT and HispanTV.
About the speaker
Since joining the University of Westminster, Pablo Morales has been researching China’s soft power efforts in Latin America through international media and how Russia and Iran may be proving more successful by diversifying their strategy. After graduating from the Journalism Master Degree at Zhejiang University in 2010, Pablo Morales worked for China Radio International and People’s Daily Online in Beijing.
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This event is free and open to all.
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This is one of the Global China Media Seminar Series (GCMSS), co-organised with Global China Institute.
For more information, please contact Alja Kranjec at a.kranjec@westminster.ac.uk.