China's Soft Power And Western Rhetoric

A national comprehensive power consists of the hard and the soft power (SP), with the former functioning as a dominant mode and the latter gaining more and more importance, threatening to take over the place currently occupied by the former. In this situation lies the conceptualizing background of the present study.Much positive and useful discussion and research work, from either a political or a cultural perspective, have been done by domestic academia on how to build up China's SP. However, due to various reasons, few people have undertaken to study SP from a rhetorical perspective. Thus, inevitably much of such research remains uncertain and needs improving. This is the external factor that gives rise to our present study.Rhetoric is power. It plays a key role in the generation, development and promotion of Western SP. Moreover, the West has always relied on its powerful capability in communication to gain advantages in discursive exchanges across cultural boundaries. All this constitutes the internal factor underlying our current study.This paper holds that without familiarity and mastery of Western rhetoric, China will find herself stuck in an embarrassing situation of playing a passive role in international communication, being unable to argue for her political system and economic development mode, and failing to change her status as a "giant" in HP but a "dwarf in SP.This paper preliminarily probes and researches into what role Western rhetoric can play in building up China's SP. It adopts as its methodology a combination of the descriptive, the inductive/deductive, and the diachronic/synchronic approaches, and it assumes a comparative rhetorical point of view. This paper concludes that it serves as the only way and a fundamental channel for China to build up her SP by mastering Western rhetoric, deploying every type of rhetorical resources, agilely putting into practical use all kinds of rhetorical strategies in international discursive communication and engaging Western discursive partners rhetorically.