With regard to the recent developments in public diplomacy, the increasing fusion of strategic communication appears necessary. China engages in public diplomacy with a strategic purpose to shape its national image abroad. Hosting diplomatic advocacy event is regarded as an instrument with expectations to present reliable and responsible image and promote international collaborations. The present research focuses on the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) in May 2017 with the objective to analyze its outcomes and influence on the international news agenda, news frames, and foreign citizens' comments online. The quantitative content analyses are used to compare the media reports (N=364) and Facebook users' comments on the selected news (N=957) between the US and Pakistan. Results reveal that Pakistani media provided more diverse frames and attributed more positive evaluations to the BRF than the US media. However, Facebook comments expressed more unfavorable opinions toward the BRF and China's image with rare differences between two countries. In conclusion, the BRF has served as an eye-catching advocacy of Chinese foreign policy, as it influenced the news agenda in two selected countries. However, news frames vary due to the differences in media system and the involvement in the BRF. China's public diplomacy practices follow a traditional top-down communication which needs meticulous subdivision of target stakeholders, delicate messaging strategies, and integrated tactics.
Traditionally, students from the Southern world tend to cross their national borders to study abroad. However, in recent times, we have observed a trend in which more and more students, both full-time and short-term, select Southern countries as destinations for overseas education. This paper contributes to the sparse literature on the above phenomenon, examining the case of Vietnam. We surveyed 50 universities and colleges about their international student profiles (including statistics and nationalities) and their strategies for attracting international students. The findings of this study provide implications for Vietnam's policymakers and university/college leaders and other Southern countries when implementing the internationalization of tertiary education.
This study analyses North and South Koreas' coverage as framed by the main Polish press titles from 1989 to 2019. The main method applied is a computational textual analysis of press articles based on frequency, correlations and co-occurrences. The purpose is to map the topics of the examined articles in the context of relations between Poland and the two Koreas in various areas, predominantly political and economic relations. Emphasis is placed on the impact the carmaker Daewoo's investment in Poland in the mid-1990s had on bilateral Polish-South Korean relations. First, the authors argue that Korean issues in the Polish press, mainly in the second half of the 1990s, particularly concerned economic affairs. Secondly, they argue that after Poland's accession to the European Union in 2004, the country's interest in the two Koreas decreased, and since that time has remained at a more or less constant level. Finally, the authors discuss the outcome of the research in the context of the main developments in Polish-Korean relations, taking into consideration the results of a Polish public opinion survey presenting the international linkages between national public opinion and foreign policy.
Social credit rating in China (SCRC) has been criticized as "dystopian" and "Orwellian," an attempt by the Communist Party to hold onto power by exerting ever greater control over its citizens. To explain such measures, value differences are often invoked, that Chinese value stability and cooperation over privacy and freedom. However, these explanations are oversimplifications that result in ethical impasses. This article argues social credit rating should be understood in terms of the commonly human problem of large-scale cooperation. To do so, this paper relies on a cultural evolutionary framework and is an exercise in interpretive pros hen ethical pluralism, attempting to understand how apparently irresolvable cultural differences stem from common human concerns. Wholesale condemnation of SCRC fails to acknowledge the serious, intractable nature of problems resulting from a lack of trust in China. They take for granted the existence of institutions ensuring largescale, anonymous cooperation characteristic of - but somewhat unique to - Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) cultures. Because of its history and rapid development, China lacks the institutions necessary to ensure such cooperation, and because of anti-social punishment, social credit rating might be one of the few ways to ensure cooperation at this scale. The point is not to defend social credit rating in general, but to raise the possibility of its defense in China and show one way this would be done.
This paper proposes an interpretation of Charles Ess's pros hen pluralism, especially concerning what constitutes the single end point (hen) toward which the pluralistic viewpoints converge (pros). The single end point, I argue, is constituted by an empirical social reality that obtains in the world at a particular period. In other words, it is the fact that we happen to agree largely and broadly on several ethical issues that serves as the end point in Ess's theory. The reason is that humans happen largely to share the same goals and values qua human beings, such as the desire for communication and cooperation with one another. It is not their rationality, or any other permanent and ideal characteristic, that serves as the source of normativity for human beings, but rather the contingent facts that obtain at a particular place and time, facts that humans happen to agree on. This raises an obvious objection of what to do with those who might cherish a very different set of values. The answer is that the globalized nature of the world today, especially deepened by information technology, makes it increasingly difficult for any groups to remain isolated. This does not imply, however, that disagreements are not possible. On the contrary, disagreements are a part of the whole process from the beginning. At the theoretical level, there is always a need for those who disagree on the theoretical issues rationally to persuade one another. This is also part of the empirical reality referred to earlier.
Dominant approaches to designing morally capable robots have been mainly based on rule-based ethical frameworks such as deontology and consequentialism. These approaches have encountered both philosophical and computational limitations. They often struggle to accommodate remarkably diverse, unstable, and complex contexts of human-robot interaction. Roboticists and philosophers have recently been exploring underrepresented ethical traditions such as virtuous, role-based, and relational ethical frameworks for designing morally capable robots. This paper employs the lens of ethical pluralism to examine the notion of role-based morality in the global context and discuss how such cross-cultural analysis of role ethics can inform the design of morally competent robots. In doing so, it first provides a concise introduction to ethical pluralism and how it has been employed as a method to interpret issues in computer and information ethics. Second, it reviews specific schools of thought in Western ethics that derive morality from role-based obligations. Third, it presents a more recent effort in Confucianism to reconceptualize Confucian ethics as a role-based ethic. This paper then compares the shared norms and irreducible differences between Western and Eastern approaches to role ethics. Finally, it discusses how such examination of pluralist views of role ethics across cultures can be conducive to the design of morally capable robots sensitive to diverse value systems in the global context.
Misguided use, manipulation, misappropriation, disruption and mismanagement of Information deeply affects the infosphere as well as the social and moral fabric of a society. Information ethics is an attempt to bring the creation, organization, dissemination, and use of information within the ambit of ethical standards and moral codes. The diverse and inherently pluralistic nature of societies however puts forth an additional demand on us - to come up with an intercultural information ethics. An intercultural ethics which is other-centric, context sensitive and workable without being homogenizing, patronizing and colonizing. An endeavor in that direction has already been made by proponents of intercultural information ethics like: Charles M. Ess, Fay Sudweeks, Rafael Capurro, Pak-Hang Wong, Soraj Hongladarom et al. In our paper, we propose that the kind of ethical pluralism being sought in the domain of information ethics can be attained by having a reappraisal of the current methodological strategies, by casting a critical relook at the Eurocentric ethical model. This paper analyses the current framework of Intercultural Information Ethics. And in an endeavour to move towards an all-encompassing, other-centric, workable, intercultural, harmonious and compassionate model of 'Pluralistic Information Ethics', it proposes the Indian / Asian philosophical method of 'Samvāda' to the current inventory which includes methods like: 'parrhesia/free speech' and 'interpretive phronēsis.