The Third Public Diplomacy Forum on “Media Diplomacy and the Construction of China’s Influence” was held at CFAU on June 24, 2017. The event, organized by the Public Diplomacy Research Center at CFAU, was jointly hosted by the Department of Diplomacy and Foreign Affairs Management and the Office of Academic Affairs at CFAU. More than 30 well-known experts and scholars from the Public Diplomacy Office of the Ministry of the Foreign Affairs, the Department of Policy Planning of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the University of Oxford, and other institutions attended.

Associate Professor Chen Xuefei, the director of CFAU’s Public Diplomacy Research Center, presided over the opening ceremony. Professor Wang Chunying, the director of the Department of Diplomacy & Foreign Affairs Administration, addressed the forum. The experts had a vigorous discussion on freedom of speech, soft power, and diplomacy. Florian Schneider, associate professor at the Regional Research Center at the University of Leiden, and Todd H. Hall, associate professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University, shared their insights on China’s soft power, freedom of speech, and public diplomatic policies. Three associate professors from the Department of Diplomacy and Foreign Affairs Management at CFAU also presented their research in these areas.

The Public Diplomacy Research Center at CFAU was established in October 2009 and was the first of its kind at a domestic university. The center has carried out a series of activities on the teaching and research of public diplomacy. It also hosted the First Public Diplomacy Forum in 2014, and a Second Public Diplomacy Forum on “Big Data and the Construction of China’s Soft Power” in 2016.

The Public Diplomacy Research Center at CFAU