Constructing and Communicating National Prestige at Home. The People’s Daily and the 2014 APEC Summit in Beijing

Prestige is an asset that can be used both internationally and domestically. On the one hand, governments resort to prestige in their mutual interactions within the international domain. As argued in International Relations theory, national governments use the “policy of prestige” to expand their room for manoeuvre, by influencing their counterparts’ perceptions and behaviour. On the other hand, prestige is also exploited domestically, as a tool for consolidating the legitimacy of a government in front of its own citizens. A key-role is then played by the media, which actively contribute – or resist doing so – to the process of constructing and communicating national prestige among the domestic public. The aim of this paper is to investigate how prestige is constructed and communicated domestically. The first section analyses the politics of prestige that takes place at the intersection between international and domestic politics. The bulk of the paper is then devoted to a case-study on China. When it comes to the domestic uses of prestige, contemporary China is an interesting case for at least two reasons: the political process whereby the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) legitimates its rule; and the functioning of the Chinese media system, with the peculiar role of the official media. How does the Chinese government represent its international role towards the domestic public? How is China’s national prestige constructed and communicated domestically? In order to answer these questions, the paper analyses how the Chinese-language People’s Daily – the CPC mouthpiece – represented China’s role during the 2014 APEC summit. On 5-11 November 2014, leaders from all over the Asia-Pacific region convened in Beijing for their annual conference. The summit offered China an extraordinary platform to project its image as a regional power – and to do so first and foremost in front of the domestic public.