COVID-19 and China’s Changing Soft Power in Italy

Abstract

This article investigates how China’s COVID-19 aid efforts affected its soft power in Italy through analyzing data on China’s COVID-19-related aid from Italy’s main national newspapers during the period March–April 2020. Previous research has focused on China’s mask diplomacy in relation to its impact in Europe, primarily discussing the geopolitical nature of Chinese aid and arguing that China manipulated the pandemic to change COVID-19 narrative. While these scholars provided significant insights into China’s aid in Europe, their research failed to provide country specific studies and lack inquiry into the domestic role played by China’s public diplomacy overseas. This article finds that, while China’s COVID-19-related aid have often been negatively portraited in European media, this has not been the case for Italy, when analyzing the news reports on the arrival of China’s aid in national newspapers during the period March–April 2020. Through assessing secondary data collected from newspapers, this article argues that China’s aid allowed the country to increase its visibility in Italy, especially during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even if there is no direct correlation between higher visibility and increased soft power, this paper finds that increasing visibility in national newspapers allowed Italians to see China more positively. The paper concludes that China’s understanding of soft power is still undergoing enormous changes and that one should not simply understand China’s aid as a way to increase its soft power globally, but its overseas aid are considered a powerful tool to boost its domestic conviction that it is global responsible leader helping the world.