Abstract
Narratives help in interpreting and understanding surrounding political realities. Yet, the divergence of narratives may also create distrust, and it is an important reason for greatly diverging perceptions of the Belt and Road Initiative between China and the international community. This article explores how trust can be bridged between different narratives. It discusses the notions of trust and how the Chinese concept of ‘brightness’ contributes to a strategic signalling process for trust-building in strategic cooperation. This article proposes that trust-building is a process of signalling and knowledge building. Only when the signal sent for strategic cooperation fits the other parties’ knowledge about the sender, can the trust-building process succeed. This compatibility between signals and developed knowledge can be the result of several rounds of signalling, in which the signal sender’s honesty regarding their self-interests and intentions is the necessary pre-condition.
Highlights
Narratives help people make sense of the world (Somers, 1994: 606), and in interpreting and understanding the surrounding political realities (Patterson and Monroe, 1998:321)
This paper aims to address the question of how trust may be bridged across differing narratives in International Relations (IR) by linking the notion of strategic signalling with the Chinese concept of ‘brightness’
This paper started with the puzzle of international audiences’ mistrust of China’s cooperative signal sending via the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and it attempts to investigate how trust can be built across different narratives
Summary
Narratives help people make sense of the world (Somers, 1994: 606), and in interpreting and understanding the surrounding political realities (Patterson and Monroe, 1998:321). In order to reduce risk in cooperation and to demonstrate their sincerity, states in the Spring and Autumn period exchanged princes (sometimes the crowned princes) as hostages This kind of action can be regarded as sending costly signals for trust-building. When the signal sent for strategic cooperation fits the receiver’s knowledge about the sender, generating a good understanding of the sender’s cooperative interests, can the trust-building process end in success. Communication and cognitive theorists point out that people with high cognitive capability can avoid being misguided and make rational choices if they have access to multiple sources of information (Zucker, 1977; Zaller, 1992; De Vreese and Boogaarden, 2005, 2006) This argument suggests that it is difficult to manipulate others’ knowledge about a country, especially in a long-term trust-building process, because manipulated information will eventually be corrected by other information sources. The Han needed allies to balance the threats from the Xiongnu, and this strategic objective remained the top priority of the Han’s relationship with Central Asian nations
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