Does public diplomacy function as a conflict resolution in East Asia? - Comparing the case of China and Taiwan in 21st Century

East Asian countries have been developing public diplomacy strategy as they found that their attraction to each other do not prosper as the Asian economic miracle. Despite efforts seen in countries’ employment of public diplomacy in 21st century, disputes and threats are still generating so cast a doubt over East Asia’s security and conflict resolution. Hence, this paper established an analytical framework of East Asia security, which reveals that East Asian conflicts should be understood as a patchwork of all security approaches that are conceptualized as conflict resolution. Due to various security approaches from military alliances, institutionalization to shared norms and values, the answer to the research question is not arguing public diplomacy to replace these approaches but about how public diplomacy has been conceptualized as a conflict resolution in parallel with other approaches. This paper took a comparative perspective between China and Taiwan in 21st century because of their different interpretations of soft power and practices of public diplomacy. China since 2003 has been reducing the threat perception of its rising power and projecting a responsible power image. Whereas, Taiwan has also involved public diplomacy in strategic foreign policy since 2015 in the aim of projecting an image as a peacemaker rather than a troublemaker. Do their public diplomacy strategies function as reducing threat perception or changing the national image to foreign audience? I conducted 15 semi-structured interviews of Taiwanese working in government and NGO. The result revealed the causal relation of the understanding of the conflict and the effectiveness of public diplomacy. When the public diplomacy is embedded with the element of nationalism, this advances the threat perception and increases conflict challenges to security. In the case of China and Taiwan, China’s public diplomacy is embedded with the narratives of one Chinese nation but this is in conflict with Taiwan’s growing identity as a Taiwanese rather than a Chinese. Therefore, to China, employing soft power and conducting public diplomacy does not lead to conflict resolution if it contains a salient nationalism and different national identity. It further leads to the problem that the public diplomacy strategy is only another form of rivalry and competition rather than reducing the threat perception. To Taiwan, the growing identity inevitably puts Taiwan in the competition against China’s public diplomacy; however, building an image as a Taiwanese and projecting the image as a peacemaker may be an effective strategy to distance from China’s nationalism competition but to establish the function as a conflict resolution.