Research Papers

This paper analyses the extent to which the EU influences national and international political debates on human rights situation in China, with a particular reference to the role of the internet which facilitates and provides new platforms for such debates. In doing so, I propose a normative power perspective which helps us understand how human rights norms are diffused through a discursive form of power. Central to this paper is the assumption that human rights norms are better diffused through normative means in the global information age, such as knowledge-based cooperation and living by virtuous example. To verify this assumption, I look at two analogous issues of the death penalty and Tibet, and seek to understand the ways in which the EU shapes the international and Chinese discourses on these two cases, against the backdrop of the liberating impact of internet over the past decade. Regarding the death penalty, I argue that EU cooperation projects in recent years, which pragmatically focused on enhancing the knowledge and capability of legal professionals and lobbying through academic research, are more effective than direct lobbying in the Chinese context. In case of Tibet, although European governments had resorted to public criticism as a less costly way to sustain the international visibility of the Tibetan cause, the process of ‘shaming’ has yet to alter the Chinese citizens’ almost universal acceptance of the official view on Tibet, largely due to the ideological divide, and China’s successful propaganda on the domestic front.