Japan-China Strategic Communications Dynamics under the Belt and Road Initiative: The Case of "Third Country Business Cooperation"

Since the 2000s, the power of international narratives has attracted much attention in China. Under the Xi Jinping administration, the enhancement of "international discourse power" became an explicit policy and a diplomatic goal, closely linked to its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI, further, overlaps with China's efforts to develop a new concept of "institutional discourse power" as a mechanism to convert the economic gravity of China into political power by enhancing their agenda-setting capability, particularly in emerging rule-making process of the new economy. Such ambition has also shaped the new economic integrative framework between China and developed countries including Japan. Japan, on the other hand, relied on an increasingly inclusive notion of free and open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) to define and promote its relations with both "like-minded countries" and China for the purpose of making the BRI relative. Although Japan and China have agreed on economic cooperation in third countries as a new collaborative scheme in 2018, there remains a gap in their political objectives and strategic communications. This poses a major challenge for China, which hitherto has relied on China-centric narratives, as it can only enhance its identity as a global leading power by accommodating and accepting partially narratives of other major countries, including Indo-Pacific countries.