The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in a Chinese Reality TV Program: A Case Study of Divas Hit the Road 5: Silk Road Season
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Abstract
This article examines how cultural diplomacy is mediated through Chinese popular entertainment by analyzing Divas Hit the Road 5: Silk Road Season in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Responding to the limited attention given to reality television in cultural diplomacy and soft power studies, the research asks what cultural-diplomatic roles the program performs and how these roles are realized through narrative representation and audience interpretation. The study adopts a qualitative case-study design that combines content analysis, discourse analysis, and online ethnography. The empirical materials include the twelve publicly released main episodes of the season, purposively selected scenes involving intercultural contact, labor participation, cultural learning, and conflict resolution, as well as publicly visible audience comments and discussion threads from Weibo, Douyin/TikTok, and related short-video platforms collected around the program’s broadcast and circulation period. The analysis employed a thematic coding procedure to compare visual frames, narration, participant interaction, subtitles, promotional discourse, and audience responses. The findings show that the program performs three interrelated roles: cultural mediation, by translating macro-level BRI and Silk Road narratives into everyday human experiences; intercultural relationship-building, by staging processes of adaptation, humility, empathy, and identity negotiation; and informal public diplomacy, by allowing entertainment narratives and audience participation to circulate soft-power meanings in a less official and more affective form. The study contributes to media and cultural-diplomacy scholarship by showing how reality television may operate as an informal, mediated, and audience-co-created diplomatic space. However, because the research is based on a single case and publicly available online discourse, its conclusions should be understood as interpretive rather than as a direct measurement of diplomatic effects.
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