Borrowing a boat to go out on the ocean The image of China as a cultural power promoted by the PRC Government’s strategies and Italian born Chinese

The purpose of the research is to shed light on the image of the PRC constructed and represented in Italy through the action of different actors and by different means. The study will be divided into three parts: A. strategic motivations behind the PRC external propaganda, to understand who are the main actors (media and organs of the government) and the new players that constitute the “stratified overseas communication system” (Bu and Dong 2018) of overseas propaganda and how they contribute to the image of the country abroad; B. contribution of Chinese cultural products in shaping China’s image abroad which will move from an examination of the current regulation on the protection, enhancement and promotion of China's cultural heritage also with reference to the “law in action” and to the contribution of actors outside PRC. Based on this framework, the research will focus on the role of Chinese “cultural products” in shaping China’s national image outside China, particularly in Italy. The focus will be on literary translations and on the strategies implemented by the Chinese government to promote Chinese Literature abroad. C. Action of the Italian Born Chinese (IBC) as cultural producers to shape the image of China in Italy. This part will be divided into three phases. 1. an analysis of the linguistic construction and representation of RPC through the official WeChat accounts of four internet media platforms. 2. an analysis of the representation of China as outlined in an informal environment by the IBC; 3. the study of the initiatives of ethnic entrepreneurs, focusing on the representation of China they build. GLOSSARY: The glossary aims to make the text more easily readable and is not providing an exhausting definition of the entries: - BRI: Belt and Road Initiative: an economic and geo-politic strategy launched in 2013 by President Xi Jinping and imbedded in Chinese Constitution in 2017, born as an economic and geopolitical strategy and then developed also as an educational and cultural strategy, among whose goals there is the involvement of skilled migrants and foreign talents in a project of shaping the image of China abroad. - WeChat: WeChat is one of the world's most popular social media messaging apps and is similar to WhatsApp. - IBC – “Italian Born Chinese”: Acronym for the second-generation of Chinese in Italy, who recognize the influence of both Italian and Chinese origins on their identity and culture - Topic analysis and Corpus Construction - LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation): In natural language processing, the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is a generative statistical model that allows sets of observations to be explained by unobserved groups - Rumbaut classification: Classification of the migrant population based on the criteria used by the sociologist Rubén G. Rumbaut (Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2547157) - UTU Univ. of Turin Unit - UCSCU Univ. Cattolica Sacro Cuore Unit