ABSTRACT
China’s cultural diplomacy aims to engage with the entire world, but the world is one big place. The phrase “with Chinese characteristics” was Deng Xiaoping’s invention to define socialism in the Chinese context in the early 1980s, with a view to putting ideological contention between capitalism and socialism on the backburner and focusing on economic development. Unlike South Korea, study tours to China were the highlight events for all the other Confucius Institutes interviewed. They all mentioned the visitors’ excitement or even shock to see ‘the real China’ with their own eyes compared to their imaginative impressions. The cultural boundary between China and the UK is arguably a harder one of the two as Europe is where Orientalism was bred and the UK was in a different ideological camp from China during the Cold War era, so China has been held as both a ‘cultural other’ and an ‘ideological other’ in the past.
