Notes
1 This essay is indebted to the relevant reports in China Daily, Global Times, CGTN, The Asahi Shimbun, The Straits Times, the World of Chinese. In these sources, Yang Meng emphasizes the invigorating function of poetry while Zhao Wuji and Zhang Xiujuan use the case of gifting poems to explore the connection between cultural identity and image building. Liu Xin and Hu Yuwei first suggested that these poems figured the cultural ties between China and Japan. Chen Xi, on the other hand, examines East Asian ways of managing intercultural relationships and also observes that these classical Chinese poems are ‘strategically’ selected and often encode the message that ‘common ground is shared by different countries’ (570–71).