Controversy, uncertainty and the diverse public in cultural diplomacy: Australia–China relations

ABSTRACT

In the past few years, foreign policy tensions between China and Australia have become especially fraught. In some cases, this political situation manifests in the very diplomatic initiatives that were funded to help ease relations. This article considers a case study of a theatrical collaboration in the context of contemporary Australia–China relations to interrogate the value of our understandings of and evaluation frameworks for public diplomacy. This article argues that theories of cultural diplomacy and assessments of initiatives need to consider the multiple and competing objectives, diverse publics and controversial receptions that may be the outcomes of cultural diplomatic initiatives. It demonstrates this complexity in relation to Australia–China relations. Taking a cultural diplomatic initiative that sought to increase positive association for Chinese culture in the Australian public as a case study, it illustrates the range of differences that can be found amongst stakeholders, and the different roles that may be ascribed to cultural diplomacy. These interests, including those of different artistic and political stakeholders, as well as differences in the publics involved, are best segmented not only according to nation but also to subculture.

KEYWORDS:

• Public diplomacy
• cultural diplomacy
• China–Australia relations
• foreign policy

Introduction

The past few years have seen a period of turbulence in Australia–China relations. In 2017, the western media focused its attention on China’s political interference in the governance of other nations, and has continued to do so (National Endowment for Democracy 2017; Nye 2018). In that same year, Australia was a global example when it became apparent that its political and cultural elites were unduly susceptible to influence by China’s interventions. Medcalf describes Australia in the period between 2016 and 2019 as having gone through a ‘reality check’ in response to a ‘tapestry of activity from political donations and propaganda through to social mobilisation, intimidation of individuals, alleged misuse of academic links, cyber intrusions and espionage’ (2019, 109). Examples of this ‘tapestry of activity’ include Australia banning Chinese telecommunications company Huawei from its communications network, apparently due to fears that it might enable Chinese spying capability in Australia (BBC 2019), and China stopping imports of Australian coal at its Dalian Port, an act that was perceived as economically threatening by some (ABC 2019) and caused the value of the Australian dollar to fall sharply (News 2019).

These events raise important questions about the kinds of interventions that might improve relations, and the ways in which existing fit-for-purpose strategies, such as public diplomacy, serve this particular relationship in this particular era. Little more than a decade ago, public diplomacy appeared to be on the rise as the only way to address the global problems of the twenty-first century (Riordan 2004), and as little as five years ago there were renewed calls to better recognise the role that cultural activities can play in public diplomacy (Zaharna 2012). Yet efforts to identify and articulate both the successes and failures of public, and specifically cultural, diplomacy strategies have proven problematic, particularly as the adoption of newer and faster platforms (e.g. social media) and the involvement of multifarious players (e.g. NGOs, corporations) make assessment and evaluation increasingly complex.

Indeed, how to evaluate public diplomacy initiatives is a question that has vexed researchers almost since the terms associated with public diplomacy were coined. Kings College London’s 2017 report neatly summarised the challenge: ‘On the whole, Soft Power and Cultural Diplomacy are poorly understood, often confused, thought to be good things, lack empirical justification and are a replication of geopolitical power’ (Doeser and Nisbitt 2017, 32). This article joins a chorus of existing arguments that assert that a greater understanding and theorisation of public diplomacy are necessary in order to confidently assess the strategies that are implemented in response to contemporary needs. It argues that one major step towards achieving greater knowledge is recognising the complex and uncertain reception of public diplomatic initiatives, especially those that bring together nations with different, and sometimes opposing, values, as is the case with Australia and China.

The article takes as its case study a seemingly benign and typical example of public diplomacy: an international ballet co-production. The co-production illustrates the two main arguments we advance herein: first, public diplomacy is, by definition, complicated. An international co-production, with diplomatic objectives as a key driver for collaboration, can be both a ‘feel good’ experience and a contentious activity, depending on whose interests it is judged against.

Secondly, a sophisticated theorisation of public diplomacy must account for potential negative consequences. Overly optimistic narratives about the ability of public diplomacy programs to achieve a range of diplomatic aims chronically overlook the complicated contexts in which programming is ultimately developed, designed, delivered and consumed by various experts and publics. As a consequence, both diplomatic stakeholders and programming delivery partners often elide the more difficult tensions of international relations in order to provide a positive account of their efforts.

The article begins by introducing a definition and the expansive scope of public diplomacy and briefly reviews scholarship on existing evaluation practices in the field. The article then outlines the foreign policy context of Australia’s relations with China, before examining the case study of a specific cultural initiative. Co-produced by China’s National Ballet of China (NBC) and the Australian Ballet in 2017, The Red Detachment of Women (hereafter Red Detachment) represented a cultural intervention into a politically fraught environment involving multiple diplomatic stakeholders. The selection of a single initiative as case study allows for a deeper engagement with the different and competing national interests at play, as well as the complexity of varying stakeholder interests, than would be possible with the analysis of a wider scope of public diplomacy activity. The discussion analyses the audience and media responses to Red Detachment, before identifying the ways in which the controversy and uncertainty that characterised the performance’s reception, and the diversity of its target publics, both hindered and, paradoxically, also advanced its achievements as a diplomatic project.

Definitions and scope of public diplomacy

At its simplest, public diplomacy aims to influence international public attitudes and behaviour in the interests of advancing a nation’s international standing and foreign policy aims. It is achieved through efforts such as media engagement, participation in arts and cultural festivals, and educational, scientific or cultural exchanges, each of which can help to build networks and relationships between people of different countries, encourage a better understanding of different cultures, and thereby favourably influence thoughts and behaviour. As a branch of public diplomacy, cultural diplomacy strategies are employed to engage a foreign public through the export of cultural experiences such as performances or language (Cull 2008, 2001). Historically these channels have been directed at elite audiences, who are seen as having influence over public opinion, and have been used to influence long-term public views of a foreign power rather than current affairs (Gilboa 2001, 4) In recent years, these distinctions have become more blurred.

The scope and tasks of public diplomacy are also becoming increasingly complex. Firstly, the business of and responsibility for public diplomacy is not limited to national governments but also assumed by supra-national agencies, sub-national governments, and particularly non-state actors (Cull 2011, 5; Gregory 2011, 353; Melissen 2005). Secondly, where public diplomacy was once predicated on a primarily uni-directional approach, in which one country tried to influence foreign citizens to favour their nation and influence their own government accordingly, public diplomacy increasingly emphasises dialogical modes of communication designed to further the interests of both or multiple parties (Pamment 2014, 53; Cull 2013). It is also a term now used to encompass initiatives exercised within a single country, as a way of positively influencing the attitude of the public toward either a foreign power or their home nation’s foreign policy. Without such positive perceptions at home, a nation ‘may find itself unable to rely on the support of its own citizens in both reaching out to and establishing relationships with people abroad and in responding to situations requiring quick and decided action to counter potentially damaging events’ (Fitzpatrick 2012, 432, 433; see also Melissen 2005, 13). Public diplomacy is now so ubiquitous a tenet of diplomacy that some are reluctant to differentiate it as a distinct category (Gregory 2011, 353).

As the status of public diplomacy and the range of participants involved in its initiatives have increased over time, so too are scholars increasingly aware of a need for further sophistication in such activities, including greater responsiveness to the range and roles of the publics targeted (Fitzpatrick 2012; Zaharna 2011). Different publics for diplomatic actions—the media, political and cultural elites, audiences for public events, for example—all come with different values, interests and networks, and play different roles in relation to those actions. Furthermore, these publics are also dynamic, and the roles they play in relation to a public diplomacy initiative are likely to change as situations evolve and nations adapt to new conditions (Fitzpatrick 2012, 424). ‘Diaspora diplomacy’ provides an illustration of such heterogeneity. Diaspora diplomacy is seen as a means of targeting diasporic communities in order to increase their support for the values and interests of the nation in which they are living, as well as to encourage them to spread positive messages through their international networks that promote the host nation’s image (Carter 2015, 480). But diasporas are heterogeneous and demographically and politically changeable, and flexible and multi-directional migration patterns make it more difficult to clearly distinguish between international and domestic publics. Technological changes—particularly social media—also mean that publics around the world are increasingly powerful and inter-connected, and ‘communication aimed only at its leaders will necessarily fall short’ (Cull 2013, 137). The dynamic nature of the publics potentially influenced by public diplomacy efforts, and the speed at which those publics seek, receive, interpret and spread information, increases the need for timely strategic interventions.

Challenges to evaluation

The deficiencies of existing measures to assess public diplomacy outcomes are widely identified and thoroughly discussed. Banks’ guide to evaluation lists twelve challenges that evaluative practice faces (2011, 12–14). While all of Banks’ challenges are relevant to the case study discussed here, the preference for ‘success stories’, the difficulty—if not impossibility—of attributing change to public diplomacy initiatives, the emphasis on ‘multilateral’ partnership approaches and the confusion between outputs and outcomes (Banks 2011, 12–14) are four that are particularly pertinent. In relation to scholarly assessments of specific public diplomacy initiatives, Gilboa (2008) points out that research has had a historical and empirical focus, and so is limited in its capacity to inform contemporary relations. To an extent, this reflects the fact that public diplomacy strategies are designed to be cumulative and long-term. It may take several years for an initiative to affect a political or trade decision or reshape the perceptions of a nation’s constituency towards the other nation, by which stage it is difficult if not impossible to identify that initiative as contributive (Doeser and Nisbitt 2017, 17). The immediate impact of Australia’s original Colombo Plan, for example, which funded students from neighbouring Asian nations to study in Australian universities from the 1950s to the 1970s, was evident to the students and the communities who encountered each other and established friendships. However, its larger impact became much more evident two or three decades after it began. By this point several of its graduates occupied positions of power in their home countries, and their familiarity with and appreciation of Australia helped to shape their business, political or public relations activities (Byrne and Hall 2013; Lowe 2015, 453).

Another limitation is that public diplomacy literature tends to identify ‘ideal’ initiatives, or to ‘prefer success stories’ (Banks 2011, 14), and rarely even countenances failure. Indeed, there are only a few attempts to define what failure looks like. Banks mentions programs that are ‘ineffective’ (Banks 2011), while Cull (2008) references the case of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, in which the government’s positive messaging was so out of keeping with the realities of the situation at home that it failed to counter that reality. Similar to this example, David Carter points out that the positive story Australia seeks to tell ‘about Australian multiculturalism or Indigenous Australia, for example, can scarcely be told without its other dimensions, the failure of policy, the limits to equality, the histories of racism’ (Carter 2015, 483). In these examples, the scope of failure is restricted to lack of success. If we were to envision existing public diplomacy evaluation as measured by a set of scales, those scales would begin at neutral and end at success, rather than also having the facility to identify negative and retrogressive impacts of misplayed public diplomacy strategies or to recognise that impact is not always linear or mutually acknowledged.

Callahan (2015) makes a similar criticism of limitations to the ways that soft power is often analysed. Scholarship on soft power strategies (using culture, values and norms to achieve policy outcomes as opposed to the ‘stick’ of punitive strategies) too readily accepts the emphasis on ‘attraction’ in Nye’s (2004) definition, and focuses on ‘culture and power as measurable entities’ (Callahan 2015, 216, 217). Callahan argues instead that soft power should be seen as a social construction. In a discussion pertinent to this article’s case study, he argues that in China soft power is principally exercised for the domestic benefit (attracting citizens to their government’s authority and policies) and shows how it can also be exercised negatively. China’s ‘anti-Japanese, anti-American and anti-Western themes seek to build the positive Chinese self through negative exclusion of Otherness’ (Callahan 2015, 217). The aim may be positive from the Communist Party’s point of view—to build internal cohesion—but its message is negative—China’s foes are stupid or evil. This practice of demonising is not consistent with the ethos of contemporary western public diplomacy, which seeks to identify points of mutuality and attraction. Callahan calls for scholarship to question what soft power means in a given context as part of its assessment. Similarly, it is worth interrogating the idea that public diplomacy seeks to achieve the mutual interests of the nations involved, by asking what these interests are and, where they are not mutual, how they are reconciled.

Public diplomacy is often described not only as an end goal, but also as a process (cf. Carter 2015; Doeser and Nisbitt 2017, 16). By providing a platform for showcasing a nation’s talent or by bringing people together, the doing of an activity is as important as its outcome, because when people collaborate, they develop affinities with one another (Bjola 2013, 14). It is also easier to evaluate a process than an impact. While the former considers whether a program was implemented as planned and measures participant satisfaction, an impact evaluation asks whether the program achieved its intent: a positive change in opinion or attitude (Banks 2011, 29) that can be directly attributed to the program. Including both process and outcome into the conception of diplomatic impact also contributes to one of its inherent tautologies: if the implementation of a public diplomacy initiative is in itself evidence of diplomatic achievement, then any (and every) such initiative must be regarded as, at the very least, a partial success. A more nuanced understanding of how the process of enacting an initiative might contribute to its diplomatic impact can be found in the notion that public diplomacy represents responses to uncertainty (McKie and Heath 2016). It is not simply the production and reception of an event, but the way that event allows for, or even provokes, different views to be expressed and considered, that underlines the value of process to potential diplomatic outcomes.

In Sevin’s (2017) terms, public diplomacy evaluation must attend not only to the activity (e.g. a broadcasting strategy) and its outcomes (i.e. achieving foreign policy goals), but also how both are achieved. Sevin identifies ‘pathways of connection’ (2017, 879) which are collectively designed to influence three ‘layers’ within the host nation: public opinion, relationship dynamics and public debates. For example, Sevin’s framework sees public diplomacy shaping public opinion by ‘attracting’ foreign publics to a nation’s values or policies, and engineering ‘benefit of the doubt’ amongst target audiences in relation to a nation’s policy decisions. Sevin notes that ‘a public diplomacy project does not have to focus on only changing the public opinion or relationship dynamics’ (2017, 886) and that the three layers, informed by three distinct schools of thought, ‘might work in conjunction with each other’ (2017, 886). The remainder of this article assesses how a cultural diplomacy initiative was implemented in the context of fraught but important Australia–China relations.

Australia–China relations

The 2017 Commonwealth Government Foreign Affairs White Paper stressed that as Australia’s top-ranked trading partner (Findlay 2011), China is politically and economically important to Australia (Commonwealth of Australia 2017, 40), but Australia is less important as a trading partner to China (Findlay 2011). The White Paper emphasised public diplomacy as a means to strengthen political relations:

Our societies are increasingly connected. Our economic and people-to-people links … provide ballast for our relationship … At times, closer engagement will be accompanied by friction arising from our different interests, values and political and legal systems. Regular and substantive engagement at senior levels will be essential to achieve our ambitions for the relationship. (Commonwealth of Australia 2017, 40)

Yet publicly there is much ambivalence about China in Australia. Australia struggles with questions of how to bridge the gulf between its political values—freedom of expression, democracy, secularism—with the more directive relationship between the state and its citizens that characterises many of its neighbours. As mentioned in the introduction, fears have been raised that the Chinese government unduly influences Australian political, economic and cultural decisions, threatening to violate its claim to sovereignty. These reached a peak in 2017, the year in which The Red Detachment of Women was performed in Melbourne. On 12 December 2017, Labour politician Sam Dastyari resigned from federal parliament in disgrace for having accepted financial gifts from a Chinese businessman whilst also actively representing Chinese business and political interests within his own party deliberations (Remeikis 2017; Patrick 2017). A month earlier, Australian publisher Allen & Unwin cancelled plans to publish Clive Hamilton’s Silent Invasion, following alleged legal threats from China due to Hamilton’s claims that the Chinese Communist Party exercises direct political influence in Australia (Brull 2018). Throughout 2017, universities reported allegations that Chinese students were disruptively representing their home nation’s political interests in their interactions with Australian classes and students, to the extent that then Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop publicly addressed the claims (Benney 2017; Greene and Dziedzic 2017). All of these incidents were regarded as illustrative of a growing media and government concern: the exercise of undue pressure by China on Australia’s internal affairs. Since 2017, the controversy around Huawei, the implications of China’s Belt and Road strategy and the embargo of Australian coal represent the continuation of these anxieties about China’s exercise of power in and against Australia.

It is difficult to assess how deeply felt this sentiment is in Australia. The Lowy Institute’s poll of Australian public sentiment in both 2017 and 2018 found that most Australians see China as representing more of an economic opportunity than a military threat (Lowy 2018). Nonetheless, flashpoints such as those mentioned above receive critical media attention, and suspicion of China’s motives are common in political pronouncements. In his popular essay on Australia’s place in Asia, Australia’s leading scholar of strategic studies, Hugh White explored Australian anxieties about China:

What we fear, and what those who condemn accommodation as appeasement assume, is that [Chinese leaders] plan to impose a harsh and oppressive hegemony which would force fundamental changes to Australia’s political system, social order and economic prospects … But there is no evidence that this is how China’s leaders see things today … They show no desire to proselytise an ideology or export a political system. (White 2017, 67)

Regardless of the real scale of tensions, and reflecting China’s significance as a trading partner, the issues between the two countries have led to Australian investment in public diplomacy strategies aimed at improving relations between the countries, on the grounds that: ‘Collaboration on cultural projects helps build influence and partnerships internationally and creates shared understanding’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2017, 114). Part of the aim of this focus is on reassuring the Australian public, including citizens whose personal or ancestral backgrounds are Chinese, that ‘the national interest can be protected in a way that is inclusive and respectful of the rights of all Australians and not destructive of social cohesion’ (Medcalf 2019, 111). Representing a significant example of ‘paradiplomacy’ at work (Zamorano and Morato 2014), the state of Victoria in south-east Australia has been particularly active and successful in building relations with both the central and provincial Chinese governments on collaborative cultural projects within a diplomacy framework. In 2016, the Victorian State Government and Chinese Culture Minister Luo Shugang signed a five-year cultural exchange agreement. One of the first recipients of these cultural exchange opportunities was the National Ballet of China’s Red Detachment of Women.

The remainder of this article focuses on a modest public diplomatic intervention into a contemporary international relations issue—Australia–China relations. It aims to contribute to public diplomacy theorising by considering the intervention from different perspectives, including those of state powers and political elites, as well as different segments of a nation’s public. Rather than assuming that the fact of a public diplomatic activity constitutes a positive intervention, the discussion of a performance of China’s The Red Detachment of Women in Australia identifies the ways in which the process of implementing the initiative could be seen as negative and/or positive, depending on the perspectives of the stakeholders.

Case study: Red Detachment of Women

The NBC’s Red Detachment was performed in Melbourne in February 2017 in collaboration with four Australian arts organisations: Arts Centre Melbourne, The Australian Ballet, Orchestra Victoria and the Australian Choral Federation. It was part of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts (Asia TOPA), a five-month festival showcasing Asian contemporary arts in Melbourne. Red Detachment is an icon of Communist-era China—one of eight model productions commissioned by Chairman Mao’s wife Jiang Qing as the only productions (opera or ballet) that could be publicly staged in China under Mao’s leadership. First staged in China in 1964, Red Detachment presents the story of Wu Qionghua, a young peasant woman who joins the Red Army during the 1930s to escape persecution from a local landlord. Famous in the West for its performance for President Nixon and Henry Kissinger during their historic visit to China in 1972 (subsequently immortalised in John Adams and Alice Goodman’s 1987 opera Nixon in China), the Cultural-Revolution era ballet is one of the National Ballet’s most popular touring works and recognised internationally as a twentieth-century cultural icon. However, its association with the Cultural Revolution means that it is rarely performed in China now.

Red Detachment was a high-profile event in Melbourne’s season of performing arts. A total of 3990 people attended the four performances over three days at Arts Centre Melbourne. Collaboration between Arts Centre Melbourne and Trade Victoria—the state government’s trade promotion agency—also made sure that performances provided an opportunity for high-level diplomatic and business networking opportunities, with engagement from the Chinese Consulate in Melbourne and individuals and organisations with trade and business relationships in China. Self-reported data from the National Ballet of China and the Australian Ballet identified 237 Australian and 66 Asia-Pacific cultural, diplomatic, government, business, private sector, and sponsored guests and VIPs amongst the audiences for Red Detachment.

Data discussed in this article include media reports and social media commentary on the production, self-reported information provided by the performing arts companies involved, and an audience survey administered by the research team using digital tablets at the end of one performance. The survey captured data by 125 respondents, or 13% of that evening’s audience. The audience survey had a broad scope and sought to collect data about a range of aspects of the audience experience, including demographic data. Of the 125 survey respondents, for example, slightly under 20% identified as Chinese or of Chinese ancestry, including from diasporic Chinese communities in other Asian countries (such as Chinese Singaporean or Chinese Malaysian). The survey was intended to investigate the audience’s appreciation of the production, the extent to which the audience identified it with contemporary China and the ways in which they thought about China as they left the theatre.

Red Detachment was initiated by Australian government and cultural funding agencies as an incoming rather than outgoing diplomatic activity, and sought to have an impact in both Australia and China through the opportunity for Australian trade and diplomatic stakeholders to host visiting delegations. The Asia TOPA festival in which Red Detachment was showcased itself had cultural diplomatic aims and benefited from public funding provided by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and its bilateral councils—including the Australia–China Council—in order to achieve these aims. Within Australia, it sought to lay the groundwork for further collaborations between Asian and Australian artists that would strengthen Australia’s cultural integration in the region and its international association with its Asian counterparts, as well as increase Australian interest in Asian arts. Outwardly, it sought to attract Asian artists and VIPs to collaborate with their Australian equivalents.

The reception of Red Detachment

Media reception

The Australian media response was divided between those who focused on the production’s aesthetic quality, which was generally positive, and those that saw it principally as a form of national expression, which was more negative. Media reviews that focused on its artistic elements emphasised the production’s distinctive visual and aural qualities, the skill of the dancers, and the significance of the work as an important piece of modern dance history. Regarding its particular aesthetic qualities, one critic noted: ‘The sets are glorious, all lucent greens and azures; and the score, performed by Orchestra Victoria, is incredibly lush’ (Fuhrmann 2017). The production was also widely appreciated for the dancers’ high level of technical skill: ‘Performance-wise, the work is unimpeachable … blending ballet with acrobatic feats and slapstick clowning’ (Eckersley 2017). Other reviews noted the historical significance of the production as an iconic work from the canon of modern ballet: ‘The Red Detachment of Women is a fascinating piece of art specifically because it is so enmeshed in the historical epoch that birthed it. [The production] is true to itself and an enthralling ballet that deservedly holds its place as both iconic and controversial’ (Solarsh 2017).

Red Detachment was simultaneously the subject of media debate about the relationship between artistic freedom of expression, human rights history and cultural propaganda. Media reports pointed out that the ballet’s narrative is ‘vigorously unapologetic’ in its celebration of Mao’s political ideology, with characters either ‘evil or courageous’ (Callick 2016) depending on their allegiance to the People’s Liberation Army.

Coverage referred to the vast gulf between Australian and Chinese political ideologies, broader anxiety about twenty-first-century politics and the even more recent climate of simmering public hostility towards Chinese political strategies in 2017:

How the Arts Centre have failed to register what staging this production conveys about its politics is, quite frankly, flabbergasting. … The fact that there appears to be an almost wanton lack of historical awareness, of China’s track record on both Human Rights and freedom of expression, makes Asia TOPA’s decision to present The Red Detachment of Women bad enough. But given the paradigm shift we’re seeing in the current geopolitical landscape, as some of the world’s greatest powers toe the line between popularism and fascism, this ballet is a chilling reminder of the power and purpose of disinformation. (Boon 2017)

Many of the public comments to the media reports agreed:

blood thirsty communist propaganda poorly dressed up as art … We should be hanging our heads in shame that we have allowed this on an Australian stage. I’m sure a ballet celebrating democracy wouldn’t be welcomed by the communist regime in China. (Nina Smythe Asia TOPA Red Detachment Facebook post, 16/2/2017)

The performance sparked protests outside the venue led by Chinese-Australian members of the Embracing Australian Values Alliance (‘the Alliance’), as well as a social media campaign that described the work as ‘fascist’ propaganda (Westwood 2017). A similar reaction notably met the performance of Red Detachment in New York in 2015 (Timm 2015).

Audience reception

A number of sources acknowledged high expectations surrounding the production of Red Detachment. Business and trade organisations (Trade Victoria and the Australia China Business Council) viewed the work, along with other arts productions presented by Asia TOPA, as a means of familiarising Australian audiences with Chinese culture. These organisations were also interested in the opportunity to display that interest to visiting Chinese officials whom they were hosting at the performances. Their hope was that Australian public opinion would respond favourably to Red Detachment and that this would be apparent to the Chinese elites who attended the performances or read about it through the media, thus influencing their ‘minds and attitudes’ (Sevin 2015). However, in practice, the pathways to Red Detachment’s public diplomacy achievements were somewhat vexed.

Certainly, Red Detachment highlighted Australian audiences’ interest in Chinese culture and history. When asked what drew them to the performance, the majority of survey respondents (54%) reported that it was an interest in the history of the culture behind the production more than the opportunity to attend a highly professional and renowned performance (31%) or complimentary media coverage (5%). Red Detachment represented a display of one of China’s ‘attractive cultural assets’ in Sevin’s (2017) terms, to influence Australian public opinion (see Sevin 2017, 888). In the survey of audience members, open-field questions allowed respondents to identify what they enjoyed about the performance. Although some respondents used the questions to express their lack of attraction to the performance,¹ 47% identified artistic talent or professionalism as the major aspect of the performance they enjoyed, and 34% identified factors relating to the spectacle of the event (such as the colour, mass scenes or set design). These aesthetic elements, more than their association with a specific nation or culture, were highlighted in open-field responses to the question ‘What is one thing you liked about the performance?’, which the survey asked in the hope of reducing respondents’ impression to the most significant aspect of their experience. Seventy per cent of responses included statements such as: ‘Very talented dancers and wonderful sets and music’ or ‘Choreography, theatrics and colourful costumes’, while 30% referred to history or culture, such as: ‘Trying to understand the appeal of revolutionary communism’, or: ‘The history of China, role of women and fighting for freedom’. In this sense, the NBC’s production was a ‘prestige gift’ to Victoria in the way Cull suggests: ‘the best that the country has to offer … to a foreign public’ (2011, 126).

Red Detachment also functioned to highlight common values across cultures. One respondent reported finding the Communist propaganda in the ballet ‘intense’ and encouraging of empathy, if not understanding: ‘It made me feel deeply for those today performing as part of a company whereby to truly understand is impossible from an Australian perspective.’ Another respondent identified the ballet’s theme of women’s empowerment as one that is common and enduringly progressive. The company’s Artistic Director, Feng Ying, articulated this aspect in relation to a later tour, arguing that the production’s themes of ‘heroism, women’s untiring struggle for freedom and self-liberation, and strong belief in faith are common emotions that can be understood by all humans’ (quoted in Zhen 2018).

On the whole, however, audience responses framed the Chinese political history represented in the production as exotic rather than familiar, as evident in comments such as: ‘It’s interesting to see the revolution era propaganda posters come to life’ and ‘[I enjoyed] trying to understand the appeal of revolutionary Communism to the Chinese’. As described above, others saw it simply as ‘blood-thirsty Communist propaganda’. When asked the open-field question, ‘What was one thing you did not like about the performance?’, the majority (76%) either did not respond or answered ‘Nothing.’ Yet, 18% noted a certain unease with the politics behind the production (for example, ‘Uncomfortable with the political implications’ or simply ‘Propaganda’ or ‘Controversial’), compared to 6% who commented on aspects of the aesthetics (for example, ‘The young male dancers are weaker than the girls’ or ‘The opening scene was dark’). Those who expressed discomfort with the politics behind the production provide an interesting counter-story to Cull’s (2011) taxonomy of theatre-as-cultural-diplomacy strategies, which points to the fact that a ‘self-confident’ (democratic) nation will ‘even show works that are explicitly critical of its life’ in order to build a reputation for the nation as ‘honest and trustworthy’ (Cull 2011, 126). China’s reliance on romanticised representations of its revolutionary past in this instance generated distrust amongst some respondents. Respondents were evidently not all moved to give China the ‘benefit of the doubt’ (Sevin 2017). They were, however, moved by the performance to think differently about Chinese people, with 48% of respondents responding to the open-field statement ‘Will this performance change your perspective on … ’ with the response ‘People from this culture’.

Red Detachment of Women as public diplomacy

While ‘attracting’ and causing audiences to give China the ‘benefit of the doubt’ may have represented Australia’s interests, these impacts may not have been so important to China. From Beijing’s point of view, the Australian media reception to Red Detachment, both positive and negative, can be framed as a clear success. The ‘vigorously unapologetic’ production was an unabashed display of China’s power, and one which was arguably designed to impress China’s own visiting elite, as much as if not more than Australia’s, even whilst bridging the present and the past to display the enduring nature of Chinese identity (Callahan 2015, 219). If China views diplomacy as a ‘fierce competition between leaders who win or lose face for the nations they embody’ (Bjola 2013, 13), then the production of Red Detachment was undoubtedly a win—albeit a modest one—for China.

Red Detachment demonstrates, then, that conceptions of public diplomacy as a strategy to simply advance mutual interests may not be useful. It also reveals the limitation of evaluation frameworks that rely on positive terminology, such as ‘attraction’ and ‘benefit of the doubt’. Where the interests of nations whose values—including the perceived value of public diplomacy—diverge from those of western democratic states, such indicators do not necessarily apply. It also highlights the importance of recognising the complexity of ambitions driving an initiative. Furthermore, adopting Callahan’s (2015) view that China uses soft power to influence its own people more than to build foreign favour, the export of Red Detachment and media stories of its acclaim may be seen as a strategy to reinforce China’s seeming international cultural excellence amongst its own people. From China’s point of view, it may not have been intended as a strategy for improving relations with Australia, so much as a strategy of domestic propaganda.

But while Australia and China may not have identified the same preferred outcomes for the production, this is not to say that Australia ‘lost’ where China ‘won’. From the perspective of Australia’s interests in safeguarding trade with China, the Alliance protests threatened to display more Australian public hostility than warmth towards visiting Chinese diplomatic and trade representatives, and this was certainly not in the national interests that the Australian Government White Paper asserted. But the protests also provided an opportunity for another, somewhat unexpected, route to positively influence the attitudes of elites. Australian festival organisers needed to work with the Chinese Consulate in Melbourne to outline a strategy to manage the production and the protests. This involved cancelling the Victorian Premier’s speech to the audience and bringing Chinese VIPs into the venue through a separate entrance to avoid the protests. The response by organisers demonstrated that they seriously considered the safety of the Chinese VIPs and acted to avoid any harm to the visitors, while also defending the quintessentially Australian right of the Alliance to hold a peaceful protest—its freedom of expression. It demonstrated to Chinese diplomatic and trade stakeholders, as well as their Australian counterparts, that the organisations involved understood and respected the inalienable values of the two national cultures. The production became a balancing act between ensuring the security of the organisers, performers and audiences, whilst also maintaining the freedom of expression the performance represented. In this sense, the management of the protest provided an opportunity for positive public diplomatic encounters between stakeholders—the festival organiser, the Chinese consulate, the protesters—beyond the performance itself. This is an example of the process of a cultural diplomatic initiative indeed contributing to the diplomatic outcome, although in a less direct and automatically positive sense than the literature suggests: it is not the easy bringing together of different cultures to learn about one another that took place, but rather, the two cultures addressing points of difference of disagreement.

If careful conflict management was one outcome of the controversy over Red Detachment, greater recognition of the complexity of diaspora diplomacy was another, and one that is as revealing of complexity as the first. Melissen observes that the ‘elusiveness and apparent unpredictability of public groups’ often baffles diplomats (2005, 24). Protests over Red Detachment drew particular attention to the fractured nature of China’s diasporic communities. Australia has received several substantial waves of migration since the final abolition of the Immigration Restriction Act or ‘White Australia Policy’ in 1966. Politically motivated emigration from China was a response to the student protests of 1989, after which 45,000 Chinese citizens in Australia applied for asylum, becoming the largest migration intake in Australian history (Gao 2009). By the 2000s, migration was largely driven by newly affluent Chinese families aiming to improve their quality of life. In the decade between 2001/02 and 2009/10, the number of Chinese arrivals rose from nearly 7000 to nearly 17,000 (Findlay 2011). While Chinese-Australians of the 1990s largely seek to distance themselves from pro-Maoist ideology and are alarmed by China’s increasingly celebratory references to this history, immigrants of the second wave are more likely to be apolitical about China and culturally nostalgic. There is therefore no one, unified Melbourne Chinese community, a fact that highlights an inherent risk of public diplomacy: ‘one person’s masterpiece can be another’s blasphemy’ (Doeser and Nisbitt 2017, 20). One audience member suggested that the choice to perform Red Detachment in Melbourne was a display of China’s contempt for its politically driven diaspora, by celebrating the very ideology they had escaped from.

One of the longer term domestic outcomes of Red Detachment may be that arts organisations—both those that were directly involved in negotiating between the different parties, and those across the larger sector that benefitted from information-sharing—are now more sensitive to the complexity and diversity within Australia’s different ethnic minority cultures. The entry of non-government players into public diplomacy ‘does not necessarily mean good things will happen’ (Gregory 2011, 360). If understanding the public is a necessary precondition for successful public diplomacy (Gregory 2011, 355), then the learnings associated with the protests may well make arts organisations better diplomats.

The final, and arguably most significant, finding about the role of controversy in achieving diplomatic outcomes in the case of Red Detachment is that cultural events provide opportunities for expressions of uncertainty about the implications of international events within the public domain. Within the context of numerous Australia–China tensions in 2017, the ballet performance provided an opportunity for the public to consider and express their understanding of the relationship. In some cases, this expression was hyperbolic and hostile, such as the media report that suggested its deliberate strategy was apparent in the fact ‘that in precisely the period that China has been ratcheting up its claims on the South China Sea, the National Ballet Company of China has been performing The Red Detachment of Women on one international stage after another’ (Finnane 2017). In other cases, it was deeply empathetic and protective of the sensitivities of Chinese Australians, such as the audience survey respondent who said ‘I felt like a production promoting one of the reasons that many Chinese migrants are living in Australia was a strange choice [for the festival organisers to program]’. In both cases, the production allowed for public consideration of international political tensions in the relatively safe forum of a theatre venue.

Conclusion

The Melbourne production of Red Detachment of Women draws attention to the complexity in cultural diplomacy that is under-recognised in theoretical literature and evaluation practices. Such complexity includes the issue of potentially opposing aims of stakeholders, as well as the diversity of their publics, both abroad and at home. This article has argued that theories of cultural diplomacy and assessments of initiatives need to consider the multiple and competing objectives, diverse publics and controversial receptions that cultural diplomatic initiatives may bring to light.

By considering in depth a single diplomatic intervention into Australia’s relations with China, the article has provided insights into the complexity and controversy that will arguably accompany any significant impactful cultural engagement between the two countries. Given that the practice of diplomacy increasingly relies on public and cultural diplomatic activities in which non-state actors play a leading role, these insights are instructive. Red Detachment was a ‘win’ for China in its objective of exhibiting enduring national strength, whilst also for Australia in its desire to demonstrate Australia’s commitment to freedom of expression and inclusivity. This illustrates that very different objectives can be met simultaneously. Red Detachment also drew attention to Australia’s diverse Chinese communities, giving the Australian producers the opportunity to learn about the politics of this diversity and to find ways to accommodate it. All of these responses to the production reveal complexity, controversy and ambivalence, characteristics that may well be the defining characteristics of twenty-first-century public diplomacy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research is associated with an evaluation project that was made possible with the support of the Australian Government through the Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade and the Department of Communications and the Arts, and the City of Melbourne's Smart City Research Team.

Notes on contributors

Katya Johanson

A/Professor Katya Johanson is Associate Dean (Partnerships and International) for the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University, a researcher in the School of Communication and Creative Arts and co-founder of Cultural Impact Projects, a research group that addresses the social and cultural impact of arts and cultural initiatives. Her research on cultural policy, arts and national identity, and audience behaviour has been published in the International Journal of Cultural Policy, Poetics and Cultural Trends.

Amanda Coles

Dr Amanda Coles is cross-appointed to the Arts and Cultural Management, and Employment Relations graduate programs in the Faculty of Business and Law at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Amanda’s research examines public policy for the cultural economy. She holds a PhD in Comparative Public Policy from McMaster University, and is a Co-Researcher with Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalisation and Work (CRIMT) based in Montreal, Canada.

Hilary Glow

Associate Professor Hilary Glow is Director of the Arts and Cultural Management Program and co-founder (with Dr Katya Johanson) of Cultural Impact Projects a research group that brings together academics from diverse fields to address the issue of the impact of arts and cultural practices. Glow’s research is in the areas of arts and cultural impact, audience engagement, evaluation processes for arts organisations, the impact of arts programs on people’s views of cultural diversity, barriers to arts attendance, and audience measures of artistic quality.

Caitlin Vincent

Dr Caitlin Vincent is a researcher and academic in the cultural and creative industries. Her areas of interest include digital technology, creative workforces and labour, organisational management, and gender and diversity. Dr Vincent has published across digital performance, scenography, gender studies, employment, and public diplomacy. In 2019, she was appointed Lecturer in Creative Industries at the University of Melbourne and an affiliate member of the Centre for People, Organisation and Work at RMIT University.

Notes

1 One response reflected on the cause of what they considered to be poor artistry: ‘I was so disappointed that it was so pantomime in its choreography and storytelling, and that the music was so crudely western … So in the end, what was so powerful about the production was how clearly evident that the political upheaval of that time so utterly destroyed and devastated a country’s rich cultural history’.