Professor Zou Sheng secures RGC grant to decode France-China diplomacy in the digital era

We are pleased to announce that Professor Zou Sheng from the Department of Journalism, School of Communication, has been awarded funding of approximately HK$1.7 million under the French National Research Agency (ANR)/RGC Joint Research Scheme. The grant supports his collaborative project, “Transforming France-China Public Diplomacy and Reputation Management in the Digital Era: Policy Shifts, Communication Strategies, and Impact Exploration”.

Professor Zou's funded project seeks to present an in-depth comparative analysis of French and Chinese digital public diplomacy, with a special focus on AI as a contested terrain. It examines at once the two countries' cooperation and their competition in AI leadership and innovation. Utilizing a set of qualitative and quantitative methods—including in-depth interviews and computational analysis — the research team will map out the key actors in digital public diplomacy, their messaging, as well as the public reception, both online and offline.

The project's outcomes will be of value to academics, decision-makers, policy practitioners, and interested stakeholders and citizens both within and beyond France and China.

Professor Zou Sheng is an interdisciplinary media scholar whose research interests span such areas as critical theory, political communication, digital media and society, cultural industries, and global communication. Through comparative and transnational perspectives, his current work explores the politics of cultural production, aesthetic approaches to popular propaganda, the ethics of emerging technologies in social governance, and non-Western algorithmic cultures/imaginaries.

The French National Research Agency (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) and the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong Joint Research Scheme (JRS) aim to strengthen collaboration between the French and Hong Kong research communities.

We congratulate Professor Zou on this achievement, which exemplifies HKBU's commitment to pioneering, interdisciplinary research that facilitates the understanding of contemporary international relations.