Volume 4,Issue 3
Trust Reconstruction and Precision Communication: Research on Artificial Intelligence Empowering China's Enhancement of Cultural Soft Power towards ASEAN
China's economic and trade cooperation with ASEAN continues to deepen, but a corresponding depth of cultural identification has yet to emerge at the societal level. The resulting 'proximity without intimacy' trust gap has become a core challenge constraining bilateral people-to-people exchanges. This dilemma is not caused by a lack of information but rather by four kinds of cultural adaptation failures across symbol encoding, communication models, media platforms and affective structures, which prevent traditional communication paths from balancing the depth of cultural translation with the breadth required for mass reach. The distinctive technical properties of artificial intelligence offer a unique opportunity to break through this structural bottleneck. This study conceptualizes AI as a non‑human actant in cross‑cultural meaning‑production networks and proposes that AI bridges symbolic, contextual and affective distances through semantic, contextual and emotional negotiation mechanisms. These mechanisms follow a progressive logic of cognitive trust, affective trust and trust accumulation: AI establishes credibility through cultural accuracy, fosters intimacy through personalized interaction, and deepens trust through sustained presence while shifting trust from the human–machine relationship to the content itself. However, challenges such as model hallucinations and algorithmic bias mean that realising the trust-building potential of AI requires human-machine collaboration. This paper provides a theoretical framework and reference for China’s precision communication with ASEAN.
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