Abstract:

It is one of the aims of a country’s external communication to win the identification of the outside world, and empathy rhetoric can serve as an indispensable means to effectively gain external identification. Empathy rhetoric takes the audience’s emotions and perceptions into account and adds a humanistic ingredient to the serious international exchange intertwined with interests, attempting to balance the role of “emotion” and “reason” in the construction of the external identification of a country and to give full play to the pro-social behavioral attributes of empathy. Such pro-social attributes motivate the rhetor to facilitate an unbiased understanding of the audience, to create a good rhetorical atmosphere for the construction of the external identification of the country the rhetor lives in, and to generate friendly emotions and thus gain common interests through empathy rhetoric.

Key words: external identification of a country, empathy rhetoric, national image, external communication, diplomatic discourse