Symbolic Reception of a Chinese Railway Narrative without Communicative Deployment: Evidence from Egyptian Technical Personnel

Abstract

Research on host-country perception of Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure frequently conflates media discourse, public attitudes, and communicative action, inferring shifts in perception from documented shifts in discourse. Drawing on Peirce’s distinction between the immediate object and the dynamic interpretant, this study separates three sequential steps in symbolic transfer, namely reception, evaluation, and deployment, and measures each among graduates of a talent cultivation program serving Egypt’s 10th of Ramadan Light Rail Transit, one of the flagship projects of China-Egypt cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative (N = 38). Reception converged strongly, with the median respondent giving identical answers across all reception items, while evaluation did not inherit that convergence, dividing along independent dimensions and shifting with elicitation mode. Deployment followed from neither step: the most strongly endorsed proposition was selected by 7.9% of respondents as the claim fellow citizens would receive most favourably, against 68.4% for technological and utilitarian claims. Endorsement therefore does not entail advocacy, revealing a discontinuity that existing soft power and prosumption accounts leave unmodelled. The findings also call for a reconsideration of instruments constructed from media-derived categories, as they may capture the salience of an international rather than a locally grounded agenda. Current provision in vocational education programs supporting such projects, in turn, appears to cultivate symbolic endorsement without developing the capacity to re-encode it for external audiences, indicating a gap that could be addressed through curriculum design.