MCLC: why China is weak on soft power

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anne Henochowicz <annemh at alumni.upenn.edu>
Subject: why China is weak on soft power
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (1/17/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/opinion/why-china-is-weak-on-soft-power.h
tml

Why China Is Weak on Soft Power
By JOSEPH S. NYE JR.

China¹s president, Hu Jintao, greeted 2012 with an important essay warning
that China was being battered by Western culture: ³We must clearly see
that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of
Westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are
the focal areas of their long-term infiltration,² he wrote, adding that
³the international culture of the West is strong while we are weak.²

Essentially, Hu was saying that China was under assault by Western soft
power ‹ the ability to produce outcomes through persuasion and attraction
rather than coercion or payment ‹ and needed to fight back.

Over the past decade, China¹s economic and military might has grown
impressively, and this has frightened its neighbors into looking for
allies to balance rising Chinese hard power. But if a country can also
increase its soft power, its neighbors feel less need to seek balancing
alliances. For example, Canada and Mexico do not seek alliances with China
to balance American power the way Asian countries seek an American
presence to balance China.

Already in 2007, Hu told the 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party
that China needed to invest more in its soft power resources. Accordingly,
China is spending billions of dollars on a charm offensive.

The Chinese style emphasizes high-profile gestures, such as rebuilding the
Cambodian Parliament or Mozambique¹s Foreign Affairs Ministry. The
elaborately staged 2008 Beijing Olympics enhanced China¹s reputation, and
the 2010 Shanghai Expo attracted more than 70 million visitors. The Boao
Forum for Asia on Hainan Island attracts nearly 2,000 Asian politicians
and business leaders to what is billed as an ³Asian Davos.² And Chinese
aid programs to Africa and Latin America are not limited by the
institutional or human rights concerns that constrain Western aid.

China has always had an attractive traditional culture, and now it has
created several hundred Confucius Institutes around the world to teach its
language and culture. The enrollment of foreign students in China has
increased from 36,000 a decade ago to at least 240,000 in 2010, and while
the Voice of America was cutting its Chinese broadcasts, China Radio
International was increasing its broadcasts in English to 24 hours a day.

In 2009, Beijing announced plans to spend billions of dollars to develop
global media giants to compete with Bloomberg, Time Warner and Viacom.
China invested $8.9 billion in external publicity work, including a
24-hour Xinhua cable news channel designed to imitate Al Jazeera.

Beijing has also raised defenses. It limits foreign films to only 20 per
year, subsidizes Chinese companies creating cultural products, and has
restricted Chinese television shows that are imitations of Western
entertainment programs.

But for all its efforts, China has had a limited return on its investment.
A recent BBC poll shows that opinions of China¹s influence are positive in
much of Africa and Latin America, but predominantly negative in the United
States and Europe, as well as in India, Japan and South Korea. A poll
taken in Asia after the Beijing Olympics found that China¹s charm
offensive had been ineffective.

What China seems not to appreciate is that using culture and narrative to
create soft power is not easy when they are inconsistent with domestic
realities.

The 2008 Olympics were a success, but shortly afterwards, China¹s domestic
crackdown in Tibet and Xianjiang, and on human rights activists, undercut
its soft power gains. The Shanghai Expo was also a great success, but was
followed by the jailing of the Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo and the
artist Ai Weiwei. And for all the efforts to turn Xinhua and China Central
Television into competitors for CNN and the BBC, there is little
international audience for brittle propaganda.

Now, in the aftermath of the Middle East revolutions, China is clamping
down on the Internet and jailing human rights lawyers, once again
torpedoing its soft power campaign.

As Han Han, a novelist and popular blogger, argued in December, ³the
restriction on cultural activities makes it impossible for China to
influence literature and cinema on a global basis or for us culturati to
raise our heads up proud.²

The development of soft power need not be a zero sum game. All countries
can gain from finding attraction in one anothers¹ cultures. But for China
to succeed, it will need to unleash the talents of its civil society.
Unfortunately, that does not seem about to happen soon.

Joseph S. Nye Jr. is a professor at Harvard and the author, most recently,
of ³The Future of Power.²