MCLC: what China and Russia don't get about soft power

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anne Henochowicz <anne at chinadigitaltimes.net>
Subject: what China and Russia don't get about soft power
***************************************************************

Source: Foreign Policy (4/29/13):
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/29/what_china_and_russia_don_
t_get_about_soft_power

What China and Russia Don't Get About Soft Power
Beijing and Moscow are trying their hands at attraction, and failing --
miserably.
BY JOSEPH S. NYE 

When Foreign Policy first published my essay "Soft Power"
<http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1148580?uid=2&uid=4&sid=211021031121
11> in 1990, who would have expected that someday the term would be used
by the likes of Hu Jintao or Vladimir Putin? Yet Hu told the Chinese
Communist Party in 2007 that China needed to increase its soft power, and
Putin recently urged Russian diplomats to apply soft power more
extensively. Neither leader, however, seems to have understood how to
accomplish his goals.

Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes one wants, and
that can be accomplished in three main ways -- by coercion, payment, or
attraction. If you can add the soft power of attraction to your toolkit,
you can economize on carrots and sticks. For a rising power like China
whose growing economic and military might frightens its neighbors into
counter-balancing coalitions, a smart strategy includes soft power to make
China look less frightening and the balancing coalitions less effective.
For a declining power like Russia (or Britain before it), a residual soft
power helps to cushion the fall.

The soft power of a country rests primarily on three resources: its
culture (in places where it is attractive to others), its political values
(when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies
(when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority). But
combining these resources is not always easy.

Establishing, say, a Confucius Institute in Manila to teach Chinese
culture might help produce soft power, but it is less likely to do so in a
context where China has just bullied the Philippines over possession of
Scarborough Reef. Similarly, Putin has told his diplomats that "the
priority has been shifting to the literate use of soft power,
strengthening positions of the Russian language," but as Russian scholar
Sergei Karaganov noted in the aftermath of the dispute with Georgia,
Russia has to use "hard power, including military force, because it lives
in a much more dangerous world ... and because it has little soft power --
that is, social, cultural, political and economic attractiveness."

Much of America's soft power is produced by civil society -- everything
from universities and foundations to Hollywood and pop culture -- not from
the government. Sometimes the United States is able to preserve a degree
of soft power because of its critical and uncensored civil society even
when government actions -- like the invasion of Iraq -- are otherwise
undermining it. But in a smart power strategy, hard and soft reinforce
each other.

In his new book, China Goes Global, George Washington University's David
Shambaugh shows how China has spent billions of dollars on a charm
offensive to increase its soft power. Chinese aid programs to Africa and
Latin America are not limited by the institutional or human rights
concerns that constrain Western aid. The Chinese style emphasizes
high-profile gestures. But for all its efforts, China has earned a limited
return on its investment. Polls show that opinions of China's influence
are positive in much of Africa and Latin America, but predominantly
negative in the United States, Europe, as well as India, Japan and South
Korea.

Even China's soft-power triumphs, such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics, have
quickly turned stale. Not long after the last international athletes had
departed, China's domestic crackdown on human rights activists undercut
its soft power gains. Again in 2009, the Shanghai Expo was a great
success, but it was followed by the jailing of Nobel Peace Laureate Liu
Xiaobo and screens were dominated by scenes of an empty chair at the Oslo
ceremonies. Putin might likewise count on a soft power boost from the
Sochi Olympics, but if he continues to repress dissent, he, too, is likely
to step on his own message.

China and Russia make the mistake of thinking that government is the main
instrument of soft power. In today's world, information is not scarce but
attention is, and attention depends on credibility. Government propaganda
is rarely credible. The best propaganda is not propaganda. For all the
efforts to turn Xinhua and China Central Television into competitors to
CNN and the BBC, there is little international audience for brittle
propaganda. As the Economistnoted about China, "the party has not bought
into Mr. Nye's view that soft power springs largely from individuals, the
private sector, and civil society. So the government has taken to
promoting ancient cultural icons whom it thinks might have global appeal."
But soft power doesn't work that way. As Pang Zhongying of Renmin
University put it, it highlights "a poverty of thought" among Chinese
leaders.

The development of soft power need not be a zero-sum game. All countries
can gain from finding each other attractive. But for China and Russia to
succeed, they will need to match words and deeds in their policies, be
self-critical, and unleash the full talents of their civil societies.
Unfortunately, that is not about to happen soon.