Last night I had the opportunity to attend a talk held at Asia Society between Orville Schell, Roderick MacFarquhar, and Ian Johnson on the future of China's political model. The three men, to put it mildly, possess an enormous reservoir of knowledge of China, and their insights into the country's politics were very interesting indeed.
One subject that the three brought up was China's soft power, or to be precise, its relative lack of it. For those who have better things to do than study international relations theory, "soft power" refers to a country's influence that isn't diplomatic, economic, or military ("hard power" in other words). For example, the U-571 submarine was once part of Germany's hard power. The Hollywood film U-571, in contrast, is part of America's soft power.
China has the world's second largest economy, strong and growing military clout, and diplomatic influence beyond its own backyard. When asked to cite examples of its soft power, Johnson came up with the many Confucius Institutes scattered throughout the world, while Schell mentioned the large and growing number of people worldwide who study Chinese. I can think of a few others that they didn't mention. There's Chinese food, for one. Kung fu. Calligraphy, as studied independently of the language itself. For the philosophical types there's Taoism and Confucianism.
What's interesting about these examples, though, is that they're relics of ancient Chinese civilization. Examples of soft power from contemporary China are less obvious. China doesn't have a Google, Sony, Daewoo, Maersk, Christie's, or Tata. Falun Gong, an indigenous Chinese spiritual movement, is strictly forbidden in the country. Many of China's best writers are exiled, best artists are hounded by the police, and bravest political thinkers are imprisoned. China's best basketball players are selected due to their height, plucked from school, and groomed in state-run academies.
It's tempting to dismiss these issues by saying that in a developing country with huge environmental and demographic problems, soft power isn't important. Nobody cares that Laos, for example, is short on it. But Beijing has clearly made a concerted effort to promote its soft power. Just consider the incident involving English-language broadcaster Yang Rui, which I discussed in an earlier post. CCTV News was designed to be China's answer to al Jazeera. Instead, it has turned into just another vehicle for state-fed propaganda.
China's experiment with authoritarian state capitalism has had many successes, to be sure. It is a very good system for driving investment-led growth, for implementing huge infrastructure projects, and for transforming a destitute agricultural society into a manufacturing giant. Where it fails is in nurturing innovation, artistic expression, and world-class brands. In short, the secret to China's success in accumulating hard power is the very reason why its soft power lags so far behind.
