Soft Power, America vs. China: America Still Wins

China is engaged in a soft-power war with America and the West. America may not have noticed this, but China has. While America takes its soft power around the world for granted, China struggles to win even the “hearts and minds” of its own citizens.

“Soft power” is defined by Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye as “the ability to get what one wants by attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment.” In contrast, “hard power” refers to a nation’s economic and military might. As Nye writes in reference to China: “Great powers try to use culture and narrative to create soft power that promotes their national interests, but it’s not an easy sell when the message is inconsistent with their domestic realities.” Due to this inconsistency with domestic realities, and due to top-down government control over all of China’s cultural production and soft-power activities around the world, according to Nye, China suffers a “soft-power deficit” that will be difficult to overcome.

China’s “soft-power deficit” has been discussed elsewhere by Nye and others. Arthur Guschin focused on “the incompatibility of the core audience in Western countries and the information product of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.” As Guschin observed, Western audiences are unlikely to be swayed by mass media material featuring “Chinese culture and language with ideologically driven news” controlled and censored by the Chinese government. Chinese academic Qiao Mu likewise commented that “government-funded efforts to promote Chinese culture overseas had failed because they were often viewed as propaganda.” When it comes to soft power, as I wrote in a recent article at the Asia Times, “China still just doesn’t get it.” Due to government censorship, top-down control, and the inconsistency of its message with domestic realities, China’s efforts to build itself “into a socialist cultural superpower” have met with little success.

Chinese culture has considerable global influence, but this influence mostly comes from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Chinese American community in the United States, and other Chinese communities outside of mainland China. Mainland China contributes comparatively little to the world’s appreciation of Chinese culture. As much as anyone may appreciate Chinese food, Chinese martial arts, Chinese philosophy, or a Chinese New Year parade, mainland China’s global image remains overwhelmingly negative. Mainland China has produced a bumper crop of excellent film directors, but those directors usually become world-famous only after their films are banned in mainland China. Mainland China has also produced a bumper crop of award-winning intellectuals, but most of those are either sitting in Chinese prisons or in exile abroad. The most popular label for any mainland Chinese cultural product is not “Made in China,” but “Banned in China.”

Mainland China suffers a “soft-power deficit” not only abroad, but also at home. Even in mainland China, the official mainland version of “Chinese culture” is not very popular. American and Western culture, however, are immensely popular, particularly among young people.

In the more than five years I have spent teaching in China, young Chinese people with whom I have spoken show remarkably little interest in mainland Chinese films, television shows, or popular music, and remarkably strong interest in American and Western cultural offerings. My Chinese students enjoy American movies, television, and pop music because they find these more interesting and imaginative than anything the Chinese government allows to be produced in China. Few of my students express any interest whatsoever in government-censored Chinese offerings. Don’t ask me why, but apparently Miley Cyrus twerking is more fun for Chinese 18-year-olds to see than the Long March re-enacted by a People’s Liberation Army patriotic Chinese opera troupe. And for some reason, online TV coverage of the 2012 U.S. presidential election was more interesting for my Chinese postgraduate students to watch than Chinese TV coverage of a simultaneous change of Chinese leadership in which the Chinese people had no say and the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Go figure.

The Chinese government is aware of this, and doesn’t like it one bit. As I wrote in a recent post at Foreign Policy Blogs, the Chinese Communist Party sees Western cultural influence in China as a threat to its hold on power. This post includes several recent statements by Communist Party leaders on the threat of American and Western cultural influence particularly on young people in China. These statements feature the obsessive and repetitive use of Communist Party buzzwords and catch-phrases such as “Western hostile forces” (西方敌对势力) and Western “cultural infiltration” (文化渗透) as threats to China’s “ideological security” (意识形态安全) necessitating intensified “ideological work” (思想工作) and proper “guidance of public opinion” (舆论导向).

The Communist Party’s fear of American and Western cultural influence in China is typified by a party statement from July 2012. The statement contends that China is engaged in a soft-power war with the West, especially the United States — an “ideological struggle” (意识形态斗争) and “competition in overall national strength” (国家综合国力竞争) which it describes as a “war without smoke” (无硝烟战争). Then the statement goes on to accuse “Western hostile forces” of “cultural infiltration” and threatening China’s “ideological security.” Its enemies list includes major U.S. news organizations, Hollywood movies, and U.S. programs and charitable foundations such as the Fulbright program, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which sponsor educational and cultural programs with China. The soft-power war this statement described was not a war for global influence, but a war for the “hearts and minds” of China’s own citizens.

This statement and others like it are very revealing as to how the Communist Party views China’s relations with the West and with Western culture. For Communist Party leaders, the influence of Western culture and Western democratic ideas in China are an object of fear. Lacking soft power even among its own citizens — particularly its young people — how can China expect to win any soft-power contest with America and the West internationally?

Image credit: American Culture.