Chinese Soft Power Research Articles

Thinking Hard About Soft Power: A Review and Critique of the Literature on China and Soft Power

This article critically reviews the literature on China and soft power. Among other themes, it tackles the conceptualization and operationalization of soft power, measurement of the effectiveness of Chinese soft power, and the analysis of variables that intervene between China's soft-power tools, realized images, and policy influence results.

Nation Branding as Nation Building: China’s Image Campaign

This paper illustrates the links between China’s nation building exercises and its efforts to promote the country as a ‘brand’. By using the examples of the Shanghai Expo, China’s national image films and the revival of Confucius, I show how Chinese soft power is both inward and outward looking. Understanding this dual role of soft power is important in comprehending the underlying motivations behind China’s attempts to create and manage its identity as orderly, prosperous and legitimate.

Paper Tiger? Chinese Soft Power in East Asia

Journal Article Paper Tiger? Chinese Soft Power in East Asia Get access Gregory G. Holyk Gregory G. Holyk GREGORY G. HOLYK is a visiting assistant professor of politics at Washington and Lee University and a survey consultant for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Shortly, he will begin as a survey analyst for Langer Research Associates, the main survey research provider for ABC News and The Washington Post. He has published articles on public opinion in Public Opinion Quarterly and The International Journal of Public Opinion Research. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 126, Issue 2, Summer 2011, Pages 223–254, https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-165X.2011.tb00700.x Published: 15 February 2013

China's ‘soft power’ in Africa?

Beijing's political ‘charm offensive’ in Africa has ostensibly made China a major player on the continent. The source of this success in China's African policy is sometimes seen in China's political and economic ‘attractiveness’. It is true that China is building a positive image targeted to the audience in Africa, promoting for example the vision of ‘win-win’ mutual economic benefits from cooperation. This endeavour is close to the concept of ‘soft power’. However, soft power is about dynamic relationships between an agent and the subject of attraction. Hence, the general growth of Chinese soft power and its success depends not only on whether China can sell its image to African states, but also whether African states are willing to buy this.

The evaluation and implication on Chinese Soft Power - focusing on the result of international public opinion poll -

The evaluation and implication on Chinese Soft Power - focusing on the result of international public opinion poll -

Public diplomacy games: a comparative study of American and Japanese responses to the interplay of nationalism, ideology and Chinese soft power strategies around the 2008 Beijing Olympics

The Olympic Games are global communication events that offer host-nations the unique opportunity to promote a soft power agenda by allowing them to construct global messages about their cultural identities and work towards public diplomacy goals that may be more difficult to achieve under normal circumstances. At the same time, however, the Olympics accentuate nationalist and patriotic sentiment, especially in host-nations. Nationalist conviction must be conceptually differentiated from support for the national government. Indeed, we suggest that one of the tasks of governments of Olympic host cities is to manage strong nationalist emotions in order that they support the public diplomacy efforts associated with the Olympic Games. In this paper, American and Japanese media responses to the interplay of China's 2008 Olympics public diplomacy efforts and Chinese nationalism are comparatively analyzed for each of three periods: 1) the international torch relay; 2) the 2008 Sichuan earthquake; 3) the Olympic Games. Our findings suggest that in the West, the Chinese nationalism that was prompted by a controversial torch relay overpowered other aspects of the Games and that thus the Olympic Games ultimately gave new power to familiar discourses emphasizing a fear of China. In Japan, on the other hand, the Olympics presented modest, albeit important, new opportunities to test and promote positive portrayals of Sino-Japanese relations

China's “Soft” Naval Power in the Indian Ocean

For the past several years, Beijing has been attempting to “shape” the diplomatic and strategic environment in maritime Asia, projecting an image of itself as an innately trustworthy great power. As a part of this public relations campaign, Chinese leaders have retailed the story of Zheng He, the Ming Dynasty eunuch admiral who voyaged to destinations throughout the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean six centuries ago. They have touted the feats of Zheng He, who sojourned in maritime Asia without attempting military conquest, as a metaphor for China's current peaceful ascent in the maritime domain. In doing so, Beijing hopes to convince key audiences in Southeast Asia and South Asia that it remains pacific in outlook – and thus can be counted on not to abuse the sea power it is amassing. An attractive vision of China, they hope, will avert the tendency of regional states to band together to balance Chinese power.Until now, Chinese diplomats have had the luxury of telling their story how they wanted to, as deployments of China's naval forces beyond East Asia remained abstract. Beijing neither saw the need nor boasted the capacity to maintain strong forces far from Chinese shores. However, the headline‐grabbing dispatch of two destroyers and a combat logistics ship to the Gulf of Aden on counter‐piracy duty in late 2008 has put China squarely in the spotlight. By depicting itself as an inherently defensive power, China has set a high standard for its behavior at sea. Fellow Asian powers will hold Beijing to this lofty benchmark – measuring its actions against the storyline Chinese leaders have developed around Zheng He's voyages.Beijing's anti‐piracy mission thus offers an ideal opportunity to empirically test the efficacy of Chinese soft power at sea. To this end, this paper explores the motives behind the Zheng He narrative and assesses the key messages that Chinese leaders are attempting to convey to Asian capitals. This study then examines the extent to which China's unprecedented naval presence in the Indian Ocean has dovetailed with the Zheng He storyline and with the larger strategy of easing regional misgivings about Chinese maritime power. Finally, the paper analyzes how India, a target audience, is responding to China's narrative, drawing several preliminary conclusions about the effectiveness and the prospects of Chinese soft power in the Indian Ocean.

Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora (review)

Reviewed by: Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora Stephen Teo (bio) Tan See Kam, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, editors. Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009. 311 pp. Paperback $33.00, ISBN 978-1-592-13268-3. The discourse on Chinese cinema in recent years has been one of questioning and contesting the identity of the beast, so to speak. With Chinese-language films produced not just in mainland China but in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, many critics and scholars have expended time and intellectual effort on how to come to terms with this polyvalent face of Chinese film and its reception. Emphasis has fallen on the idea of language as a signifier if not a unifier of Chinese films, as in the 2004 anthology Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, edited by Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yeh Yueh-yu, and in Shih-mei Shu’s Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, published in 2007. Both volumes make important contributions to assessing the underlying identity of Chinese cinema. This new volume entitled Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora, edited by Tan See Kam, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, collects essays from distinguished scholars that examine Chinese film through a triangular prism of global connections, gender identity, and the diaspora to explore further and mark out the character and identity of Chinese cinema. Published in 2009, the book presents various perspectives of Chinese films, showing a multiplicity of approaches in studying Chinese cinema in general. The essays are insightful and well written and they all go a long way in helping the reader to understand the many facets of Chinese cinema. However, the volume may be criticized for being much too engaged with the idea of difference and affirming the Other’s perspective on Chinese cinema, as it were. At its heart, the book lacks a certain sense of direction pointing the reader toward the knowledge of how Chinese-language films may develop as a more entrenched and identifiable entity. Chinese Connections places Chinese cinema in the context of globalization, which is still largely driven by the West. On the other hand, it seems keenly aware of Chinese cinema’s own rise as an industry in correspondence with China’s dramatic rise as an economic power. While the book is not primarily about the mainland Chinese cinema, it does perhaps betray a subconscious desire to offer divergent perspectives of Chinese-language films against the backdrop of an emergent, powerful China and its integration into the world economy. This can be detected in the book’s many chapters concerning the Hong Kong cinema (indeed, the majority of the chapters are devoted to discussing this very cinema, as I will demonstrate below). One of the strongest impressions that I get from reading these articles is an almost nostalgic, retrospective sense of this particular industry wherein the authors are actually discussing Hong Kong films from a perspective of past (or, more accurately, pre-1997) achievement. It then becomes imperative to note that the volume was published in 2009, twelve years after 1997, and that in [End Page 486] these twelve years of the post-1997 era, the stakes concerning Hong Kong cinema have changed. Whereas Hong Kong cinema in the pre-1997 era (particularly in the Golden Age of the 1980s) was seen as the predominant industry producing Chinese films, the mainland film industry now is likely to dominate Chinese-language filmmaking in the coming years if it has not already done so. Chinese cinema as an entity may be increasingly identified as an instrument of Chinese soft power in the foreseeable future as China makes its mark in the geopolitical arena, and Hong Kong cinema has now basically tied its fortunes together with the Chinese industry. Chinese Connections (the title thus has an ironic implication for Hong Kong cinema) can be seen as making a valuable contribution in exploring the broader connotations and dimensions of Chinese cinema from the angle of an increasingly powerful and overbearing China, not just as a political power but an economic one (and one, moreover, that has already absorbed...

Chinese Soft Power, Insecurity Studies, Myopia and Fantasy

This article is critical of a series of works on Chinese soft power which have garnered much attention in recent years. These works typically portray Chinese soft power, characterised by its disregard for Western models of development that propagate ‘democratic governance’, as a latent threat to global order. The article argues that such claims are premature, and to date there is little evidence of a systematic attempt by the Chinese to propagate a ‘Beijing model’ of autocratic development. These claims are substantiated by analysing China's participation in United Nations peacekeeping operations in Africa, which are characterised by mandates aimed at transforming war-torn states into liberal democracies. I suggest that China's participation in these operations is a crucial component of its ‘charm offensive’ aimed at the West, and designed to allay fears of a ‘China Threat’. The article argues that Chinese understandings of soft power are diverse and directed at multiple audiences. The tendency to ‘look for potential threats’ in many Western policy-informed works, however, ignores the multifaceted nature and diverse views on Chinese soft power, and clouds our ability to understand this new phenomenon in Chinese foreign policy.

On Nowadays' Research of the Spread of Chinese as a Foreign Language

China's economic strength in the international community to increase gradually, the Chinese culture in the world gradually is widely disseminating. In today's globalization, cultural soft power has become an important symbol of national power. How to shape the culture of China's soft power is the communication should be concerned about the issue, but also the national strategy on major issues. This article hopes to collect Chinese as a Foreign Language dissemination of academic research and academic monographs. Research, analysis and summary to find out and come to study trends, and based on the use of communications on the basis of the theory of the spread of Chinese law to discuss, In order to provide a big country reference for creating a real culture of Chinese soft power to provide a big country reference.

War, Peace, and China's Soft Power: A Confucian Approach

AbstractThe contemporary Chinese intellectual Kang Xiaoguang has argued that Chinese soft power should be based on Confucian culture, the most influential Chinese political tradition. But which Confucian values should form the core of China's soft power? This paper first explores the coexistence of state sovereignty and utopian cosmopolitanism through an analysis of Confucian tradition up to contemporary Chinese nationalism. It insists on the exogenous roots of the cosmopolitan ideal and its relations with the ideal of a harmonious political order and a global peace. Then, it compares the philosophy of ‘all-under-heaven’ in its classical and contemporary forms, with Mencius’ theory of a ‘hegemon’, a theory that still informs the moral language that Chinese intellectuals use to evaluate foreign policy, especially regarding morally-justified warfare. It ends on a reflection on the role that Mencius's theory of just and unjust war can play in the contemporary Chinese context and to help understanding and defining the stance of China in the international geo-political context.

China’s Soft Power Diplomacy in Southeast Asia

The paper analyses the new geo-political and geo-economic strategic relationship between China and Southeast Asia. Is Chinese soft power encroachment into Southeast Asia creating greater stability, does it jeopardize US interests and what is the impact on the regime-types, economic restructuring, and the state-civil society relationship?
 
 The paper is divided into four parts. The first explores the historical and especially the contemporary changes in China’s geo-economic bilateral relationship with Southeast Asia through its bilateral trade, the role of FDI, the role of the ethnic Chinese Diaspora, and other political and economic factors. The second focuses on China’s role in the new emerging geo-political relations on a multilateral scale through new regional security, military and politico-economic institutions. The third part contains a brief exposure of shifting US bilateral and multilateral interests in the region - both geo-economic and geo-political; however the bulk of this section is devoted to a comparison of the differences and similarities of US and Chinese approaches in Southeast Asia. Finally some concluding remarks are offered.

Public Diplomacy and the Rise of Chinese Soft Power

In recent years, China has sought to supplement its traditional use of hard power with soft power, and thus the Chinese government has paid more and more attention to public diplomacy. Chinese governments have previously demonstrated a limited understanding of public diplomacy, seeing it either as external propaganda or a form of internal public affairs, but this has not prevented China from becoming a skilled public diplomacy player. Key aspects of traditional Chinese culture and politics have presented major obstacles for Chinese public diplomacy. In comparison to the United States, China needs an enduring and effective public diplomacy strategy and needs to improve its skills to make full use of the modern media. The peaceful rise/peaceful development policy in Chinese grand strategy has sought to integrate Chinese hard power and soft power to create a soft rise for China.