Soft Power

Spreading the message

By Cui Jia (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-06-01 08:24

Top: An Israeli woman plays a Chinese song with a bamboo flute while an elderly Chinese man plays the traditional musical instrument xiao at the Jingshan Park in Beijing in May 1995. Above: Iconic images from China are displayed at Times Square in New York in January 2011. Top: Wang Dongsheng / for China Daily; Above: Shen Hong / Xinhua

The successful hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing dispelled notions that many foreigners like Mark Surman had about China. Surman, who has been studying political science at Peking University for the last two years, is one of the 40 million foreigners who are studying Chinese now. "The Olympics exposure has shown the world what China can do," says the 27-year-old Briton. "China's influence on the world is spreading faster and wider than ever."

The number of foreign students studying in China has grown from 1,236 in 1978 to 265,000 in 2010, according to the Ministry of Education, while the number of foreign tourists increased to 26 million in 2010, according to the China National Tourism Administration. That to some extent explains the strong growth of China's soft power.

The Ministry of Education said earlier this year that the nation plans to use cooperative educational programs to attract 500,000 foreign students to China by 2020. By current estimates, China also has the largest number of overseas students in the world, with a record 1.27 million studying abroad by the end of 2010, according to the latest data from the ministry.

There is no doubt that China always had an attractive and strong traditional culture. But now it is making waves on the global center stage. China has made remarkable progress in introducing its culture to the world since joining the World Trade Organization in 2001. By current estimates there are more than 300 Confucius Institutes and 300 Confucius classrooms in more than 90 countries across the world, with about 40 million people learning Chinese.

Besides China's attractive culture, the Beijing Olympics, the Shanghai Expo, Confucius Institutes as well as people like Yao Ming, the Chinese basketball star who plays for Houston Rockets in the NBA, represent Chinese soft power.

Soft power, a concept coined by Harvard scholar Joseph Nye, a former US assistant secretary of defense and dean of Harvard University's John F Kennedy School of Government, has described Confucius Institutes as "instruments of China's soft power", which can enhance the understanding of the Chinese culture.

President Hu Jintao stated in 2007 that China must "enhance culture as part of the soft power of our country to better guarantee the people's basic cultural rights and interests". Since then the nation had started to include soft power development as part of the national development strategy.

China has also assumed more international responsibilities, dispatching search and rescue teams to earthquake-hit Haiti and Chile, assisting the post-war reconstruction in Afghanistan and engaging in peacekeeping missions. All of these activities have enhanced China's global influence.

At the same time, China has also actively participated in formulating international legislation and helping the global community with more rules and solutions. The Boao Forum for Asia and the Six-Party Talks on the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue are significant examples. When the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference faced an imminent collapse, Premier Wen Jiabao came out with an amendment on energy-saving and emissions reduction that enhanced China's growing soft power.

Another example this year was the month-long promotional campaign at New York's iconic Times Square - a 50-meter display called China Experience, which featured some of the nation's most famous faces. In 2009, the Ministry of Commerce made a 30-second short film on Chinese companies working with foreign partners to produce quality products. The film was broadcast on CNN.

"As China's economic and military power increases, it can create fear among other countries. This fear can be reduced by the development of China's soft power," Nye says.

"More Chinese soft power in the United States and more American soft power in China will help make the two countries more attractive to each other and avoid the misperceptions that can lead to conflicts," he says.

Nye feels that the development of Chinese and American soft power is not a zero-sum game, but one in which both sides can gain by reducing the prospects of misunderstanding and conflict. "We should welcome the growth of cultural diplomacy between the two nations."

As the national English newspaper, China Daily has contributed to China's soft power growth.

"There were very few foreign journalists here in the 1980s, and not much news came out of China," says Anthony Kuhn, an American who studied in China during the 1980s and was the Beijing correspondent for the National Public Radio in the United States between 2005 and 2010.

"By contrast, the volume of news coming out of China has greatly increased - from diplomacy to sports, science to finance, every news story, it seems, has a China angle these days," Kuhn says.

In the past 30 years, China's international stature, engagement in the world economy, political and military strength and its citizens' confidence have all made progress, mostly because of China's accomplishments, he says.

China's cultural influence index ranked seventh among 131 countries worldwide, behind the US, Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Spain in 2009. In 1990, China's cultural influence ranked 11th. In addition, China's cultural influence has risen from second to first in Asia, according to the China Modernization Report 2009: Study of Cultural Modernization, released by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in January 2009.

China's image and influence have been transformed thanks to the growth of its soft power and it is set to continue. The nation will attach more importance to cultural development, and conduct more cultural exchanges with other countries, to enhance the international influence of Chinese culture, Premier Wen Jiabao stated in the Government Work Report in 2010 and the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015).

Han Bo, deputy chief of the China's soft power research group at Peking University, says China should pay consistent attention to and increase investment for the development of cultural soft power.

Developing a media industry with strong international exposure is an inevitable trend, he says. "It will enable foreigners to hear the voice of the nation and popularize its actual and outstanding culture."

(China Daily 06/01/2011 page46)