China’s Olympic Moment and New Soft Power Game

By Shweta Aggarwal

China’s Olympic moment is finally here, signaling to the world its arrival on the world stage. It’s a moment China has been waiting for decades: as the 29 Olympic Games opened in Beijing at precisely eight minutes past the eighth hour of the evening on the eighth day of the eighth month of the eight year of the millennium, billions around the world watched this stunning blend of pageantry and high-tech wizardry in which 15,000 people Chinese performers showcased 5000 years of their country’s history in a breathtaking four-hour ceremony. The message was clear for all to read: China’s rise is inexorable and China wishes to carry others along, and not merely awe them into accepting the inevitable.

Not that there was anything shockingly original in what Beijing was trying to get across. China’s rise as an economic and military power has been the reigning theme of global public discourse for some time. But an ambitious Beijing has taken scrupulous care to discourage this impression – what Deng Xiaoping has said “disguise your ambitious and hide your claws” – and tried to project its peaceful rise and the doctrine of harmony to win friends and allies in a changing world, specially in its East Asian backyard. Instead, Beijing has launched a massive charm offensive – what theorists call soft power, control by indirect non-military means through persuasion and cultural diplomacy – to expand its footprints in not only East Asia, but in resource-rich but poorer countries of Africa and Latin America.

In a new great game of global dominance and with the declining salience of military might in the power calculus, China has shrewdly realized the importance of projecting its soft power and is doing so with calculation and panache. Resource-hungry Beijing has also cleverly sensed a market for its cultural exports and its much-touted Confucian ethics in the wake of the diminishing credibility of American power due to its overseas military entanglements. And knowing the power of popular culture in an increasingly globalized world, Beijing has also made rapid forays in areas perceived to be American turf.

Chinese film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" has become one of the highest grossing non-English films. Chinese novelist Gao Xingjian won China's first Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000. Yao Ming, the Chinese star of the U.S. National Basketball Association's Houston Rockets, has busted popularity charts in many countries around the world. Chinese art is notching up astronomical sums at chic auction houses in Western capitals. Christie’s global sales of contemporary Chinese art rose from 13.5 million euros to 90 million euros from 2004 to 2006. Modern Chinese dance has made a splash in New York with troupes such as the Guandong Modern Dance Company, Beijing Modern Dance Company and Shen Wei Dance Arts.

More and more foreign students are enrolling in Chinese universities for higher studies with their number tripling to 110,000 from 36,000 over the past decade. And the China success story is attracting tourists in droves with 17 million foreign nationals visiting China in 2006.

By any standards, this is an impressive projection of China’s cultural power that is riding high primarily on three decades of double-digit economic growth and presenting an alternative model of authoritarian government that uses liberal free-market methods to create prosperity for its people and develop global economic clout that befits a continent-sized country of more than one billion people. Joseph Nye, the Harvard scholar, defined "soft power" as the gaining of influence by persuasion and appeal rather than by threats or military force. In a global information age, Nye writes, sources of power such as culture, political values and diplomacy are part of what makes a great power. “Success depends not only on whose army wins, but also on whose story wins,” Nye writes, encapsulating a paradigm change on what makes a great power.

The powers-that-be in Beijing has assimilated Nye’s dictum well and has moulded its public diplomacy to promote an image of a rising modern economic power with an attractive culture rooted in thousand-year-old traditions going back to the ancient sage Confucius. It’s not that China’s soft power is growing on its own. In fact, there is a grand design to sell China’s new-found position in the world without presenting a threatening picture to the status quoists. In sync with its great power ambitions, China has systematically tried to remove all distractions that can come in the way of its ongoing expansion of economy and military power. Beijing, therefore, went about resolving its festering border rows with nearly all its neighbours, including Russia and Vietnam, and became an active player in multilateral arrangements like the WTO, the ASEAN, the East Asia Community and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. China has contributed more than 3,000 troops to serve in the UN peacekeeping forces and has offered to mediate in recalcitrant international disputes like hosting the six-party talks on North Korea.

To complement this rising international profile, China also embarked on a massive well-funded campaign of cultural diplomacy with Confucius Institutes, which promote Chinese language, culture, and business, leading the charge. China already has established more than 100 Confucius Institutes and plan to reach the figure of 500 institutes in 2010 and 1,000 in 2020. The overarching objective is to teach Chinese to 100 million students around the world by 2020. And cultural commissars in Beijing have already started working to achieve this objective with ambitious plans to train 5 million teachers by 2020. The gap between the target and reality is however huge. According to one estimate, presently there are over 5,000 teachers in China who are certified to teach Chinese to foreigners. But with billions of dollars pouring into Chinese language teaching programmes, it may be possible to achieve at least 50 per cent of the target by 2020.

Besides language promotion, China has also deployed cultural diplomacy to build better ties and promote a more favourable image by holding culture weeks, culture tours and culture festivals in other countries, including in India. The idea is to broaden the range of cultural exchanges and spawn a new dialogue among civilizations that can minimize chances of conflict and familarise the world with the Chinese way of life, its customs, the arts and history. In an article, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has expounded in some detail about what China’s strategy of integrating cultural relations as part of its broader international diplomacy. “We should expand cultural exchanges with other countries. Cultural exchanges are a bridge connecting the hearts and minds of people of all countries and an important way to project a country’s image.”

Wen’s “going global” cultural strategy includes developing culture industry, improving the international competitiveness of Chinese cultural enterprises and products, increasing the export of books, films, TV programs and other cultural products, so that “these Chinese cultural products and particularly the best of them, will reach the rest of the world (...)”

“We should conduct public diplomacy in a more effective way. We should inform the outside world of the achievements we have made in reform, opening-up and modernization in a comprehensive, accurate and timely manner. At the same time, we should be frank about the problems we have. (...) We should work to enable the international community to develop an objective and balanced view on China’s development and international role, so as to foster an environment of friendly public opinion for China,”’ writes Wen in “Our Historical Tasks at the Primary Stage of Socialism and Several Issues Concerning China’s Foreign Policy” in China Daily in 2007.

This is an explicit and comprehensive articulation of China’s strategy of using soft power and shows there is a conscious design in expanding the global appeal of Chinese culture. If one compares China’s conscious projection of soft power with that of India, another rising Asian power, one finds fundamental differences in approach that holds clues as to who will win the new great power game in the 21st century. For one thing, India can be considered slightly laidback, critics would say, in seducing the world with its inherent cultural attractiveness. Unlike China, India does not have an ambitious plan for language teaching – as English is a virtual lingua franca - and there is no conscious attempt to promote cultural products along with trade.

Some would say Indian diplomacy has also not invested huge amounts of money that China has done in peddling its cultural products and tended to rely more on its 25-million-strong diaspora spread across five continents and 17 cultural centers managed by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. But this impression appears to be slightly misplaced as there is a seminal difference between the style of Indian diplomacy and Chinese diplomacy that emanate from deeply ingrained cultural attitudes. The relatively low scale of cultural diplomacy by India also flows from the premise that an attractive culture finds its own way and there is no need for hardsell. This in turn comes from the broader vision India has of its place in the world. Unlike China which desires to be a world power, India is at best a reluctant power that has yet to awaken to its larger global role despite its UN Security Council ambitions.

Besides, the image of India is radically changing in the world, without PR managers and spin-doctors selling stories to a captive media. The burgeoning interest in India, fuelled by its high economic growth, is no longer confined to karma cola and nirvana chic but has shifted to new areas like Indian writing in English, the country’s emerging stature as a knowledge society and the new-found attractiveness of Indian universities for foreign students, specially for students from Africa and the Middle East.

While yoga continues to be a thriving multibillion industry and Indian gurus like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the late Osho Rajneesh are still popular in the West, there is a fresh burst of enthusiasm for contemporary Indian art, literature, fashion and cuisine, says a recent article.

Most importantly, India has two winning cards that could tilt the balance in its favour: a vibrant democracy reflective of the country’s multicultural ethnic diversity and a thriving film industry called Bollywood that has gone on a global conquest. Go to any major city in Europe - Berlin, Hanover, Paris, Brussels, Rome or Madrid - you will find people jiving to exuberant beats of the hippest Bollywood numbers or waxing lyrical about Indian software engineers and writers.

As a writer in Time magazine wrote recently: “I am not even sure China is the real power in Asia when it comes to soft power. Think of India, and what comes to mind. Poverty? Sure. A tempestuous relationship with Pakistan? Check. But how about Bollywood, booming software and high-tech industries, and a vigorous democracy?” Critics also point out at the way China has orchestrated the Beijing Olympics as the showpiece event parading its new stature in the world. They gloatingly point out spontaneous protests triggered by China’s human rights compromises in Tibet and Darfur that trailed the passage of the Olympic torch to underline the fatal flaw in China’s rise – its neglect of democratic values and liberal freedoms. Indian cultural mandarins are sure to feel a sense of quiet triumph after reading all this. But there is no room for complacency in the new soft power game which China has started in deadly earnest.

True, India has many winning cards and the West feels more comfortable dealing with a democratic India than an assertive authoritarian China, but there is much New Delhi can learn from Beijing’s manifold projection of its soft power. The Indian foreign policy-making establishment has woken up to the challenge, but need to do much more. Agrees Pavan K. Varma, the director-general of the ICCR: “There should be a new emphasis on the projection of India’s soft power.”

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