U.S. President Barack Obama sets off on his Asia tour amid growing speculation about the Unites States’ ability to reassure its democratic allies in the region that it can effectively counter an increasingly assertive China.
China's soft power in the ascendant? Credit: UCLA
The trip coincides with a “soft power” offensive by Beijing in an attempt to project its interests and promote its image, following last week’s announcement by the ruling Communist party’s Central Committee that China must enhance its cultural profile.
Meaning what exactly?
“At its heart is a balance that Beijing is trying to strike between encouraging China’s burgeoning culture and media industries for the money and prestige they can generate – and keeping close tabs on the political and social implications of diversity in cultural life,” says Li Yan. “Let a hundred flowers bloom but keep a grip on the sprinkler.”
Beneath the diplomatic politeness of Obama’s Asian meetings, a subtle ideological conflict will be played out.
“Although the themes are community-building and cooperation, beneath the surface they’re becoming an arena for subtle but, for the region, quite unnerving power plays and influence games between the U.S. and China,” says Michael Green of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Asia’s democracies will be looking for guarantees that Washington remains committed to their defense and that economic woes won’t lead the US to retreat into neo-isolationism, analysts suggest. China’s belligerence gives the US an opportunity to reassert its influence, says Jacques DeLisle of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
“China really has squandered a lot of the soft power that it had accumulated earlier in the decade, and has made its neighbors very wary,” he says.
From the Olympic Games to a global network of Confucius Institutes, Beijing’s soft power projections have hard power implications.
“Looking from the perspective of international competition, there are two issues,” says Professor Zhaoxiao Zhang. “On the one hand, it is about effective communication and making a positive image for the country, for the government and for the party. On the other, it is about developing an overseas market for cultural and art products. When these two things are combined, cultural soft power will become an influential hard power.”
But Beijing’s ability to project its soft power is inherently limited, writes David Pilling in a must-read analysis.
“American ideals of freedom of speech, equality before the law and social mobility remain powerfully attractive. These are bolstered by its ‘cultural output’ of movies, music, philosophical discourse and even political polemic,” he writes. “By comparison, China has little to offer.”
For all of its substantial spending on soft power, Beijing’s “diplomatic buddies” are not neighboring Vietnam, Japan, India or Russia, but states like North Korea, Pakistan and Burma.
China’s aggressive cyber offensive is also undermining its soft power projects and creating adversaries, writes Richard Fontaine, a senior advisor at the Washington-based Center for a New American Security:
As ever-greater numbers of companies, universities, government agencies, and individuals around the world are subject to Chinese hacking, the effect is to build an ever-larger constituency that is suspicious of Chinese power. Think of it as soft power in reverse – the power of repulsion rather than attraction – or perhaps simply as a titanic public diplomacy nightmare.
China’s authoritarianism is an insuperable obstacle in its efforts to win friends and influence world opinion, the FT’s Pilling concludes:
That is because soft power is based as much on dissent as on forging a common view of culture. For millions of people around the world the attraction of the US is not to be found in its official discourse, but in its ability to tolerate – even encourage – an alternative view, whether it be anti-war protesters or Tea Party radicals. Many of the best US films prod at American ideals….The Communist party’s jealous monopoly on power and truth means China cannot match this cultural breadth.
The regime’s intolerance of diversity and dissent is evident in the persecution of dissident artist Ai Weiwei and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo.
“These are the people who could be carrying the flag of Chinese soft power,” Pilling concludes. “Instead, their treatment at the hands of the state reveals a much uglier side.”
Human rights activist Wang Yi, also known as Chen Jianping, could be added to the list.
As Human Rights in China reports:
She has just been released from a Henan Reeducation-Through-Labor (RTL) facility where she served one year of RTL as punishment for re-tweeting a sarcastic message in October 2010. Wang said that she is staying at a guesthouse in Henan, and is under surveillance by Domestic Security officers. It is unclear on what basis the surveillance is being imposed or how long it will last.
Human Rights in China is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.
