Screening China's Soft Power

Paola Voci, Luo Hui, Paola Voci, Luo Hui

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317209430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Promoting China's cultural soft power by disseminating modern Chinese values is one of the policies of President Xi Jinping. Although, it is usually understood as a top-down initiative, implemented willingly or unwillingly by writers, filmmakers, artists, and so on, and often manifesting itself in clumsy and awkward ways, for example, the concept of "the Chinese dream, " intended to rival and perhaps appeal more strongly than "the American dream, " modern Chinese values are in fact put forward in many ways by many different cultural actors. Through analyses of film festivals, CCTV, Confucius Institutes, auteurs, blockbusters, reality TV, and online digital cultures, this book exposes the limitations of China's officially promoted soft power in both conception and practice, and proposes a pluralistic approach to understanding Chinese soft power in local, regional, and transnational contexts. As such, the book demonstrates the limitations of existing theories of soft power, and argues that the US-derived concept of soft power can benefit from being examined from a China perspective.

1	Screening China’s soft power Screen cultures and discourses of power^1 Paola Voci and Luo Hui

Imagine China’s soft power as the reach of a China Facebook page. Admitting a touch of irony, let us imagine the account holder and moderator of the China Facebook page being a geopolitical entity closely defined by the political vision of the current leadership, i.e. China as a nation-state with ambitions for global greatness. Indeed, the quantitative measure of its reach derives from the number of likes and followers that this page is able to gain. This number can also translate into economic gains (since Facebook pages attract sponsors and may lead to other commercially profitable enterprises). Yet, while this number may give us an indication of the related increase in social visibility and associated advertising revenues, it does not tell us much about the tenor or mood of the page as reflected in the individual posts. Posts may indeed be in line or in disagreement with the main declared agenda of the China Facebook page. Even when not specifically in agreement or disagreement, posts on the China Facebook page do not necessarily all contribute to one conversation thread, but tend to generate multiple and divergent conversations.

This social media metaphor can usefully capture some of the main issues and contradictions that characterize the current discourses on soft power and culture. To continue with the metaphor, both scholars and media analysts face the problem that the number of friends and followers and their comments are simply too large to allow comprehensive critical examination. Attention is therefore largely limited to the account holder’s status updates and the conversation threads that the account holder has initiated or joined. However, it is equally important that we take into consideration the huge number of cacophonous contributions which – in turn – generate their own cluster of followers. We must keep our ears tuned to some of the salient sidewalk conversations and late-night gossip. We must keep an eye out for the occasional image that is unsavory, unflattering, but nevertheless revealing. These are part of our collective task in this book.

Critiquing the (main) discourse on soft power

Nye (2004) describes soft power as “the ability to get what you want through attraction² rather than coercion or payments.” While this concise description is arguably only the punch line of a much more complex conceptualization of soft power within Nye’s understanding of international relations, some important considerations may nonetheless be derived from it.

First, in the context of world politics, “what you want” actually refers to “what states want.”³ In this admittedly utilitarian view, soft power is a tool that helps states increase their power, not by defeating enemies, but rather by seeking alliances. From an international relations’ standpoint, soft power therefore is, or tends to become, a quantifiable concept. Assessing soft power has become a flourishing business for companies that specialize in opinion surveys and statistics. For instance, the report “Soft Power 30: A Global Ranking of Soft Power” produced by Portland Communications claims to have “the most accurate index of national soft power ever produced,” compiled by “using over 75 metrics across six sub-indices of objective data and seven categories of new international polling data.”⁴

Even when taking a more analytical and less purely numeric approach, scholars tend to seek evidence for the presence or lack of soft power in opinion surveys and approval rates. For example, to support the statement that China lacks soft power, Joseph Nye (2012) notes that:

[a] recent BBC poll shows that opinions of China’s influence are positive in much of Africa and Latin America, but predominantly negative in the United States and Europe, as well as in India, Japan and South Korea. A poll taken in Asia after the Beijing Olympics found that China’s charm offensive had been ineffective.

Second, despite the tendency to quantify soft power, the “ability to get what you want” is based on means that often resist measurement. Soft power is not directly derived from a simple equation in which economic rise will proportionally result in increased – broadly defined – appeal. Rather, this ability comes from likable features. According to Nye, these features include state policies, but also extend to a country’s culture and values. We can therefore recognize a mismatch between soft power’s stated goals (i.e. succeeding in world politics) and some of the key means through which soft power is developed and deployed (cultural practices and values). This discrepancy points to the increasing inadequacy of the concept of the nation-state to capture the complex, transnational space of cultures. In international relations, it is nation-states – entities with very specific borders, institutions, and leaders – that need soft power, but it is cultures and their people – entities that often transcend the nation-states – that are identified as the main contributors to the making of soft power. In other words, while states are seen as the main beneficiaries of soft power, what creates soft power is beyond the state. Cultures and values are neither simply containable nor fully controllable by the state; they are shaped by hybrid local and global belongings that transcend a country’s national borders.

Nye further recognizes that defining the kinds of likable features that generate soft power is far from simple. Once embedded in the fluid and contested space of cultures and values, what determines a country’s likability within the global community becomes a set of complex variables. Understanding soft power’s likable features in the context of culture is therefore a task that cannot be simply addressed by seeking evidence either in measurable political and economic benchmarks or opinion polls and approval rates. There exists an unresolved tension between likable features that have very loose, fluid belongings and the very concrete – and allegedly measurable – outcomes that are supposed to serve the needs of the state.

The “China story”: what does soft power mean in China?

A similar tension is evident in China’s adoption and adaptation of the Nyean concept. On the one hand, the Chinese leadership has highlighted “culture and values” as an inseparable part of its soft power discourse. As a vestige of the political culture of imperial China, the Chinese elite recognizes the symbolic power of highbrow intellectual discourse appropriated for political ends – former President Hu Jintao’s deployment of the New Confucian concept of “harmonious society” is a case in point. In a more blunt and pragmatic iteration, President Xi Jinping issued directives to “promote China’s cultural soft power by disseminating modern Chinese values” and better communicating China’s “‘soft power’ message” (Xi 2014). The “China dream,” with its many slogans, has been officially defined as a key strategy to promote such cultural soft power.

On the other hand, in China, soft power is openly strategized and planned by the state and is expected to bring quantifiable outcomes. A keen sense of hard economic competitiveness and an equally strong desire for the more elusive symbolic value and prestige are most vividly felt in the country’s bid for international soft power showcases such as the Olympic Games and the World Expo. China’s officially promoted soft power seems to have been modeled after its more successful competitors (e.g. the USA, Japan, and Korea) and the state has taken some creative and bold steps to refashion Chinese branding beyond postsocialism, based on a declared universalist ideology. The government has openly embraced the task of directing and planning soft power initiatives to strengthen the image – or branding – of the nation-state, and this branding is ultimately evaluated by its translation into measurable economic gains and political influence.

Once again, the overemphasis on measurability is problematic when applied to cultural practices. As William Callahan has pointed out:

Rather than counting bombs and bullets, analysts measure the expansion of China’s global media platforms, the growing number of Confucius Institutes and the growth of other soft power “resources”. Scholars thus generally treat culture and power as measurable entities, with many in the PRC lamenting that China “punches below its weight” in terms of the international influence expected of a great power.

(Callahan 2015b: 216)

Rejecting the view that soft power could or should be measured, Callahan proposes that we should instead focus on “‘what does soft power mean?’ and ‘does it mean something different in an authoritarian state?!’” (Callahan 2015b: 216; emphasis added). Questions concerning meaning are indeed at the heart of our analysis in this book. As scholars researching in film, media, and cultural studies, we seek to understand soft power not as a tool to succeed in world politics or to support China’s much-heralded economic rise, but rather in terms of what it means and how and why it may mean something different in particular contexts.

To understand the meaning of China’s soft power, we need to be willing to open up the state narratives and include multiple and intersecting discourses that, in turn, develop both consonant and dissonant perspectives. As Foucault has famously argued, “power is everywhere” and “comes from everywhere” (Foucault and Hurley 1990: 93). Power controls, represses, and negates via structures of discipline and surveillance; it produces a reality that transcends politics and is embodied in everyday practices. Foucault also recognizes that discourses are neither produced and controlled by the state, nor necessarily antagonist towards it. In China, hard power and soft power are indeed both intertwined with regimes of truth and knowledge, but also separable and subject to fluctuations, critical interventions and even radical transformations. In this book, we argue that the overarching influence of the Chinese state needs to be reassessed, contrasted, and expanded with the complex, divergent, ambivalent articulations of soft power that are developed within and beyond China.

Powers and dreams: China/Chinese main(stream) discourses and other stories

As we address the core question of what soft power means in/for China, we immediately recognize that the incommensurability between the two ingredients in Nye’s concept of soft power – state interest and cultural impact – has become all the more acute in the Chinese context. Indeed, in both Chinese official and popular discourses, soft power is first and foremost cultural; its cultural dimension is embedded in the very phrase wenhua ruan shili (cultural soft power). Yet, given the authoritarian nature of the Chinese state, culture tends to be – in our view, mistakenly – defined and interpreted through an official lens, and soft power is inextricably linked to centralized policies.

In Chinese academia, alternative perspectives on soft power have taken the form of re-evaluations, and sometimes appropriations, of traditional Chinese, mainly Confucian, ideological and philosophical concepts (Yeung and Fung 2011; Guo 2012). Evoking China’s past glory and imperial largess based on a philosophy of harmony, or he, Guo Shuyong argues that, to be a truly effective modern soft power, China must adopt a strategy that transcends national interest, as it is often its altruistic contribution to international affairs and world welfare that generates soft power for a nation-state. Here Guo hits upon a paradox in Nye’s concept of soft power: “getting what you want” is often best accomplished with a measure of altruism. Guo conceptualizes China’s soft power in the context of China’s “peaceful rise” and the attendant need to mitigate the suspicion and hostility surrounding China’s emergence, or re-emergence, as a world superpower. While seemingly more high-minded than Nye’s “getting what you want” style of soft power, Guo’s version is not fundamentally different from Nye’s in that, at its heart, this soft power is staunchly in alignment with hard power, serving to soften it so that hard power can be likable or even celebrated.

It must be noted that even these culturally based interpretations of soft power have a tendency to actively serve, or be subsumed by, the more prevalent interest in China’s state ideologies and policies. Zhao Tingyang’s reinterpretation of the concept of tianxia as a basis for the development of a Chinese new world order is another famous example. Widely influential in contemporary Chinese political discourse, Zhao’s tianxia has been put into dialogue with Xi Jinping’s foreign policy narrative that can be traced back to Deng Xiaoping’s socialism with Chinese characteristics and Hu Jintao’s harmonious society (Callahan 2015a: 52–5).

Both Hu’s “harmonious society” and Xi’s “Chinese dream” are rhetorically constructed via references to an essentialized Confucian ideology and actualized in a self-proclaimed tangible reality. In their construction and deployment, both terms have taken on internal and external connotations: domestically, they constitute the basis for the consensus that the Party is seeking to gain; internationally, they are promoted through media platforms to enhance the country’s soft power appeal.

So widely promoted and referenced is it, in both media and academic circles, that Xi’s “Chinese dream” has become almost inseparable from the officially constructed Chinese soft power (Zhao L. 2014). Consciously appropriating and redefining the idea of a locally specific but exportable “dream” that was so successful in expanding American soft power, Xi has continued to expand it as a model for the Asia-Pacific region (2014 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit in Beijing), implicitly contesting the universality of the American dream and offering the Chinese dream as an – even better – alternative. More recently, the “New Silk Road,” or the Belt and Road Initiative, has become another channel for China’s soft power ambitions; the dream has been redefined as “Eurasia’s Dream” (Gosset 2015).

The officially articulated discourses of “harmonious society” and, more recently, the “Chinese dream” inform and underscore China’s approach to soft power. They represent the leadership’s desire to not simply endorse an imported idea (i.e. soft power), but to make it Chinese by injecting Chinese content into it. In the interpretation of the Chinese state, the Nyean concept of soft power, an open, though US-derived, framework that can be applied to other nation-states, is replaced by “Chinese soft power,” which is concretized, closed, and predicated on a host of terms and concepts that are deemed uniquely Chinese.

It is not surprising therefore that academic discussion has mostly focused on the Chinese leadership’s recognition of the importance of developing its own distinct brand of soft power and on the kind of language, policies, and ideologies the government deploys to achieve such a goal (Kurlantzick 2007; Lai 2013). By and large, seeking to define a soft power with Chinese characteristics (Glaser and Murphy 2009) or the terms of the debate on soft power in China (Li 2008), scholars have not challenged the one-dimensional and essentially nation-state-dominated (either Communist Party or ideology-centered) conceptualization of soft power and have measured it in terms of sources and limits (Gill and Huang 2006). Scholarship in this area has amply echoed the privileging of “official” soft power, with much focus on “branding,” “national re-building” (Barr 2012), and a “softer” diplomacy (Lai and Lu 2012; d’Hooghe 2011). Overall, the verdict has been that Chinese soft power has been mostly deficient, negative, or failing (Shambaugh 2013; Callahan 2004). The main reason for this failure has been attributed to China’s undemocratic policies. The Chinese government is simply too controlling “to unleash the talents of its civil society” (Nye 2012) and, without this freedom, Chinese soft power will continue to be weak.

In the political studies scholarship on China’s soft power, the crucial interrelation between soft power and cultural practices is acknowledged but not scrutinized in concrete terms. With a few notable exceptions (for example, the work of William Callahan, discussed below), the “cultural turn” appears to have been mostly overlooked in current scholarship or reduced to the discussion of a few token examples. The role of culture as a source of soft power is still mainly understood as being dominated, directed, and controlled by the Chinese state with the willing or unwilling support of cultural actors (prominent writers, filmmakers and artists, etc.) and creative industries. It is commonly assumed that cultural practices either conform to or oppose a discursive center, domin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Note on transliteration and use of Chinese characters
• 1 Screening China’s soft power: screen cultures and discourses of power
• Part I What’s SAPPRFT got to do with it: the limitations, or failure, of Chinese soft power
• Part II From East–West to South–South: localizing soft power
• Part III Auteurs, animateurs, and matchmakers: pluralizing Chinese soft power
• Index