Setting the Scene: China’s Global Rise and Image Dilemma
“China is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will shake the world.” Napoleon Bonaparte staked this claim nearly two centuries ago, and today we observe an awakened China. On the 50th anniversary of Sino-French diplomatic relations in 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that, “Today, the lion has woken up.” He quickly added, “But it is peaceful, pleasant and civilized.” At this celebration of international ties, the Chinese leader underscored that the rise of China, the woken lion, is neither a danger nor harm to you.
In contrast with Xi’s message, two contradictory and seminal advertisements by The Economist had already been circulating, which I encountered at King’s Cross Station in London in June 2011, while waiting for the underground train in order to attend a conference on China. The advertisements were contrastively titled, “China is a Friend to the West” and “China is a Threat to the West” (see Gilroy 2011; Wade 2011).
The advertisement entitled “China is a Friend to the West” has three claims: (1) China makes a fifth of all the world’s goods. It kits out the West’s consumers and finances the West’s borrowers; (2) China goes out of its way to emphasize that it wants a “peaceful rise.” No other great power in history has done that; and (3) China is the world’s biggest investor in green technology. On the other hand, “China is a Threat to the West” has three claims: (1) China spends about $100 billion on defense, almost three times as much as a decade ago, and nearly twice as much as Britain; (2) China has cracked down on minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang and persecuted campaigners like the Nobel Laureate, Liu Xiaobo; and (3) China’s hunger for raw materials is exhausting the Earth and bolstering corrupt regimes in the developing world (The Economist 2011).
Framed to reflect two leading and opposing images of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that are circulating internationally, the advertisements depict both “China as an Opportunity” and “China as a Threat” (Cable and Ferdinand 1994; Zheng 2005). The perception of China as a dual source of opportunities and threats is predominantly a result of its worldwide geo-economic ascendancy, complicated by its creeping geopolitical expansionism in the Asian region. This Janus face of China’s global rise reflects the coexistence of hopes and fears growing among other countries.
Cognizant of this situation, the official Xinhua News Agency—in advance of Xi’s speech to present China as a peacefully rising country, to counter geopolitical anxiety—released a publicity film on the national image (Guojia xingxiangpian) of China for the first time in New York City’s Times Square (People’s Daily 2010; Reuters 2011). This was to coincide with former President Hu Jintao’s state visit to the United States (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2011).
Not only did it reflect China’s endeavor to promote its soft power—which refers to “the ability to affect others through the co-optive means of framing the agenda, persuading, and eliciting positive attraction in order to obtain preferred outcomes” (Nye 2011)—but it also hints at the recent development of the Chinese media system and the production of media products along China’s “going global” geocultural strategy.1
Views of China as a threat, a fragile power (Shirk 2007), or the partial power (Shambaugh 2013) still prevail, even though China’s twenty-first-century leaders Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping have developed strategies for casting the PRC as a peacefully rising nation with desirable soft power offerings. Such ambivalent views of China exist not only in the West, but are also prevalent in Asia.
How would China, as an emerging superpower under an authoritarian regime, continue its ascendancy in the long run? One of the key elements may lie beyond sustaining its economic and societal development at home. Its continued growth is also stringently contingent upon mastering a way of communicating with others, via the formal and informal emulation of its soft power abroad. Attempts to account for this dilemma necessitate an understanding of the general predicament that China, as an emerging power under soft authoritarianism, faces in the task of building its soft power influence around the world. Since the early 2000s, China has developed a plan. But the ability of the PRC to convert its growing economic power into cultural influence in Asia and around the globe (Callahan 2013: 1) needs more work. China thus faces a dilemma with the geocultural projection of its soft power.
This book takes an unconventional approach to explain the untold truth of the aforementioned endeavors, to make sense of China’s dilemmas with projecting its soft power on an ambitious international scale. Soft Power Made in China focuses particularly on the setbacks in China’s effort to create a soft power field in East Asia , particularly South Korea and Japan, via the mediation of television products.
Soft Power Building in the Rise of China
The recent history of the PRC’s soft power engagements reflects its ambition to push China’s global reach . It also underscores how the definition of the nation’s wealth has undergone transformation, from a purely economic conceptualization to the inclusion of cultural wealth (State Council 2001; 2006; 2011).
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, during President Hu Jintao’s administration (2002–2010), the Chinese government conceptually mapped the country’s present and projected future in three Five-Year Plans: the Tenth (2001–2005), Eleventh (2006–2010), and Twelfth (2011–2015) Five-Year Plans. In 2004, the Tenth Five-Year Plan (2001–2005) proposed a strategic call for culturally “going global” (wenhua “zouchuqu”). In the plan, the term “cultural industries ” (wenhua chanye) was first introduced and incorporated in a Chinese governmental project. Some scholars interpret the Tenth Five-Year Plan as the beginning of preparations for a system to export cultural products through the next Five-Year Plan (Esraey and Qiang 2011; Hong 2011; Su 2011).
In line with its global strategy, during the years of the Tenth Five-Year Plan (2001–2005) the Chinese government began promoting Chinese language and culture by establishing Confucius Institutes, which many scholars read as a means of developing China’s soft power around the world (Cheng 2009; Chey 2008; Gil 2008; Hartig 2010; Hughes 2014; Lee 2009; Nye 2004; Paradise 2009; Starr 2009; Yang 2010). The East Asian region was strategically considered a test bed for such institutes.2 The first Confucius Institute was established in Seoul in 2004, and the second in Tokyo the year after (Lee 2009). By 2013, there were more than 400 Institutes in over 100 countries (Confucius Institute Headquarters (Hanban) 2013), reflecting China’s conviction about implementing its “going global” policy. As of December 2017, 525 Confucius Institutes and 1113 Confucius Classrooms exist in 146 countries (Confucius Institute Headquarters (Hanban) n.d.).
Subsequently, the Eleventh Five-Year Plan (2006–2010) focused on promoting Chinese culture (zhonghua wenhua) in a more explicit way as a means of enhancing China’s influence around the world (guoji yingxiangli) and to pro...