Beijing's 'soft power' offensive
By Purnendra Jain and Gerry Groot
ADELAIDE - Carrots and sticks, inducements and force, are the two sides of
effective diplomacy. In recent international-relations literature, both popular
and academic, these two tools of diplomacy have increasingly been described as
"hard" and "soft power". Hard power is the ability of one nation to use its
military power and economic strengths to coerce or buy compliance. Soft power,
according to Harvard Professor Joseph Nye, who coined the term, "is the ability
to get what you want by attracting and persuading others to adopt your goals".
Military power alone is no longer sufficient for nations to project their
might. Today more than ever, governments also need to use subtle and effective
soft power to deal with terrorism and other
global challenges. Nye, who was assistant secretary of defense under US
president Bill Clinton, has been on a major media campaign to persuade the
current US administration of President George W Bush to use soft power to
complement its hard power, especially in the wake of September 11, 2001.
Significantly, the concept of soft-power advocacy has made a strong impression
in China, especially after some agitation by at least one Shanghai think-tank.
Most recently, Chinese Communist Party leaders have put in place an initiative
to enhance soft power and thus China's global influence.
Beijing established what it calls the Confucius Institute with a mission to
promote the Chinese language, culture and a range of other aspects of learning
about China, including its business environment. Several of these institutes
have already been established around the world, in such places as Japan,
Australia, Sweden and the United States, and Beijing aims eventually to open
some 100 of them.
The choice of the name is instructive, since for years it was Communist Party
dogma that Confucianism held back China's development. In recent years,
however, Confucianism has undergone a kind of political resurrection in China,
and in any case has no threatening connotations. A "Mao Zedong Institute"
probably would not be welcomed in most countries.
China is obviously pursuing this course to increase its legitimacy as an
emerging superpower. President Hu Jintao and company are far from threatening
US global influence quite yet, but they certainly want to outperform Japan and
provide competition to an emerging India. Chinese leaders' desires for national
revival (fuxing zhongguo) includes returning to economic-superpower
status, with all the cultural influence that implies - in other words,
re-establish the position China had before a rising Europe began to eclipse it
in the 18th century.
A national mission to spread Chineseness
The National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, or Hanban, has
a national mission to spread the teaching of Mandarin and Chinese culture
around the world. In many ways it is patterned after Germany's Goethe Institute
or France's Alliance Francaise. The Chinese government recently committed
nearly US$25 million a year for the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.
Significantly, these the Confucius Institutes differ in significant ways from
the long-established agents of French and German culture. Those European
organizations are government agencies and fully dependent on state funds for
their operations, but they locate their offices in normal commercial locations
wherever their governments can rent appropriate space. There is no attempt to
integrate them into their host societies via institutional link-ups. In
contrast, the Confucius Institutes are being incorporated into leading
universities and colleges around the world as well as being linked to China not
only by their Hanban connections, but also by supportive twinning arrangements
with key Chinese universities. The London School of Economics, for example, is
setting up an institute using arrangements under which it will cooperate with
the equally prestigious Qinghua University in Beijing.
In the US, Confucius Institutes have been affiliated with the University of
Maryland, near Washington, DC, the Chicago public school system, and San
Francisco State University. Not only will the Confucius Institutes immediately
benefit from the prestige and convenience of becoming parts of existing
campuses, the latter will also have a vested interest in supplying the
institutes with staff and funds.
The foreign partners of the Confucius Institutes will have a key stake in the
institutes' finances. One obvious way of covering the costs is to offer courses
appealing to people who simply want to learn more about China and things
Chinese and others who want to gain insights that help them get a piece of the
action in China's booming economy. It is also the attractiveness of these
growth rates and their implications that seems to be the key driver attracting
foreign universities not only to go along with the Hanban initiative, but also
to compete for such an institute on their campuses.
This enthusiasm is tempered with some risks, financial and otherwise, that the
Hanban's conditions entail. For example, the contracts call for the foreign
partners to acknowledge Beijing's one-China policy. This demand may at present
be little more than formulaic, but it has an inherent potential to trip up the
foreign hosts should they attempt to enter arrangements with Taiwanese partners
or the Taiwanese government in circumstances that Beijing finds unacceptable.
The more successful the institutes, the more potential for them to be used as
agents of Beijing's foreign policy in future.
Such conflicts may, of course, never come to pass, but the current enthusiasm
of foreign institutions to enter into arrangements with the Hanban seems much
more predicated on what they might be able to get out of the arrangements in
future than what is obviously available at present. The Hanban is not offering
much more than hints at possible benefits in the way of access to Chinese
markets or useful political connections, while the costs to and the obligations
of the foreign partners are evident.
At present, it seems much more like trying to get a foot in the door in the
hope of some as yet unclear payoff later. The amount of prestige a Confucius
Institute might bring to the foreign partner is also unclear but also seems
dependent on the great promise of the Chinese economy.
For the Hanban, the benefits of the institutes in terms of gaining immediate
prestige for China as well as access to offices in prime locations, skilled
staff and good connections are obvious. Also clear is the potential to use the
institutes for the long-term building of Chinese soft-power influence, in part
because of the initial advantages. The institutes are a small but significant
part of what seems to be the equivalent of a soft-power offensive via the
promotion of Chinese language and culture as well as preparing the way to raise
Mandarin toward the status currently enjoyed by English.
Beijing's initiative is innovative in many ways and will make Tokyo and New
Delhi think more about their own strategies of projecting soft power. Certainly
the Japanese government has been active in trying to promote its cultural
industries as part of a drive to boost its soft power. Japanese manga, animated
movies, karaoke and computer games are now ubiquitous. But institutionally,
Tokyo's main vehicle to promote Japanese language and culture has been the
Japan Foundation, an independent agency but one funded and controlled by the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. While the foundation has been highly successful in
its cultural mission, it has suffered severe financial constraints as a
consequence of Japan's recent economic stagnation, thereby restricting its
activities.
Although Nye once said that Japan "has more potential soft-power resources than
any other Asian country", these resources have not worked to Japan's political
advantage, and the country still lacks an international profile befitting the
world's second-largest economy. The government of Prime Minister Junichiro
Koizumi now seems to be focusing more on developing its hard power through new
defense and security arrangements with the United States and participating in
the "war against terror" in Afghanistan and Iraq.
A 'Gandhi Institute'?
India, despite its size and achievements in many areas, is still trying to
establish itself as a power deserving serious attention. Given its cultural,
religious and linguistic diversity, but most of all the structure of its
government, it is hard for Indian officials to project soft power in the same
way as China and Japan. Although Hindi is the main language of India, there are
more than a dozen other languages, and none has great appeal outside the Indian
diaspora.
Moreover, India's extensive, widespread use of English, on which rests a large
part of part of its economic success, negates any need by foreigners to learn
Indian languages. However, Bollywood movies, dance and music are increasingly
popular around the world and have even influenced Western audiences through the
Oscar-nominated Lagaan, offshore productions such as Bride and Prejudice,
or indirectly in Moulin Rouge. However, there is no single Indian
government agency such as the Japan Foundation or Hanban committed to
proselytizing Indian languages and culture.
Despite India's problems in trying to control the diffusion of culture with
political consequences in mind, the failure of Japan to be able to use its
cultural exports to its political advantage highlights the problem of a
simplistic linking of culture and power. These cultural exports need to contain
moral/political values salient to those who consume them in order to work to
the long-term advantage of the countries that produced them.
Purnendra Jain is professor and head of Adelaide University's Center for
Asian Studies in Australia. Gerry Groot is senior lecturer in Chinese
Studies at Adelaide University's Center for Asian Studies.
