(4/60) 8 Ways China is Changing the World this month with Soft Power
Every month, we highlight 8 Chinese soft power actions of the past month, in order to: i) Show the importance of soft power to sustain China’s growth overseas; ii) Capture the acceleration towards a more multipolar world; iii) Strengthen East-West and South-South understanding.
This is based on tertiary sources and some in-country local accounts.
APRIL 2021
1) Climate Change… a soft power playground. After China stepped up in COP21, and Trump pulled out of COP24 in Poland, China became the world’s lead in climate change investment, renewable production, and the leader of the climate change agenda. When John Kerry, the US’s climate Envoy, went to Shanghai this month, and Xi then agreed to virtually attend Biden’s climate change meeting this summer (both are calling each meeting a ‘summit’ as there are other nations present), it has become clear this is now a G2 tag-team for global leadership, leading up to Glasgow COP26 in November. This is positive. Climate Change is a soft power darling, it provides immediate returns on the environment and research, and it carries into areas of economic development, trade, and commercial re-engineering, with several technological spinoffs. As the world’s far and away leader in the renewable market and also production, China remains in a vulnerable political place as it continues to build more coal plants (53% of the world’s coal plants are in China), likely until 2026 when the price per megawatt is expected to be cheaper for renewables than coal. Until then, it is ensuring its BRI projects are greener and sustainable, as evidenced by the cancellation of projects in Bangladesh last month, among others. Two key questions to watch: Will countries choose to harp on China’s coal production, or will it applaud China’s renewable revolution (0.9% of its GDP is given to and get on board? Will china’s international outsourcing of coal reduction be enough to offset its soft power vulnerability? Will climate change succeed in being the primary area of understanding and joint leadership for these two powers? China’s soft power hangs in the wind.
2) Oscars: Chinese cinema’s independence. Chinese born Director Chloe Zhao won the Oscar for best Film, however it was not celebrated in China. Wei shen me? Why? It could be seen as a soft power missed opportunity, or perhaps Chinese humility, or perhaps China showing it no longer needs Hollywood as much as Hollywood needs China. We think however, this was China not yet ready to risk supporting a Chinese lady and an industry that is not fully supportive of China. The soft power lens on this needs to be telescopic. Western media and human rights groups are saying it’s a missed opportunity for soft power, though we see this more nuanced. The West are laying nets out now, proverbial mine fields of sorts, for China to walk into. The Oscars could have been one. So, the Chinese appear to be taking a tactful and pragmatic approach by distancing themselves from the Oscars which have become extremely political lately, first with gender equality, then climate change, and now race. With the US aggressively shaming China and, similar to Richard Gere with Tibet in the 90s, there could easily be some Western actors using the platform to spearhead a defamation campaign against China. From a soft power angle, the entertainment industry is the final stage for harming soft power and shaming: First it starts with human rights groups and INGOs, then UN, then investigative journalism, then mainstream news, then political chambers, and then, the final steps are into the entertainment industry (and finally into school curriculums). This typical cycle of country defamation is sophisticated and coordinated. It appears the Chinese authorities weren’t ready to give the political platform an accelerant, in a year when so much is riding on Chinese soft power with COVID, COP26, the 100th year anniversary of the party, and the Olympics.
3) China Olympics: Potential Boycott, Failed traction. The winter Olympics are coming soon, and Beijing will be the first country to ever host both the summer and winter Olympics. The Olympics will be a seminal projection of China’s soft power — which the West will need to try to limit as China’s successes counter their own narratives. Beijing 2008 was the springboard of China’s soft power presence on the global stage which no longer made China’s rise possible to ignore. At that time, China was looked upon favourably by the West, yet now 14 US allies collectively view china unfavourably, per last month’s pew polling. The Winter Games will be deeply political, whereas 2008 had a very subtle political signal regarding China’s support of Sudan (re: Darfur; US’s flagbearer was a Darfurian refugee), the political magnetism of these games will be aggressive. It has already begun with low profile Uighur human rights groups calling for a boycott, yet, notably, all 36 Gulf and Muslim countries signed a joint statement supporting China’s Xinjiang Uyghur policy, so there will be more avenues now to try to shame China (Hong Kong, Taiwan, even Tibet railroad construction, etc). Right after Tokyo’s summer games are completed, we can expect a full throttle propaganda campaign to shame the games from a handful of Western countries — notably Canada, the US, Australia and the EU (not the European countries themselves, but the EU as a bloc). If a boycott is presented, then February 2022 could be the watershed moment when political alliances are drawn in the sand/ice for the next decade/century, similar to Moscow’s 1980 Games. Notably: unlike the Summer Games however, most of the Winter attendees aren’t African or Latin American where China has a lot of support. Still, instead of a full athlete boycott, at the bare minimum, we expect to have Western media outlets not showcase the games’ ceremonies (and Beijing’s technological prowess), and for no Western countries to send political leadership. Attendance will represent the fault lines, the media will represent the narrative, and the Games will represent China’s soft power frontiers.
4) Chinese Soft power in US is plummeting: Confucius Institutes’ US presence. This month, there are only 51 Confucius Institutes (Centers which promote Chinese culture and language) remaining from 110 just three years ago. 7 more are due to close in 2021. This is a litmus. This past month, the US Senate voted to deny the Department of Education funding to universities that host Confucius Institutes unless they meet oversight requirements. This is building upon the 2019 National Defence Authorization Act which forces schools to choose between the Institutes or language program funding from the US Defence Department. The US’s foreign policy narrative is succeeding to counter China’s soft cultural power reach. This is clear because the demand for the Institutes is also falling quickly. The critical issue here is that there is now a deliberate disinterest from universities or US policy to build an understanding and appreciation of China, which now provides a more difficult playing field for China to succeed in their soft power objectives. This setback will now provide the Chinese gouvernment with a decision: to unilaterally close all the Institutes in the US (a three edged sword), or to use this as a challenge in their agility to develop more nuanced soft power approaches beyond these Institutes.
5) Xi’s War on Platforms / China’s Tech focus. Xi announced, in very direct language, that a type of internet firm would be pursued in anti-trust (ie: anti monopoly) legislation: PLATFORMS. Platform internet companies are the widest ranging, connecting other companies, merchants, and users to one another in an array of products and services: essentially, most of the largest non-state (and primarily tech) companies in China. What this means for soft power is that the gouvernment is displaying to the world that there will be increased competition permitted. On the other side, it also shows that China will not tolerate monopolies (similar to the EU and the US do not) which could send a signal that there is market space — at the expense of irking investors into Chinese large firms. It’s a calculated, and complicated trade-off.
6) US has begun mirroring China. There is a rare phenomena beginning, which we can expect to continue. The US are showing signs of comparing themselves to China, in order to not lose the communications strategy which China has been implementing along with their clear 5 year plans. The US has announced huge stimulus of 50B to computer chips, while also having launched a “Made in America” campaign akin to India’s, and of course China’s ‘Made in China 2025’ (which our 60 report journey is harnessed to.) To see the US mirroring China, exhibits a form of soft power counter-insurgency, which, can only be seen as an imitation being the highest form of flattery, and a reflection of just how effective China’s communication has been. It is proving effective as a soft power tool to gain respect amongst policymakers and observers. This is akin to the US’s ‘Sputnik Moment’ of 1957, when the USSR launched the first satellite into orbit which triggered massive R&D investment in the US (which inadvertently led to the internet amongst other innovations).
7) Russian vacuums, Chinese opportunity. As US interests wane from the Gulf, Latin America, swaths of Africa, MENA, and also Afghanistan, China enters. The same can be said when Russia lessens its soft power footprint as well. First, in Education in Russia’s old sphere. In Kyrgyzstan, Chinese language continues to flood in, tied to concessional loans based on spreading Chinese in schools. In Uzbekistan, many of the Chinese factories (cotton, car manufacturing, fruits) also provide free daycare to its local and Chinese workers, which, always includes a Mandarin component, alongside Uzbek, Russian, and English language. Second, Russia announced last year it would leave the International Space Station (cooperation with US since 1998) in 2025. It said last month it would use this time to develop a programme with the Chinese for either an orbiter of the moon, or a base on the moon by 2030. Third, this month brought profound friction between Eastern Europe and Russia via mass expulsions between Russian diplomats and Belarussians, Latvians, and most notably 100 Russian diplomats from Prague. Russia labelled 9 countries as “hostile to Russia”: US, UK, plus 7 Eastern European (including 5 Former Soviets). This puts pressure on these countries to look West, but, now, also, to China for some balance. China has a strong economic, political, and soft power presence in the Western Balkans, yet it still has work to do beyond the Balkans and into Central Europe. China’s relations with Czech are divisive between the Prague municipality and the Federal State, and also between the Budapest Mayor and the Hungarian President. The point is, the opportunity is ripe with Russia’s weakening reputation, for China to expand its soft power anchor in the Balkans.
8) China’s proliferation of patents. China currently has approximately 40% of the world’s new patents across a wide area of industries, and the US has 40%. The rest of the world has 20%. Patents represent technology, which represents talent and education and entrepreneurship and ingenuity: this phenomena to attract people and recognize China as a creator and not a copier is a key facet of soft power. In the past decade, in the more upstream products, China obtained 390,000 artificial intelligence (AI) patent applications for example, ranking first place in the world and accounting for 74.7 percent of the world’s total of 520,000, according to the China Artificial Intelligence Development Report 2020, released this month during the China Artificial Intelligence Industry Annual Conference held in Suzhou. China leads the world in scientific research output in more than 10 AI sub-fields, including natural language processing, chip technology and machine learning. However the country still needs to catch up in human-computer interaction, knowledge engineering, robotics, computer graphics and computing theory. The report also analyzed high-level talent resources, pointing out that the U.S. has the largest number of high-level AI scholars of 1,244, while China ranks second with 196.
