The Chinese dream shattered between hard and soft power?

Abstract

Sometimes the Chinese dream is of sustainable development, of anti-corruption, of constitutionalism, of a clean environment, or of social harmony. Essentially, like the American dream or any dream for that matter, the Chinese dream can mean anything to anyone. However, more so than in ‘democratic societies’, where dreaming is free and extensively discussed, the authoritarian Chinese government and Communist Party seem to have a problem as these slogans do not resonate with the broader public, neither nationally nor internationally

Keywords

anti-corruption China Confucius Institutes public diplomacy soft power strategic communication

Introduction

The jury is still out on the Chinese dream. It is the favoured slogan of the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, who took over as paramount leader in early 2013. Even for hardened apparatchiks, it seems a bit vague

writes BBC correspondent Joe Boyle (2013) in his overview of the 11 slogans that changed China.

However, more so than in ‘democratic societies’, where dreaming is free and extensively discussed, the authoritarian Chinese government and Communist Party seem to have a problem as these slogans do not resonate with the broader public, neither nationally nor internationally. At an international level, it is often combined with the concept and strategy of soft power.

In this article, we start with a brief overview of the nature and theoretical expressions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power in contemporary politics and culture. We link this debate to the issue of public diplomacy as soft power and compare briefly the differences between China and the United States in this regard. The Chinese dream and soft power aspirations are then assessed against the backdrop of two current, still unfolding ‘power’ struggles: Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive and China’s strategy of using the Confucius Institutes as ‘cultural ambassadors’ in the world.

Power and its disguises

In all societies, power is based on two main fundamentals. The very first is the naked ‘political power (that) grows out of the barrel of a gun’, a famous quote attributed to Mao Zedong. No social order can persist without the monopoly of military might that is entrusted to the state. One only has to refer to the past or recent events in Iraq or Afghanistan, or to the current situation in Thailand, to find sad examples for such a claim.

The second important factor is the consent of the governed. Both elements are needed to achieve a stable social order. No government can survive based on might alone, and this is particularly so in democratic societies, where the consent of the governed has to be explicitly given every few years during more or less democratically organized elections. The important question is, ‘how can one achieve such consent?’

An answer to this question leads to the problem of power and the legitimization of power relationships. Each social order can be characterized by an interrelated division between an (economic) base and an (ideological and symbolic) superstructure. According to Pierre Bourdieu (1979), the dominant classes call upon an ideological and symbolic preponderance not only to maintain their position in the social hierarchy but also to justify it. This system has a ‘symbolic power’ because it is capable of construing reality in a directed manner. Its symbolic power does not lie in the symbolic system itself but in the social relationships between those who exercise the power and those who are subject to it. Symbolic power functions mainly ‘unconsciously’ as the legitimization criterion for the existing social and economic power relationships and creates ‘myths’ and ‘ways of life’. So, in reality, not only normative but also, and especially, power factors play a role in policy and planning, and certainly when it comes to confirming and carrying out policy recommendations (Burawoy, 2012).

The traditional interpretation of the power concept refers to material or immaterial perceived possessions in a narrow as well as a broad meaning, that is, a property or possession that is handled by actors in a mainly intentional, direct or indirect manner. Max Weber’s definition, which describes power as the capability of one individual or social group to impose its will, despite the objections of others, is often quoted in this context. One can find such a static perception in different functionalists as well as classic-Marxist theories. In such definitions, power is one-sidedly situated with the so-called power holders. Their position of power rests on a conflict relationship that can only be ‘resolved’ by consensus on one side or by struggle on the other (Servaes, 1981).

Critical social-philosophers and post-structuralists have pointed out the limitations of such a power concept. Michel Foucault (1980), Anthony Giddens, and Jürgen Habermas, for example, state that the relationship between power and conflict is of an accidental nature. They, nevertheless, do not deny that the exercise of power is an asymmetrical phenomenon but, instead, believe that power is ‘all embracing’ and ‘all mighty’ and has to be coupled with the concept of ‘interest’. Power and conflict often go together, so they argue, but this union is not because one logically implies the other but because power has to be seen in concert with the pursuit of interests. While power is a characteristic of every form of human interaction, contrapositions of interests are not, meaning that power is a dual concept that can be interpreted in two ways.

Looking at power in a static way, there are those who have power and those who endure power. But if interpreted in a dynamic way, one could say that even the powerless exercise power over the powerful. Thus, power concerns the possible effectuated and asymmetrically divided ability of one actor (power holder) to put into order, inside a specific interaction system, the alternatives of actions of one or more actors (power subjects). In an interview of Michel Foucault, conducted by B. Gallagher and A. Wilson in 1982, the issue is positioned as follows:

Politically speaking, probably the most important part of looking at power is that, according to previous conceptions, ‘to resist’ was simply to say no. Resistance was conceptualized only in terms of negation. Within our understanding, however, to resist is not simply a negation but a creative process; to create and recreate, to change the situation, actually to be an active member of that process. (Rabinow, 2000: 168)

Power centers on the capability to regulate and structure the actions inside asymmetrical relations. In other words, to exercise power is not the same as suppression (Servaes, 1989).

Lukes (2005) further distinguishes between three aspects of relational power: it is not only about strategies to change people’s behavior but also the public, hidden, and invisible faces of structural power.

Put in a more straightforward way, the discussion on power and its disguises shows us that the majority has to share a common world view claiming that the current social order is the best, the only one possible, or at least, the lesser of evils. Such a world view depends to a large extent on information and knowledge, which may or may not contradict the existing predominant world view. A small amount of dissonant information is not a problem as such dissonance can be explained away. A large amount of dissonance, however, may invariably lead to a questioning of the status quo. In addition, ‘Two great power shifts are occurring in this century: a power transition among states and a power diffusion for the world of nation-states and the world of non-state actors’ (Nye, 2011: xv).

Power: hard, soft, partial, or smart?

The former dean of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Joseph Nye, introduced the concept of soft power in 1990. In Nye (2004), he argued that culture, political values, and foreign policies have become new dimensions for international relations which are not directly dependent on the hard power of economics and military might. Soft power exercises influence indirectly by creating a certain climate, which may result in changes in influence over diplomatic decisions by the public opinion rather than by political elites only. For countries with differences in political, economic, and cultural systems, the best way to influence public opinion is to increase mutual understanding and respect of differences through positive media messages and to encourage more cultural, educational, and business exchange between countries (Altinay, 2011; Cohen, 2011; Naim, 2013; Peerenboom, 2008).

Nye (2008) argues that public diplomacy is an important tool in the arsenal of soft power and that, in a certain sense, soft power can only be achieved through public diplomacy (p. 95). Obviously, in unison with the US State Department, he later introduced the concept of ‘smart power’: ‘Smart power is the combination of the hard power of coercion and payment with the soft power of persuasion and attraction’ (Nye, 2011: xiii).

National images abroad and at home are widely regarded as a state’s intangible soft power resource. While, externally, becoming essential elements of a state’s strategic asset, they, internally, contribute to political capital for both democratic systems and authoritarian regimes alike.

The potential for the news media to influence public opinion development and the constraints under which news organizations operate should be integrated into the discussion of theory and practice of public diplomacy and international relations between these societies. International relations and foreign policy are influenced by public opinion, and public opinion may be influenced by information in the media (Altinay, 2011; Hayden, 2012; Pamment, 2013; Servaes, 2013).

Public diplomacy as soft power

The term public diplomacy was coined in 1965 by Edmund Gullion, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University (Wolper, 1991). His concept was summarized in an early Murrow Center brochure:

Public diplomacy … deals with the influence of public attitudes on the formation and execution of foreign policies. It encompasses dimensions of international relations beyond traditional diplomacy; the cultivation by governments of public opinion in other countries; the interaction of private groups and interests in one country with another; the reporting of foreign affairs and its impact on policy; communication between those whose job is communication, as diplomats and foreign correspondents; and the process of intercultural communications. (Cull, 2009: 19, also quoted by Xiong, 2013)

As a successful case in US–China public diplomacy, the US–China Internet Industry Forum (UCIIF) proves that in neo-politics, there exists a rule from coexistence, complementation to convergence, and innovation, which has a close relationship with its diplomatic operations (Xiong, 2013). This case also provides important inspiration for the future of US–China relations. It will have an influence over diplomatic decisions, which were usually in the past decided by political elites (Deutsch, 1966).

As already mentioned, the initial concept of public diplomacy refers to state-driven activities such as scholarly exchanges, cultural events, and state-supported broadcasting to foreign audiences. Over the past decade, however, a new public diplomacy perspective has developed which refers to activities that are beyond state actors. It has become a more fluid concept in the context of the new media and Internet environment (Pamment, 2014; Servaes, 2012a). Nevertheless, it remains universally acknowledged that public diplomacy is targeted at influencing directly and indirectly public attitudes and opinions, and its ultimate purpose is to promote the national interest (Anneier and Lorentz, 2012; Fulda et al., 2012; Lee et al., 2012; Li, 2011; Nathan, 2011; Semetko et al., 2011; Sharma, 2009; Wang, 2011).

China versus US soft power

At present, the public diplomacy tools adopted by both China and the United States are varied (Li, 2011; Hu, 2011; Rawsley, 2014; Xiaosong and Yizhi, 2003). However, according to Xiong (2013), China has two disadvantages: The first is these public diplomacy tools are trying to win a foreign public’s appreciation but are not open to discussion; the second is that most tools’ policy effects are difficult to control or evaluate. Brzezinski (2012) and Shambaugh (2013) seem to share this view. Shambaugh observes that China’s global presence is more broad than deep and that China still lacks the influence befitting a major world power – what he terms a ‘partial power’. Brzezinski (2012) argues that the world after 2025 will not be Chinese but more chaotic: ‘The strategic complexities of the world in the twenty-first century – resulting from the rise of a politically self-assertive global population and from the dispersal of global power – make such supremacy unattainable’ (pp. 119–120).

Jacques (2012) concludes that, for the time being, China gets very little soft power in the West, for mainly three reasons: (1) China continues to be viewed as ‘still a relatively poor developing country’, (2) ‘the absence of a multi-party democracy’, and (3) at least until recently, China could not enjoy the ‘appeal’ that Western nations, especially the United States, had in the rest of the world: cultural capital and ‘national brands’ such as Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Broadway, great sporting events, mega-stars, and celebrities (pp. 609–610). However, as has been pointed out in some of the articles in a special issue on US–Chinese Mass Communication and Public Diplomacy (Servaes, 2012b), the staging of the Beijing Olympics, the Shanghai Expo, the opening of Confucius Institutes, the emerging interest in learning Mandarin, and the growing popularity of CCTV programs and blockbuster movies may have triggered the start of a change in this regard (see also Chang, 2008; Kurlantzick, 2007; Wang, 2011).

The Chinese dream (中国梦) between ethics and strategic communication

However, the Chinese dream and soft power aspirations may also be shattered by the reality on the ground. That is where the interplay of ethics and strategic communication becomes important. While China may be learning fast how to move from propaganda to public relations or strategic communication, it still looses out in the battle of winning the hearts and minds of people (especially in the West, but increasingly also in other parts of the world – including China itself – see, inter alia, Barme, 2013; Hayden, 2012; Schlosberg, 2013; Shambaugh, 2013; Wang and Shoemaker, 2011) on moral grounds (Wronka, 2008).

Let’s take two recent events, which were reported in the media: China’s anti-corruption campaigns and the Confucius Institutes.

Anti-corruption campaigns

Corruption is not typical to China; it undermines communities, institutions, and countries in many parts of the world. The Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International (2012, 2014) ranks countries and territories based on how corrupt their public sector is perceived to be on a scale from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). While no country has a perfect score, two-thirds of countries score below 50, indicating a serious corruption problem. China is one of these; it is listed as the 80th with a score of 39 in 2012 and 100th with a score of 36 in 2014, out of 175 countries. Transparency International (2013) notes,

The well-publicized trial of Bo Xilai, a former politburo member and populist politician, for corruption and abuse of power does not prove China is serious about fighting corruption. Nor does it show that no one, not even a powerful politician, is above the rule of law. This elaborately choreographed prosecution is simply an exercise in demonstrating where power lies in an authoritarian state.

Richard McGregor (2011), the Financial Times’ former China bureau chief, confirms,

The stream of corruption cases and the ruthless justice meted out to those who fall foul of the system sometimes gives the impression of a Party committed to exterminating graft without fear or favour. Far from being a modern-day Chinese version of Eliot Ness’s ‘Untouchables’, however, the (anti-corruption) commission is structured to keep its investigators in check. The approval process, with its bias towards protecting top leaders from any scrutiny at all, means the commission is dogged by politics, and political struggle, at every turn. (p. 138)

The anti-corruption commission, he argues, is toothless: ‘Corruption in modern China, with its surging wealth, proliferating business structures, walled-off government empires, massive vested interest and global reach, has simply left the commission’s traditional methods behind’ (McGregor, 2011: 141–142).

The regular stream of reports on crackdowns on corruption may make you believe otherwise. For instance, on just one day – 3 July 2014 – the Hong Kong–based South China Morning Post (SCMP) published four articles related to corruption in China (Chen, 2014a, 2014b; Huang, 2014a, 2014b).

However, to further complicate matters, one can also read about the arrests and sentencing of anti-corruption activists for advocating that officials in China publish asset declarations (BBC, 2014; Denyer, 2013). In these cases, the rule of law was used to thwart people who were actually proposing a policy that is known to help expose corruption, and hence, in support of Xi Jinping’s official anti-corruption campaign, one might think.

Not so. These crackdowns on anti-corruption activists

dramatically illustrate the Chinese leadership’s paranoia about street protests that could snowball out of control. The government seems haunted by memories of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, the Arab Spring and China’s own short-lived 2011 ‘Jasmine revolution’. It also signals that any moves by Xi to crack down on corruption will be on his and the Communist Party’s own terms, if they are meaningful at all. (Denyer, 2013)

In other words, ‘Chinese leader Xi Jinping launched an anti-corruption drive when he took over in 2012. But he has also overseen the broadest crackdown on grassroots activism that China has seen in recent years’, concluded the BBC (2014). And, it doesn’t stop with anti-corruption cases; also other forms of activism have become suppressed. For instance, just before International Women’s Day on 8 March 2015, Chinese police detained five women’s rights activists in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Hangzhou. They were suspected of ‘picking quarrels and provoking troubles’, a charge police have used in recent years to target dissidents. The women were planning to protest against sexual harassment on public transport. ‘The five are thought to be the first people in modern Chinese history to be arrested for championing women’s rights’, comments the SCMP on 16 March 2015 (Ping, 2015). The Chinese authorities only released them after 1 month after their detentions sparked an international outcry.

One explanation may be that the Communist Party considers the anti-corruption campaign an internal affair. Therefore, ‘citizens have no right to judge them, they are fighting corruption on their own’, said lawyer Liang Xiaojun, who is representing one of the arrested activists. ‘But the one-party system has never been good at fighting corruption on its own. The contradictions just get increasingly sharpened’ (quoted in Denyer, 2013). An editorial in the SCMP of 4 July 2014 seems to confirm this assumption: ‘It seems that graft is seen as so extensive that, for now, the symptoms should be tackled and contained in order to buy more time to tackle the root causes’. No wonder that activists claim that Xi’s anti-corruption talk is merely a smokescreen for the president that allows him to crack down harder on dissent. They may have a point if one takes recently imposed restrictions on press freedom into account as well. For instance, on 9 July 2014, it was reported that China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television bans reporters from sharing unpublished material on the Internet or with overseas media: ‘The regulation would in effect ensure information is reported only after going through the tight censorship process’ (Jing and Chen, 2014: A3; see also Nieman Reports, 2014; Zhao, 2008). An Editorial in the SCMP (2014) on 17 July 2014 further comments,

This is an attempt to ensure information is reported only after a tight censorship process. It does lay down rules for handling state secrets, but the definition of these remains so broad that the law has obvious potential for abuse by officials wanting to hide information from the public. That is precisely why the information gag is to be condemned. It remains the duty of journalists to report matters of public interest. (p. A12)

Also, a further crackdown on university education, especially in communication and journalism departments, is noticeable in this regard. Chinese Education Minister, Yuan Guiren, on 30 January 2015 urged universities to exert tighter control over the use of imported textbooks ‘that spread Western values’. Universities were urged to keep classrooms clear of remarks that ‘defame the rule of the Communist Party, smear socialism or violate the constitution and laws’ (Chen and Pinghui, 2015).

Confucius Institutes

The other case I wish to mention is the recent call by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to reevaluate their relationship with the Confucius Institutes in the name of academic freedom and integrity (Qin, 2014).

Officially, Confucius Institutes started in 2004 as nonprofit public institutions affiliated with China’s Ministry of Education to promote Chinese language and culture, support local Chinese teaching internationally, and facilitate cultural exchanges. (Confucius Institute Online, n.d., http://www.chinesecio.com/). The program is overseen by Hanban (officially the Office of Chinese Language Council International) and governed by a council whose top-level members are drawn from Communist Party of China leadership and various state ministries. Worldwide, there are more than 1100 Confucius Institutes, based in and affiliated with academic institutions of higher education in 122 countries.

Confucius Institutes like to compare themselves with other cultural promotion organizations such as the British Council, Alliance Française, or Goethe-Institut. However, unlike these organizations, Confucius Institutes are managed by the Chinese government and operate directly on university campuses. This has raised concerns over their influence on academic freedom, the possibility of industrial espionage, surveillance of Chinese students abroad, and concerns that the institutes present a selective and politicized view of China as a means of advancing the country’s soft power internationally as political and controversial subjects like human rights and democracy, or Tibet and Tiananmen, are censored from the programs. For instance, under the title ‘Beijing’s Propaganda Lessons’, The Wall Street Journal of 8 August 2014 reported on the removal, stealing, and censoring of academic materials during a recent conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies in Portugal.

Additional concerns have arisen over the institutes’ financial and academic viability, teaching quality, and relations with Chinese partner universities. As a result of such criticisms, administrators at several institutions, such as the University of Melbourne and University of Chicago, have opposed the establishment of a Confucius Institute.

Kerry Brown (2014), the Executive Director of the China Studies Centre and professor of Chinese politics at the University of Sydney, makes the case that China should find a new cultural figure to represent it:

If you wanted, as a modern Chinese, to promote a deeper understanding and a more favourable attitude towards your country and its culture, why choose a figure as unattractive, remote and contentious as Confucius to represent you? Confucius is well known, for one thing … The very Communist Party now lionising Confucius attacked and vilified him just four decades ago. Surely it would have been better to use someone with a less difficult recent history to represent the culture abroad. On top of this, there is the question of the values with which Confucius is associated: patriarchal, hierarchical, and conservative. Why celebrate in 21st century China a figure who is linked to these old ideas when you are also promoting your country as innovative, outward-looking and modern?

However, the controversy is more political and academic than cultural. Marshall Sahlins (2013), a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, sums it all up in an often-quoted article published in The Nation:

For all the attention that the Confucius Institutes (CI) have attracted in the United States and elsewhere, there has been virtually no serious journalistic or ethnographic investigation into their particulars, such as how the Chinese teachers are trained or how the content of courses and textbooks are chosen. One difficulty has been that the CIs are something of a moving target. Not only are Chinese officials willing to be flexible in their negotiations with elite institutions, but the general Hanban strategy has also been changing in recent years. Despite its global reach, the CI program is apparently not achieving the political objectives of burnishing the image and increasing the influence of the People’s Republic. Unlike Mao’s Little Red Book in the era of Third World liberation, the current Chinese regime is a hard sell. Having the appearance of an attractive political system is a necessary condition of ‘soft power’ success, as Joseph Nye, who coined the phrase, has written. The revamped Confucius Institute initiative is to engage less in language and culture and more in the core teaching and research of the host university. Still, the working principles of the CI program remain those of its constitution and bylaws, together with the model agreements negotiated with participating universities. Routinely and assiduously, Hanban wants the Confucius Institutes to hold events and offer instruction under the aegis of host universities that put the PRC in a good light – thus confirming the oft-quoted remark of Politburo member Li Changchun that the Confucius Institutes are ‘an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up’.

Therefore, the AAUP (2014) argues that the use of Confucius Institutes in schools and universities raises questions about academic freedom and also makes US universities complicit in cases of discriminatory hiring and censorship:

Allowing any third-party control of academic matters is inconsistent with principles of academic freedom, shared governance, and the institutional autonomy of colleges and universities. The AAUP joins CAUT (the Canadian Association of University Teachers) in recommending that universities cease their involvement in Confucius Institutes unless the agreement between the university and Hanban is renegotiated so that (1) the university has unilateral control, consistent with principles articulated in the AAUP’s Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, over all academic matters, including recruitment of teachers, determination of curriculum, and choice of texts; (2) the university affords Confucius Institute teachers the same academic freedom rights, as defined in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, that it affords all other faculty in the university; and (3) the university-Hanban agreement is made available to all members of the university community. More generally, these conditions should apply to any partnerships or collaborations with foreign governments or foreign government-related agencies.

Conclusion

The Economist (2014) in a special issue on the future of China sums it all up:

Economically and militarily, China has come a long way towards regaining the centrality in Asia it enjoyed through much of history. Intellectually and morally, it has not. In the old days it held a ‘soft power’ so strong, according to William Kirby of Harvard University, that ‘neighbours converted themselves’ to it. Now, Mr Xi may know how to assert himself and how to be feared, at home and abroad. But without the ability to exert a greater power of attraction, too, such strength will always tend to destabilize.

In other words, there is still some way to go for China before its dream comes true, and its soft power will be appreciated and endorsed by people around the world (including China) as ethically sound and strategically commonsensical.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The first version of this article was presented as a keynote during the 7th Forum on Public Relations and Advertising, Mahidol University, Bangkok, 13–15 August 2014. An abridged version was published as ‘Soft power and the Chinese dream’ in Media Development 4 (2014): 1–6.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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