China: Soft power projection campaign

For several years, shoppers worldwide have been used to China’s omnipresence: ‘Made in China’ has long been the commonest label on the goods they buy. More recently, however, the Chinese government has been trying to sell the country itself as a brand — one that has the ability to attract people from other countries in the way that America does with its culture, products and values. A decade ago, the Communist Party of China (CPC) declared a new goal: to build ‘soft power’, as a complement to its rapidly growing economic and military strength. It spends some $10 billion (Rs.64,400 crore) a year on the project, according to David Shambaugh of George Washington University — one of the most extravagant programmes of state-sponsored image-building the world has ever seen. Shambaugh reckons that America spent less than $670 million (Rs.4,300 crore) on its ‘public diplomacy’ in 2014. Evidently, CPC borrowed the idea of soft power from an American academic, Joseph Nye, who coined the term in 1990. Nye argued that hard power alone is not enough to wield influence in the world.  In 2013, about a year after he took over as China’s leader, Xi Jinping convened a meeting of the ruling politburo to discuss soft power. Its members agreed that it is a vital ingredient of Xi’s “Chinese dream of the great revival of the Chinese nation” — the term “Chinese dream” being one of Xi’s favourites. Since then, Xi has made himself promoter-in-chief of this new form of power (helped when he travels abroad by the highly visible presence of his elegant, smiling wife). His efforts to boost it were on display at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, where he won plaudits for extolling globalisation and calling for unity in the fight against climate change. Even Mao Zedong, who enjoyed cult status abroad among some left-wing academics, put far less work into winning over foreigners. Confucius, condemned by Chairman Mao as a peddler of feudal thought, is now being proffered as a sage with a message of harmony. Since 2004, China has established some 500 government-funded Confucius Institutes in 140 countries. They offer language classes, host dance troupes and teach Chinese cooking. Many of them are on campuses. China has also set up more than 1,000 Confucius Classroom arrangements with foreign schools, providing them with teachers, materials and funding to help children learn Mandarin. China wants its message to be clearly visible in the heartland of America’s capitalist culture. Sometimes the party uses covert means to sway foreign opinion. In 2015, an investigation by Reuters revealed that a Chinese state broadcaster, China Radio International, controlled at least 33 radio stations in 14 countries, including the United States, but was using front companies to mask its ties with them. Reuters says the stations avoid airing anything that might portray China negatively. China’s soft-power push has made some gains. In global opinion polls, respondents from Africa tend to be more positive about China than people from other regions.…