CHARM OFFENSIVE: HOW CHINA'S SOFT POWER IS TRANSFORMING THE WORLD

August 15, 2007


By Joshua Kurlantzick

As a correspondent for The Economist in East Asia, based in
Thailand, one of my reporting assignments was covering the
first visit of a Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, to Cambodia
in November 2000. This was the first such visit in thirty
years--China and Cambodia have had a generally disastrous
modern history. (China was the major foreign patron of the
Khmer Rouge, and after the genocide in Cambodia there was
much lingering anger at all sorts of actors, including
China.)

Jiang received a strong public response in Cambodia, not
only from local officials whose job it is to do nice things
for visiting dignitaries, but from a huge number of
schoolchildren who came to welcome him, from the local
business community, and from thousands of local officials
from all over the country who came to greet him. The Chinese
government had done a great deal of preparatory work for
this visit. They had invested a lot of money in language
schools and cultural programs in Cambodia, built a kind of
Peace Corps program there, gave out scholarships for
children who would go on to study in China, and created a
huge aid program. China had done similar things in other
countries. But there was very little coverage of this in the
global media, which tended to focus on high-level diplomacy.
Accordingly, for the book project I went to China to speak
with Chinese officials about how they see their power in the
world emerging, particularly in developing parts of the
world--Asia, Africa, Latin America-and then went to a number
of countries in these regions to look at what China was
doing on the ground in these areas. I also wanted to find
out what if any results the Chinese had gotten from what we
call soft power.

HOW CHINA'S SOFT POWER STRATEGY EMERGES
There are many definitions of soft power, but basically,
when the Chinese government talks about its new soft power
in the world, it means all power outside of the military
sphere, including diplomacy, aid, investment, and economic
tools.

One reason for this new relationship with the world is that
China has experienced great domestic changes within the past
fifteen years. By the 1990s, you saw the growth of a more
confident, patriotic, even nationalistic public in China,
that, seeing how China had grown significantly, began to
talk about China's playing a larger role in the world, a
subject that was verboten fifteen years ago. The Chinese
leadership also has become much more engaged with the world,
with their own think tanks and universities to draw on to
develop a more sophisticated foreign policy. These leaders
have a more sophisticated view of the world, travel more,
and are able to play a larger, more confident global role.

Here in the U.S. we often talk of how difficult it is for
the government to change tack when something is perceived as
a mistake. This was not the case in China, which in the mid-
1990s was somewhat more adventurous militarily, launching
missiles into the Taiwan Strait and creating disputes in
Asia over islands that China and other countries have made
claims to. Beijing recognized that this adventurism was
really failing them and that they were alienating countries,
some of whom were coming back and restoring their relations
with the U.S.

Finally, there was the Asian financial crisis. The U.S. was
widely criticized for responding slowly to that crisis, and
you saw the beginning of the decline of America's image in
that part of the world. At the same time the Chinese
government was fairly proactive. They resisted devaluing
their currency and did a lot of good PR for this. Whatever
this may have contributed to solving the crisis, they really
hyped up that they were standing up for other countries in
Asia and got a lot of goodwill from this decision. It was
the first time they saw the benefits of promoting their
economic activity in the world as a benefit to other
nations.

CHINESE GOALS
China has new goals as it has become more engaged in the
world. First, it desperately needs access to resources. It
has a high level of industrial development, but is a vast
consumer of resources. If China was to develop at the same
pace as the U.S. and consume the same amount of resources,
it would be on a scale unprecedented in the world. As a
result, the Chinese government worries desperately where it
is going to get oil and gas. The government doesn't have the
kind of legitimacy that comes from elections; its legitimacy
comes from delivering economic growth. Every time that
growth declines or if there's an electricity blackout or the
like, the government worries. The Chinese also have been
overly dependent on too few oil and gas suppliers in the
world. They now look to places they can get oil and gas
where they won't be in direct competition with the U.S. or
Japan, places like Sudan and other countries where Western
nations either can't go because of sanctions or fear to go
because the environment is dangerous.

Also, as Chinese companies start to become internationally
active, they want to have places they can sell their goods.
Again, they often want to go to places where there's less
immediate competition with the U.S - places where the
environment is difficult for business.

As they get more influential, the Chinese want more partners
in international organizations such as the UN, the WTO, etc.

Isolating Taiwan has been a Chinese goal since the U.S. and
the rest of the world recognized China, and in the past few
years, as China has become more proactive and
internationally engaged, they have sought more to isolate
Taiwan, which has informal links with many other parts of
the world.

China's strategy since the late 1990s shows recognition that
in the U.S. its image will likely be mixed. Therefore, if it
could change its perception in other parts of the world and
reduce fears of its economic and military power in other
parts of the world, it could play a much greater role on the
global stage. This is actually quite sophisticated thinking.

Finally, the Chinese leadership to some degree desires in
the long run that China be the regional leader in Asia. It
feels that the U.S. is an unnatural actor in Asia, owing
from the legacy of WWII, when the U.S. was the only country
that had the power to play peacemaker role, to guarantee
stability in the region. In the long term, they feel, that
role would naturally be China's.

COMPONENTS OF CHINA'S STRATEGY
Since the late 1990s, China has shifted its foreign policy
away from just worrying about the U.S., as it had been doing
to a large extent since Kissinger and Zhou Enlai first met,
to a much broader focus. The time they spend in Africa,
Latin America, and other parts of the world is evidence that
Chinese leaders are putting a much higher priority on those
regions, recognizing that because China is also a developing
nation, it possibly can build relations with some of these
other parts of the world more effectively than the U.S. can.
China's leaders can suggest that their country stands on the
side of these other countries on issues like trade and
technology transfer. Whether or not this is actually true,
as a rhetorical device it's quite effective.

China sometimes focuses on countries where the U.S.
bilateral relationship is faltering. An extreme case is
Uzbekistan. About two years ago there was a significant
crackdown on opposition in that country in which hundreds of
people were brutally killed. The U.S. has had a closer
relationship with Uzbekistan since 9/11, since it wanted
bases there. We still have some bases there. But at the time
of the crackdown the relationship was downgraded.
Immediately after, the Chinese government invited the leader
of Uzbekistan for a state visit in Beijing.

You see this at a lower level, too. A good example is the
Philippines. The U.S. had long had a good relationship with
that country. But in July 2004 the Philippines took its
troops out of Iraq, probably in order to save a Filipino
hostage. The Bush administration criticized them, and
immediately after that the Chinese government announced an
enormous aid package for the Philippines and aggressively
stepped up its relationship. China recognizes that it can
benefit when the U.S. slips. It seeks to convey that unlike
the U.S., it does not interfere with other countries'
domestic affairs. It won't tell any country--Sudan, Myanmar,
or France--what to do. China has won some praise in some
countries for this.

China has also become more pragmatic. It does not want to
directly antagonize the U.S. or poke a finger in its eye; it
wants to still have a good relationship with the U.S. but
pursue these other strategies at the same time. For
instance, China has a very good relationship with Venezuela,
whose Hugo Chavez has made stridently anti-U.S. statements
in many forums, including the UN. When he did the same in
Beijing, China's ambassador to Venezuela immediately told
the local press that China did not want to associate itself
with those statements.

Finally, within political systems, China is far less
ideological than in the past. Forty years ago, China chose
its relations within political systems based on ideology.
There's very little of that any more. After rebels in Nepal
who took their philosophy directly from Chairman Mao began a
war against the king, China's government had to decide who
they were going to support. They decided to support the king
against the Maoist rebels.

CHINESE TOOLS OF INFLUENCE
With very little fanfare until this past year, China has
developed into a significant aid donor in the world. China
had given out aid in the 1950s and 1960s, in Mao's time, but
had retreated from this in recent years. Now, in some
countries like the Philippines and Cambodia and parts of
Africa, China has actually become a bigger donor than the
U.S. or Japan. The money is spent in a pretty sophisticated
way, not for building big sports stadiums, which is what
China was famous for in the past, but for their own version
of a Peace Corps. They spend money on local media and bring
politicians and officials from other countries to China to
trade. They do what we in America would call building
people-to-people contacts, which was hard for the Chinese
government to understand in the past.

This comes along with more skilled formal diplomacy. When I
was first based in Thailand, you never saw the Chinese
ambassador. He was invisible. China now has a new ambassador
to Thailand who often appears on that country's equivalent
of the Larry King Show. He speaks fluent Thai, and he's
perfectly willing to talk about China's relationship with
Thailand, a dramatic change from ten years ago. You see this
across the Chinese diplomatic corps. They're much more open,
much better in English and local languages, and more able to
interact with other countries.

This comes along with much increased promotion of cultural
and language studies. China has spent a lot of money
promoting language studies, funding the first and second
year of universities in 100-150 countries. Particularly in
poorer countries, they spend a lot of money promoting
Chinese studies in primary schools. If you do well there,
you can get a scholarship to go on to university in China.
Fifteen years ago there were very few foreign students in
China--a certain number of Americans who had come on
exchange programs, as well as some African students left
over from Mao's time. Now you have 110,000-140,000 overseas
students in China. (Some, of course, are students who
probably would have liked to study in the U.S. but visas
have become more difficult to obtain since 9/11.)

Particularly in Asia, China's TV and print media also have
become more accessible, and China has begun to invest in the
world. On trips abroad, Chinese officials are savvy at
suggesting the enormous potential of China's future
investment. Right now, China is a pretty small investor in
the world. But they talk about huge targets that China's
going to bring in the future--$100 billion in new investment
in Latin America, for example. It covers up that China is
still just feeling its way in the world as an investor.

Finally, China has become a country that embraces trade
agreements, which would shock U.S. trade officials of 15-20
years ago. China is now negotiating between 15-20 free trade
agreements all over the world at the same time.[1] If you
talk to people in the U.S. who negotiate FTAs, they'd say
that's impossible, it takes a year to negotiate just one
FTA. What the Chinese government does is negotiate an FTA
that has very little substance in it, sign it, then work out
the substance later. Which brings a lot of good will.
Obviously in the U.S. context, one could not say to
businesses or Congress, "We're just going to sign a trade
agreement, we'll tell you what's in it later."

MATRICES OF CHINESE SUCCESS
In a lot of parts of the world where there had been fear of
China's economic growth, particularly in the developing
world, you see much less fear today. This is reflected in
the media coverage -- even, for instance, in the coverage of
exports of tainted goods from China. The Southeast Asia
media gives this much less coverage than the U.S. media
does. This reflects their much higher degree of comfort with
China as an economic partner. If you look at both global and
local public opinion polls, China is viewed more favorably
in a lot of countries as an actor on the global stage than
the U.S. Chinese businesspeople and officials also are now
getting access to a lot of countries that once they never
would have.

Another sign of China's success is that there's a lot of
interest in China's model of development. Countries from
Syria to Iran, from Vietnam to South Africa feel that China
somehow has done something different from Western countries
given its staggering growth rate. China probably doesn't
have a substantially different model of development, but the
fact that it has developed to be so strong economically
without loosening political control is an attractive idea to
a leader of an authoritarian country. Vietnamese officials
with whom I spoke for my book really want to copy what China
has done.

In Asia, local ethnic Chinese historically were viewed as a
prism for how to view relations with China. You see this in
diaspora communities in many parts of the world. Ten years
ago, when I first moved to Southeast Asia, Indonesians were
burning down the homes of ethnic Chinese, looting their
shops. Now you have an overwhelming celebration of Chinese
culture. Indonesia's president talks about it, and local
ethnic Chinese there run for parliament.

China, in fact, has increased its allure to the point that
it now plays a quite interesting role for other poor nations
on its border. In some ways China is now viewed by some of
these nations the way the U.S. might be viewed in Central
America, or the EU in Moldova. China is a place you want to
get to in order to live a better life. China is still a very
poor country, but some of the poorer border countries view
China as extremely wealthy. People in Myanmar, northern
Thailand, and Laos want to marry visiting Chinese
businesspeople, thinking it would get them into China.
That's actually not true, but it shows the dramatic change
in China's image.

As China has increased its access to resources, it's been
able to diversify its suppliers of oil and gas, so that its
oil and gas take from Africa has nearly doubled over the
past ten years.

Finally, China now has more peacekeepers serving under the
UN flag than any member of the Permanent 5 on the Security
Council except France. They serve in Africa, the Caribbean,
with very little comment or concern, which reflects some
degree of comfort with China's presence in these places.

WHY SOFT POWER MATTERS
China's growing popularity broadens its public appeal and
allows other countries to cooperate more closely with it,
including on defense cooperation. One Filipino defense
official put it to me this way: "Ten years ago in the
Philippines, which is a vibrant democracy, with a very free
press, if the Chinese had come to us and offered us closer
defense training or an alliance, it would have been
unthinkable, because it would have gotten out to the public
and criticized. Now we know it's essentially acceptable to
the public, because China's image has improved quite well,
and so the Philippines has pushed forward with closer
defense and economic cooperation with China."

So public appeal does matter. Conversely, here in the U.S.
we often thought it didn't matter that much, but when it
comes to the run-up to the war in Iraq, when you would like
cooperation with Turkey, our long-time friend, but Turkey's
a democracy now, and the government of Turkey knows that
U.S. public appeal is not so strong in Turkey, and we're
unable to get their support for an incursion from Turkey
into northern Iraq. Rumsfeld himself said that was one of
the major factors that hindered the war effort at first.

You see the same thing with economic cooperation--countries
in Africa, Asia, other parts of the world becoming more
comfortable in their relationship with China, partly because
it's easier for them to tolerate China's public appeal. The
U.S. still has a very close relationship with Saudi Arabia,
but the Saudi government must necessarily be worried about
the public appeal of having a relationship with the U.S.
It's not surprising that the Saudi government has formed
close links to China and thought about building China its
own strategic petroleum reserve.

As China has become more influential, opinion leaders from
all over the world are visiting or studying there. One of
the things the U.S. has always drawn upon is the generations
of opinion leaders who had come to the U.S. for education,
gone home and been the best ambassadors for the U.S.--
Margaret Thatcher, Hamid Karzai, President Gloria Macapagal-
Arroyo in the Philippines. China is increasingly going to
play that role, and that will necessarily impact how other
country leaders think of it.

Finally, as China becomes more acceptable economically, it's
going to be able to drive Asia as a more integrating trading
region. There will be less fear of it and China can drive
trade.

QUESTIONS
In the short term, China has wielded a significant amount of
power. But in the long term it faces very substantial
questions, as long as it remains the kind of country it is.
First, is China really a model for other countries like
Vietnam, Syria, Iran, South Africa? Yes, it's developed and
has remained an authoritarian state. But do they really have
any different model of development?

Second, as China becomes a greater actor in the world, can
it provide the kind of positive goods that the U.S. has
provided for years--such as security and response to
disasters? After the December 2004 tsunami hit Asia, though
the U.S. was very unpopular in a number of the affected
countries, those countries had to rely on the U.S. because
no one else was able to provide that type of disaster
relief. (Actually, the U.S. response to the tsunami did
improve its public image among those countries.)

Third and most important, China has gone far with its idea
that it, unlike the U.S., doesn't interfere in other
countries' affairs. However, the domestic affairs in a lot
of the countries with which China has relations are crying
out for some kind of resolution. China has said it won't
interfere in Sudan, but many in Sudan would like some sort
of interference, because right now the situation is
untenable. The government in Myanmar has a close
relationship with China. Many people, activists of a
movement that was elected 15, 17 years ago, would like China
to push the government to recognize them. Noninterference
isn't a policy that can exist in the world over the long
term. China has begun to think about this. They've sent
their own envoy to Sudan, they've thought about changing
their relationship with Myanmar. They're realizing that if
you're going to be a real global power, you can't
necessarily stick with this philosophy. But if they're going
to diverge from this philosophy, are they then just going to
be like the U.S.? Or can they be somehow something different
at the same time?


Joshua Kurlantzick is special correspondent for the New
Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace. He has covered Southeast Asia and
China as a correspondent for US News and World Report and
The Economist, and his writings on Asia have appeared in
Foreign Affairs, the New York Times Magazine, and many other
publications. This essay is based on the BookTalk he gave at
FPRI on July 25, at which copies of his new book, Charm
Offensive (Yale University Press), were sold by Joseph Fox
Bookshop, 1724 Sansom St., Philadelphia
(www.foxbookshop.com), where the book is also available.


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Notes

[1] See report on FPRI's Oct. 4, 2006 "China and Free Trade"
conference at http://www.fpri.org/research/asia/.