The Contest of the Century (28 page)

Like many of the trappings of modernity, from Maglev trains to the Nobu restaurant chain, soft power has become an obsession in contemporary China. Originally coined by the American academic Joseph Nye, soft power is the idea that the more attractive a country’s culture and society, the more influential it will be. America’s international dominance, so the theory goes, rests not just on its military power or its economic weight but also on the fact that so many other countries around the world have sought to copy its rules, institutions, and way of life. Nye defined soft power as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payment.” In some ways, China takes the basic idea of soft power more seriously than the U.S. The first academic in China to take up the theme was Wang Huning, a scholar at Fudan
University in Shanghai, who has since become one of China’s most senior foreign-policy officials and a member of the party’s Politburo. His ideas have been adopted at the top levels of the Chinese leadership. In his keynote speech to the important Communist Party Congress in 2007, Hu Jintao gave the concept his official stamp of approval, telling the audience: “We must enhance culture as part of the soft power of the country.” Whole university departments in China are now devoted to soft power, and the Foreign Ministry has opened a special department to improve the country’s image. There is even a new museum in Beijing celebrating public diplomacy, the art of national image boosting.

For Beijing, soft power is a tool to present a less threatening image to the world, to massage anxieties caused by the country’s rise. But there is also a hard edge to the soft-power fascination. Some Chinese scholars argue that it is also an essential part of a project for challenging America. Shen Jiru, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, argues that soft power was central to the U.S.’s winning the Cold War, the mass appeal of its popular culture helping to curtail international support for the Soviets. The Soviet Union had been equal to the U.S. for a time, he says, but
“lost the whole game due to a flaw in its soft power.” China, he urges, should not make the same mistake. For many of the officials and academics pushing the promotion of Chinese soft power, this is much more than just a PR campaign, but part of a broader struggle for influence and respect. China is taking on the U.S. at its own game in a global cultural contest.

China’s soft-power push is both a window onto its expanding ambitions and an important emotional crux in the emerging rivalry with the U.S. If the feeling takes root in the U.S. that China is presenting a worldview that will be attractive to large parts of the world, this will add real political edge to the competition. The temptation will grow in the U.S. to elevate the rivalry to a form of ideological contest, with echoes of the Cold War. There are already a few hints of this in official American reactions to the investments China is making in its media sector. “During the Cold War we did a great job in getting America’s message out. After the Berlin Wall fell we said, ‘Okay, fine, enough of that, we are done,’ and unfortunately we are paying a big price for it,” Hillary Clinton told Congress in 2011. “We are in an information war and we
are losing that war. Al Jazeera is winning, the Chinese have opened a global multi-language television network, the Russians have opened up an English-language network. I’ve seen it in a few countries, and it is quite instructive.”

Soft power can come in lots of shapes and sizes. Some academics in China believe that the country should be promoting its model of economic management, particularly to other parts of the developing world, as a way of making the country more influential. A few even suggest that China’s political system could be exported. But most of the discussion about soft power in China has focused on culture and the idea that the best way to make the country seem more attractive to the outside world is through the potential magnetism of Chinese civilization. The big media investments are the most visible element of China’s soft-power project, but beneath the surface there are, in effect, two central ideas about the attractiveness of Chinese culture: an attempt to establish a sort of modern Chinese aesthetic that the rest of the world might find enticing, and an effort to tap into the wisdom of ancient thinkers to flesh out a non-Western worldview. China wants to present itself to the world as a culture that is both new and old.

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When he was sixteen, Yan Xuetong was sent to work on a farm in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, right near the border with Siberia. It was the height of the Cultural Revolution, and, like many members of his generation of urban youth, he was taken from his home and school and instructed to learn the greater wisdom of a peasant life. It was an unimaginably harsh existence. During the winters, they sometimes had to haul around large sacks through the snow, barefoot. For months, they would go without vegetables. The brutalities of the Cultural Revolution changed young Chinese in different ways. Some never overcame the emotional scars from that time, and suffered an adult life of depression or even suicide. Others developed a toughness and resilience that, in a perverse way, have served them well as society and the economy opened up. For Yan, who was from a family of scholars, the conclusions he drew were more philosophical. Mao Zedong’s mad experiment with enforced anarchy, he decided, had destroyed the country’s ancient ethical tradition of sincerity and replaced it with lying and hypocrisy.

Nearly four decades later, Yan is one of the most prominent public intellectuals in China and a professor of international relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He has written extensively about American foreign policy and Chinese military strategy. In recent years, however, he has turned to a project that has its roots in his disillusionment during the Cultural Revolution. He is trying to find ways to reconnect with what he sees as China’s ancient ethical traditions, in particular the idea that China and the world should be governed by
what he calls “humane authority.” China, he believes, needs to re-establish the sense of morality that used to guide its behavior, both at home and abroad.

If that sounds a little esoteric, Yan has some fairly robust ideas about why it is a subject worth paying attention to. The quest to recover a Chinese ethical tradition, he believes, is a central part of the soft-power contest that a rising China faces with the U.S. The U.S. and China are in, he says, a “race for global supremacy,” and an integral part of that competition will be a
“battle for the hearts and minds” of people around the world, which will “determine who eventually prevails.” The search back into China’s philosophical traditions is not just an academic exercise, but part of a broader effort to present a vision of China and Chinese-inspired ideas that can challenge American modernity. “America’s ideology is still much more influential around the world than China’s,” he told me. And he wants that to change.

These are interesting times in China’s universities. After three decades during which Chinese society kept its head down and concentrated on getting ahead, it is starting to come up for air. Among some Chinese intellectuals, there is a hankering to generate new ideas about how global society is organized, to provide Chinese solutions to the world’s problems. In a similar vein to Yan Xuetong, Zhao Tingyang at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has become a star of the Beijing intellectual scene with a series of works about the concept of
tianxia—
literally, “all under heaven”—another idea from the classical philosophy that attempts to define a vision of international harmony. Just as the Chinese authorities have embraced soft power to present a more positive image to the world, some Chinese intellectuals are brimming with optimism about the lessons that Chinese ideas can present to the world.

One of the striking features of the way China has embraced soft power is the suggestion that China now sees its values and culture as exportable.
China and the U.S. have one very powerful thing in common, a sense of exceptionalism, the deeply felt belief in the superiority of their cultures and societies. American exceptionalism has an evangelical quality, the idea that its institutions and values are by their nature universal and should be copied by others; in recent times however, Chinese culture has been presented as being more exclusive. Chinese have tended to believe that their strengths were tied up in a history and set of values that are unique to China and which cannot be easily adopted by outsiders—at least by those countries outside the traditional Sinocentric world of East Asia. But the soft-power push indicates the beginning of a very different sort of attitude to Chineseness, a confidence that China now represents something that can be introduced in other countries, that it has things to teach the rest of the world. Amid official rhetoric about the “revival” or the “rejuvenation” of China, which has been given new impetus under Xi Jinping, China is reconnecting with an older tradition when it considered itself a natural cultural magnet for the world that surrounded it.
“The Chinese have always prided themselves on being civilized as bearers of universal ideals,” Wang Gungwu, the doyen of overseas Chinese historians, has written. China is dabbling with its own ideas of universal values.

“Five years ago, no one talked about this. People said it was crazy to talk about these sorts of things, that only our grandchildren might have to address these sorts of issues,” Yan told me. “But when you are the biggest power in the world, you have to provide leadership. The new leaders that are taking over in China now, they will face a debate about future strategy and how we use power that the leaders of the past two decades did not.”

During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards destroyed the temple dedicated to Confucius, whom Mao scorned for his “feudal mentality,” but over the last decade the ancient sage has witnessed a remarkable revival. The academic Yu Dan’s book
Confucius from the Heart
sold ten million copies. Among party elders, there is still some token resistance to the veneration of Confucius: a statue was unveiled in Tiananmen Square in 2011, outside the reopened National Museum, only to be taken away a few weeks later. But it is another example of the extreme intellectual dexterity of the Chinese Communist Party that, having spent three
decades denouncing everything Confucius stood for, it now presents itself as the legitimate inheritor of the millennial cultural tradition he represents. Yan Xuetong is one of the many intellectuals who have tried to tap into this surge in popular enthusiasm for ancient wisdom. He has mined Confucius and Mencius, as well as the less well-known writers from a similar era, such as Xunzi, Laozi, and Hanfeizi, to look for lessons about how a powerful China should behave. The most influential states, he concluded, were not necessarily the ones with the most powerful military, but the ones who won over the most hearts and minds of people at home and abroad. And this ability rested on the “humane authority… the superior moral power of the ruler.”

The conclusions he draws for China are blunt. “An increase in wealth can raise China’s power status but it does not necessarily enable China to become a country respected by others,” he writes. “For China to become a superpower modeled on humane authority, it must first become a model from which other states are willing to learn.” Some political reforms will be required, he believes, but that does not mean China should copy the U.S. “If China wants to become a state of humane authority, this would be different from the contemporary United States,” he writes. “The goal of our strategy must be not only to reduce the power gap with the United States but also to provide a better model for society than that given by the United States.”

If Yan is often blunt about his objectives,
Zhao Tingyang is more oblique. The title of Zhao’s best-known work is
The Tianxia System: A Philosophy for the World Institution
. In his elliptical style, Zhao describes the current international order as one which contains not just the odd “failed state,” but a “failed world” that is rendered unworkable by excessive competition between nations and endless wars. Like Yan, he thinks the solution is for one country to provide an impeccable moral and political example. The world institution he envisages would be a voluntary order, based on the attractiveness of that country’s “magnanimous” thought and behavior. International harmony would be established not by violence or power, but by the demonstration of virtue and good governance. “Tianxia theory,” he writes, “is a theory for transforming enemies into friends where transformation seeks to attract people rather than conquer them.”

The sorts of ideas that people like Yan and Zhao have started to discuss come with some very dangerous trip wires.
Tianxia
is an idea with deep roots in two thousand years of Chinese empire that was based on hierarchical relations between China and the other nations and peoples in the region. It reeks of a certain kind of cultural superiority and of a return to hierarchy. Most of the writers now championing ancient thinkers also leave open big questions about how China would be governed. Does “humane authority” require the sort of accountability that only democracies have been able to offer? As a result of these obvious problems, there has been a tendency among China-watchers to dismiss much of the work of the neo-Confucian writers, to see them as willing supporters of government propaganda. But these discussions are important for two reasons. They demonstrate a growing appetite among public intellectuals in China for devising ways of interpreting the world around Chinese precepts and history and forging a Chinese worldview. They are also a serious attempt to mold a language for China to explain its ambitions to influence the world and the role it wants to play. “Ancient Chinese policy will become the basis for much Chinese foreign policy, rather than Western liberalism or Communist ideology, both to justify and to be understood by Chinese people,” Yan says. “It is easier to teach common people why they are doing certain things if it is explained in these terms. It makes it different from the U.S.”

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