the world today | june & july 2012 | 41 China exports its history to soften its image abroad By Sally Peck Once the Communist Party dismissed China’s ancient culture as part of the coun- try’s ‘backward’ feudal past. But now Bei- jing is harnessing it in the service of the state, packaging treasures and traditions for export abroad in the hope of softening China’s international image. The Ministry of Culture announced in April that it had agreed to allow the highest ever number of top-tier ancient treasures to leave the country, to be sent the Fitzwil- liam Museum in Cambridge, England. A 4,000-piece jade burial suit is among 350 priceless royal Han dynasty (210 BC – AD 220) tomb objects on display in The Search for Immortality, a show designed to coincide with the 2012 Olympic Games, when all eyes will be on Britain. Simultaneously in New York, the Terra- cotta Army continues its Long March around the world, with nine of the esti- mated 8,000 life-size figures entombed with the Qin emperor (259-210 BC) on dis- play at Discovery Times Square. Each of these figures is unique and the army, dis- covered by peasants in 1974 after lying dor- mant for 2,000 years, has yet to be com- pletely unearthed. The objects in both exhibitions are relics of ancient rulers struggling to prove their legitimacy. The mandate continues to day, as Beijing deploys its treasures in a soft -power offensive. Where once human rights issues and im- ages of an authoritarian regime’s goose- stepping soldiers dominated its interna- tional image, over the past decade Beijing has put cultural and educational exchange at the heart of its re-branding efforts. Brazil’s contemporary music scene and India’s modern literature have served to raise each nation’s profile abroad. But with a modern arts scene that offers limited in- ternational appeal, Beijing has turned to its distant past, using stars from 5,000 years of history and art to cultivate rela- tionships with prestigious institutions around the world. ‘These are extraordinary things. Why not make the most of them? They show that China was once a very important king- dom and will be so again,’ said Roderic Wye, a China expert and Associate Fellow of the Asia Programme at Chatham House. More than 300 Confucius Institutes have been set up at universities around the world since 2004, offering places for foreign students to study Mandarin. But there are suspicions that these also act as government intelligence-gathering centres. Beijing has encouraged international students to study in China, many at the government’s expense. And it has invested billions of dollars in high-profile projects in Africa and Latin America, ranging from the building of railway lines to football stadiums. China relies on Africa’s minerals for its economic growth. A million Chinese have gone to work there over the past decade, during which time bi-lateral trade has shot from $10.6 billion to $160 billion, accord- ing to government figures. But this has caused resentment among Africans as only Chinese labour has been used while, at the same time, local markets have been flood- ed with low-cost Chinese goods. China has responded to this by sponsoring the educa- tion of tens of thousands of Africans: 100,000 were trained in Chinese universi- ties and military institutes in 2006 alone. Beijing also announced in April that it will begin publishing an African version of the government-run English-language newspaper, China Daily. The newspaper, which is state-run but claims to have an independent editorial board, has Euro- pean, US, Asian and Hong Kong editions, all launched in the past five years, and all with a mandate to present news with a Chinese angle. At a time when many Western news media outlets are contracting, Beijing is pouring millions of dollars into the sector. In an effort to improve its image abroad, some of these media outlets are even recruiting Western or Western-trained reporters to help reshape content. The Government has also allowed number of international journalism programmes to be set up at Chinese universities in recent years. In South-East Asia, China needs to sell itself as a non-threatening presence. ‘In soft power terms, China would like to re- move the need for the South East Asians to hedge against its rise by improving their relations with the US. This is not the way things are going at the moment,’ said Roderic Wye. Whether drawing on the ancestors to re-brand China will work remains to be seen. A recent BBC poll showed that, while opinions of China’s influence are positive in much of Africa and Latin America, they remain predominantly negative across Europe, in the United States, as well as in India, Japan and South Korea. More significant is the direction in which the polling figures are heading: in the 2012 results of the 22-nation poll, China had surpassed both the US and the EU in global perceptions of influence, with 50 per cent of those polled indicating that China was exerting a positive influ- ence worldwide, a four-point increase on 2011. The increase was apparent in both the developing and industrialised world, suggesting that China’s multi-pronged soft-power approach might be starting to reap benefits. l The Terracotta Army’s long march has reached New York, where nine warriors are on show don emmert/afp/getty images 40 | the world today | june & july 2012 the tensions between the centre of power and the periphery, and the abuses that can be a part of Chinese life.’ Such stories of corruption, misgovernance and human rights abuse damage China’s efforts to por- tray itself as an admirable society. Autocra- cies rarely enjoy much soft power. India, of course, suffers negatives as well: its pervasive corruption and its inefficiency at pulling its people out of poverty are well known. But because India does not pretend to be a super-efficient society, it transcends these failures. India muddles through. Hard power without soft power stirs up resentment; soft power without hard pow- er is a confession of weakness. Yet hard power tends to work better domestically than internationally: an autocratic state is not concerned about having a ‘better story’ to tell its own people, but without one, it has little with which to purchase the good- will of the rest of the world. Whether it is the Chinese in Tibet or the Russians in Georgia, it can in each case be said that a major military power won the hard-power battle and lost the soft-power war. By contrast, Indian soft power emerges despite the government: official backing for the dissemination of culture has been bureaucratic. So far, India’s soft-power strategic advantages – goodwill for the country among African, Arab and Afghan publics, for instance – have been largely unplanned. International goodwill has not been systematically harnessed as a strate- gic asset by New Delhi. It is ironic that in and around the 2008 Olympics, authoritar- ian China showed a greater determination to use its hard-power strengths to cultivate a soft-power strategy for itself on the world stage. India will not need to try as hard, but it will need to do more than it currently does if it wants to turn its soft-power gains into an instrument of its global strategy. Shashi Tharoor is a member of the Indian parliament and former under secretary- general of the United Nations what we can deliberately and consciously exhibit; it is rather how others see what we are, whether or not we are trying to show it to the world. To take a political example: the sight in May 2004, after the world’s then-largest democratic exercise, of a victorious leader of Roman Catholic background and Italian heritage (Sonia Gandhi) making way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as Prime Minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam), in a country 81 per cent Hindu, caught the world’s imagination and won its admiration. This had nothing to do with external messaging: it was simply India being itself. The opposite is true of China. Beijing’s performance in the soft-power arena has been revealing. Borrowing a leaf from the Alliance Française, China has started establishing Confucius Institutes to pro- mote Chinese culture internationally. Since 2004, it has already established 350 of them at universities across to the world, with 260 more in the pipeline. To these Confucius Institutes it has added 430 ‘classrooms’ affiliated with secondary schools in 103 countries. According to Chi- nese Education Ministry figures, 7,000 teachers are recruited each year from Chi- nese universities and sent abroad to teach Chinese for two-year stints. Some 100 mil- lion foreigners are currently learning Man- darin, according to Chinese estimates. The Beijing Olympics of 2008 were a brilliantly executed exercise in soft-power building by an authoritarian state. At the same time, the limitations of government propaganda were apparent when, during the first week of the Games, video footage of shootings and bomb attacks involving Uighur separatists appeared in the world media despite Beijing’s denials. It is also true that China’s extensive out- reach is not matched by commensurate benefits in terms of goodwill because its culture is being projected by an authoritar- ian state that restricts freedom of expres- sion. As Nye observed in The New York Times: ‘The 2008 Olympics were a success, but shortly afterwards, China’s domestic crackdown in Tibet and Xinjiang, and on human rights activists, undercut its soft power gains. The Shanghai Expo was also a great success, but was overshadowed by the jailing of the dissedent Liu Xiaobo, who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and the artist Ai Weiwei. And for all the efforts to turn Xinhua and China Central Televi- sion into competitors for CNN and the BBC, there is little international audience for brittle propaganda. What China seems not to appreciate is that using culture to create soft power is not easy when they are inconsistent with domestic realities.’ Soft power sits ill with heavy-handed, top-down rule. China has paid particular attention to censoring the internet, em- ploying 40,000 cyber police to monitor blogging sites and close any that get out of line. Twitter is blocked. When a US-based Chinese-language site called for a Jasmine Revolution in China, the Great Firewall of China blocked all searches for the word ‘jasmine’, even if you were merely looking for jasmine tea. Clearly, the authoritarians in Beijing are aware of the enormous po- tential of social media but their reaction has been to confront rather than cultivate it. The scandal over the blind social activist Chen Guangchen and revelations about Bo Xilai, the former party chief in Chongqing, have also undermined China’s image. Bo stands accused of terrorising his munici- pality and plotting to kill his police chief while his wife is a suspect in the murder of a British business associate. Chen’s perse- cution by the authorities, angered by his campaigns against forced abortions and sterilizations, attracted worldwide con- demnation. Both cases have challenged the narrative so assiduously promoted by Bei- jing of a smooth-running, technocratic and well-ordered nation. Instead, in the words of the analyst Michael Fullilove, they re- veal ‘the feebleness of China’s rule of law, The Shanghai World Expo was a great success but marred by the sentencing of the human rights activist Liu Xiaobo a few months before chinafotopress/getty images
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the world today | june & july 2012 | 41
China exports its history to soften its image abroad By Sally PeckOnce the Communist Party dismissed China’s ancient culture as part of the coun-try’s ‘backward’ feudal past. But now Bei-jing is harnessing it in the service of the state, packaging treasures and traditions for export abroad in the hope of softening China’s international image.
The Ministry of Culture announced in April that it had agreed to allow the highest ever number of top-tier ancient treasures to leave the country, to be sent the Fitzwil-liam Museum in Cambridge, England.
A 4,000-piece jade burial suit is among 350 priceless royal Han dynasty (210 BC – AD 220) tomb objects on display in The Search for Immortality, a show designed to coincide with the 2012 Olympic Games, when all eyes will be on Britain.
Simultaneously in New York, the Terra-cotta Army continues its Long March around the world, with nine of the esti-mated 8,000 life-size figures entombed with the Qin emperor (259-210 BC) on dis-play at Discovery Times Square. Each of these figures is unique and the army, dis-covered by peasants in 1974 after lying dor-mant for 2,000 years, has yet to be com-pletely unearthed.
The objects in both exhibitions are relics of ancient rulers struggling to prove their legitimacy. The mandate continues to day, as Beijing deploys its treasures in a soft -power offensive.
Where once human rights issues and im-ages of an authoritarian regime’s goose-stepping soldiers dominated its interna-tional image, over the past decade Beijing has put cultural and educational exchange
at the heart of its re-branding efforts. Brazil’s contemporary music scene and
India’s modern literature have served to raise each nation’s profile abroad. But with a modern arts scene that offers limited in-ternational appeal, Beijing has turned to its distant past, using stars from 5,000 years of history and art to cultivate rela-tionships with prestigious institutions around the world.
‘These are extraordinary things. Why not make the most of them? They show that China was once a very important king-dom and will be so again,’ said Roderic Wye, a China expert and Associate Fellow of the Asia Programme at Chatham House.
More than 300 Confucius Institutes have been set up at universities around the world since 2004, offering places for foreign students to study Mandarin. But there are suspicions that these also act as government intelligence-gathering centres.
Beijing has encouraged international students to study in China, many at the government’s expense. And it has invested billions of dollars in high-profile projects in Africa and Latin America, ranging from the building of railway lines to football stadiums.
China relies on Africa’s minerals for its economic growth. A million Chinese have gone to work there over the past decade, during which time bi-lateral trade has shot from $10.6 billion to $160 billion, accord-ing to government figures. But this has caused resentment among Africans as only Chinese labour has been used while, at the same time, local markets have been flood-ed with low-cost Chinese goods. China has responded to this by sponsoring the educa-tion of tens of thousands of Africans: 100,000 were trained in Chinese universi-ties and military institutes in 2006 alone.
Beijing also announced in April that it will begin publishing an African version of the government-run English-language newspaper, China Daily. The newspaper,
which is state-run but claims to have an independent editorial board, has Euro-pean, US, Asian and Hong Kong editions, all launched in the past five years, and all with a mandate to present news with a Chinese angle.
At a time when many Western news media outlets are contracting, Beijing is pouring millions of dollars into the sector. In an effort to improve its image abroad, some of these media outlets are even recruiting Western or Western-trained reporters to help reshape content. The Government has also allowed number of international journalism programmes to be set up at Chinese universities in recent years.
In South-East Asia, China needs to sell itself as a non-threatening presence. ‘In soft power terms, China would like to re-move the need for the South East Asians to hedge against its rise by improving their relations with the US. This is not the way things are going at the moment,’ said Roderic Wye.
Whether drawing on the ancestors to re-brand China will work remains to be seen.
A recent BBC poll showed that, while opinions of China’s influence are positive in much of Africa and Latin America, they remain predominantly negative across Europe, in the United States, as well as in India, Japan and South Korea.
More significant is the direction in which the polling figures are heading: in the 2012 results of the 22-nation poll, China had surpassed both the US and the EU in global perceptions of influence, with 50 per cent of those polled indicating that China was exerting a positive influ-ence worldwide, a four-point increase on 2011.
The increase was apparent in both the developing and industrialised world, suggesting that China’s multi-pronged soft-power approach might be starting to reap benefits. l
The Terracotta Army’s long march has reached New York, where nine warriors are on show
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afp/
get
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TWT_Soft_Power_03.indd 41 29/05/2012 11:04
40 | the world today | june & july 2012
the tensions between the centre of power and the periphery, and the abuses that can be a part of Chinese life.’ Such stories of corruption, misgovernance and human rights abuse damage China’s efforts to por-tray itself as an admirable society. Autocra-cies rarely enjoy much soft power.
India, of course, suffers negatives as well: its pervasive corruption and its inefficiency at pulling its people out of poverty are well known. But because India does not pretend to be a super-efficient society, it transcends these failures. India muddles through.
Hard power without soft power stirs up resentment; soft power without hard pow-er is a confession of weakness. Yet hard power tends to work better domestically than internationally: an autocratic state is not concerned about having a ‘better story’ to tell its own people, but without one, it has little with which to purchase the good-will of the rest of the world. Whether it is the Chinese in Tibet or the Russians in Georgia, it can in each case be said that a major military power won the hard-power battle and lost the soft-power war.
By contrast, Indian soft power emerges despite the government: official backing for the dissemination of culture has been bureaucratic. So far, India’s soft-power strategic advantages – goodwill for the country among African, Arab and Afghan publics, for instance – have been largely unplanned. International goodwill has not been systematically harnessed as a strate-gic asset by New Delhi. It is ironic that in and around the 2008 Olympics, authoritar-ian China showed a greater determination to use its hard-power strengths to cultivate a soft-power strategy for itself on the world stage. India will not need to try as hard, but it will need to do more than it currently does if it wants to turn its soft-power gains into an instrument of its global strategy.
Shashi Tharoor is a member of the Indian parliament and former under secretary-general of the United Nations
what we can deliberately and consciously exhibit; it is rather how others see what we are, whether or not we are trying to show it to the world.
To take a political example: the sight in May 2004, after the world’s then-largest democratic exercise, of a victorious leader of Roman Catholic background and Italian heritage (Sonia Gandhi) making way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as Prime Minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam), in a country 81 per cent Hindu, caught the world’s imagination and won its admiration. This had nothing to do with external messaging: it was simply India being itself.
The opposite is true of China. Beijing’s performance in the soft-power arena has been revealing. Borrowing a leaf from the Alliance Française, China has started establishing Confucius Institutes to pro-mote Chinese culture internationally. Since 2004, it has already established 350 of them at universities across to the world, with 260 more in the pipeline. To these Confucius Institutes it has added 430 ‘classrooms’ affiliated with secondary schools in 103 countries. According to Chi-nese Education Ministry figures, 7,000 teachers are recruited each year from Chi-nese universities and sent abroad to teach Chinese for two-year stints. Some 100 mil-lion foreigners are currently learning Man-darin, according to Chinese estimates.
The Beijing Olympics of 2008 were a brilliantly executed exercise in soft-power building by an authoritarian state. At the same time, the limitations of government propaganda were apparent when, during the first week of the Games, video footage of shootings and bomb attacks involving Uighur separatists appeared in the world media despite Beijing’s denials.
It is also true that China’s extensive out-reach is not matched by commensurate benefits in terms of goodwill because its culture is being projected by an authoritar-ian state that restricts freedom of expres-
sion. As Nye observed in The New York Times: ‘The 2008 Olympics were a success, but shortly afterwards, China’s domestic crackdown in Tibet and Xinjiang, and on human rights activists, undercut its soft power gains. The Shanghai Expo was also a great success, but was overshadowed by the jailing of the dissedent Liu Xiaobo, who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and the artist Ai Weiwei. And for all the efforts to turn Xinhua and China Central Televi-sion into competitors for CNN and the BBC, there is little international audience for brittle propaganda. What China seems not to appreciate is that using culture to create soft power is not easy when they are inconsistent with domestic realities.’
Soft power sits ill with heavy-handed, top-down rule. China has paid particular attention to censoring the internet, em-ploying 40,000 cyber police to monitor blogging sites and close any that get out of line. Twitter is blocked. When a US-based Chinese-language site called for a Jasmine Revolution in China, the Great Firewall of China blocked all searches for the word ‘jasmine’, even if you were merely looking for jasmine tea. Clearly, the authoritarians in Beijing are aware of the enormous po-tential of social media but their reaction has been to confront rather than cultivate it.
The scandal over the blind social activist Chen Guangchen and revelations about Bo Xilai, the former party chief in Chongqing, have also undermined China’s image. Bo stands accused of terrorising his munici-pality and plotting to kill his police chief while his wife is a suspect in the murder of a British business associate. Chen’s perse-cution by the authorities, angered by his campaigns against forced abortions and sterilizations, attracted worldwide con-demnation. Both cases have challenged the narrative so assiduously promoted by Bei-jing of a smooth-running, technocratic and well-ordered nation. Instead, in the words of the analyst Michael Fullilove, they re-veal ‘the feebleness of China’s rule of law,
The Shanghai World Expo was a great success but marred by the sentencing of the human rights activist Liu Xiaobo a few months beforech
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imag
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TWT_Soft_Power_03.indd 40 29/05/2012 14:40
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