China's Cultural Diplomacy

A Great Leap Outward?

Xin Liu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000721782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines China's contemporary global cultural footprints through its recent development of cultural diplomacy.

The volume presents an alternative analytical framework to examine China's cultural diplomacy, which goes beyond the Western-defined concept of 'soft power' that prevails in the current literature. This new approach constructs a three-dimensional framework on Orientalism, cultural hegemony and nationalism to decipher the multiple contexts, which China inhabits historically, internationally and domestically. The book presents multiple case studies of the Confucius Institute, and compares the global programme located around the world with its Western counterparts, and also with other Chinese government-sponsored endeavours and non-government-initiated programmes. The author aims to solve the puzzle of why China's efforts in cultural diplomacy are perceived differently around the world and helps to outline the distinctive features of China's cultural diplomacy.

This book will be of much interest to students of diplomacy, Chinese politics, foreign policy and International Relations in general.

1 Look beyond and beneath the soft power¹

East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment seat;

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!

(Rudyard Kipling, 1889)

One hundred and thirty years after the Ballad of East and West was written, we now live in an age of globalisation when the two strongest economies in the world are standing face to face across the Pacific Ocean. Back in September 2012, months before Xi Jinping became the new Chinese leader, the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that “the Pacific is big enough for all of us”,² which was widely quoted as a headline in the media. This line has since been continuously repeated, but more by the Chinese side, even as Xi Jinping’s ‘golden verse’ whenever he commented on the Sino-US relations. East and West have not just constantly met each other, they have also interacted with each other across cultural, economic, political and diplomatic realms. Amid China’s expanding global presence and growing influence, the China Dream of national rejuvenation staged by Xi Jinping has prompted both the Chinese society and China watchers to rethink China’s historical, ideological and cultural heritage.

In China’s efforts to carve out a new identity on the global stage, a cultural diplomacy campaign was launched to fulfil this new mission. Academic interest in this area has only recently developed into a substantial body of research. However, its focus has been almost exclusively on how it is functioning as a tool to build China’s soft power. The aim of this chapter is neither to measure the soft power generated by China’s cultural diplomacy, nor to argue whether or not it has been successful. Instead, its point of departure is to show the limitations of applying the Western-defined narrative of ‘soft power’ in non-Western contexts, and why an alternative and more sophisticated theoretical framework is needed to look both beyond and beneath the soft power lens to illuminate the complex nature of China’s cultural diplomacy.

Unpacking the key concepts

Cultural diplomacy

The hybrid term ‘cultural diplomacy’ does not have a particularly long history. It first appeared in the 1934 Oxford English Dictionary, as a laudatory reference for English language teaching abroad, but the concept did not gain much currency until the term ‘public diplomacy’ was coined by Edmund Gullion in 1965 – during the Cold War era. It then appeared across a range of discourses, including academic, journalistic and governmental, to mean the “active, planned use of cultural, educational and informational programming to create a desired result that is directly related to a government’s foreign policy objectives” (McClellan, 2004: n.p.). Ham’s summary offered a more discerning insight into the contrast with traditional diplomacy, which is “focusing on problems whereas public diplomacy [focuses] on values” (2001: 4).

The above definition explains why cultural diplomacy is often considered to be a core element of public diplomacy, along with “exchange diplomacy and international broadcasting” (Cull, 2008: 33); public diplomacy often assumes the form of cultural diplomacy, which is “the exchange of ideas, information, values, systems, traditions, beliefs, and other aspects of culture, with the intention of fostering mutual understanding” (emphasis added) (Cummings, 2009: 1). The definition given in the Cultural Diplomacy Dictionary echoes this: “the essential idea is to allow people access to different cultures and perspectives, and in this way, foster mutual understanding and dialogue” (Chakraborty, 2013: n.p.). It is also made clear by the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy that it “is not a promotion of its own culture, but rather of understanding and reconciling, as well as learning from each other” (2011: n.p.).

Its actual practice can be illustrated by the diagram in Figure 1.1 that was adapted from the Double-Swing Model developed by Yoshikawa (1987) for intercultural communication. The diagram shows that cultural diplomacy is inherently relational where both parties of the addresser and addressee play significant roles in this dynamic and cyclical process, and through which both will be changed during the course of cultural diplomacy practice. This model will be elaborated with more evidence-based discussions in the following chapters.

At the heart of this model is an important distinction between “cultural difference” and “cultural diversity” elaborated by Bhabha (1994), who contended that the latter is static and concerns knowledge, while the former stresses the dynamic process and concerns interaction, during which an ‘other’ culture was involved and where a difference was produced between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. This further distinguished “cultural pluralism” from the simple fact of “cultural diversity”: cultural pluralism addresses the process of mutual recognition, generation and transformation in this interaction with other cultures, particularly between conflicting cultures, and reveals the tensions and exclusions involved in the process when the dominating culture tries to establish and maintain its authority. In Sabbagh’s words, it is “a political response to the injustice done to members of formerly oppressed culture” (2005: 100).

Figure 1.1 Cultural diplomacy as a mutual process.

China’s cultural diplomacy efforts represent such a “political response”; the government wishes to reshape the cross-cultural terrain into a more level playing field as they feel that the Chinese culture was “formerly oppressed”. From the above, we can see that cultural difference is the premise for cultural diplomacy, while cultural pluralism underpins its ultimate goal. After clarifying this key concept, we will now look at the mainstream theory of using “soft power” to explain the purpose of China’s cultural diplomacy, followed by a critical review that exposes its inadequacy – and even its inappropriateness.

Soft power

Coined by Joseph S. Nye, Jr in 1990, the term “soft power” means “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payment” (Nye, 2004: x). The definition was expanded by adding the word “persuasion” when he explained the new concept of “smart power”, a strategy that describes a successful “combination of the hard power of coercion and payment with the soft power of persuasion and attraction” (Nye, 2011: xiii). Again, in another article Nye published in 2012 about soft power in China, he referred to soft power as “the ability to get what one wants by attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment” (Nye, 2012: n.p.). It is an ideal situation when “attraction” and “persuasion” merge seamlessly, but the inherent tension existing between the two, whereby the former draws on intrinsic values while the latter depends on extrinsic aids, was never discussed, although this has huge implications on how to successfully build soft power in practice. Using America’s own foreign policy practice towards China as an example, the “persuasion” part has not worked very well. In 1967, Nixon declared in his article in Foreign Affairs that: “the world cannot be safe until China changes. Thus our aim, to the extent that we can influence events, should be to induce change. The way to do this is to persuade China that it must change” (Nixon, 1967). Since his administration,

The assumption that deepening commercial, diplomatic, and cultural ties would transform China’s internal development and external behaviour has been a bedrock of U.S. strategy. Even those in the U.S. policy circles who were sceptical of China’s intentions still shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mould China to the United States’ liking.

(Campbell and Ratner, 2018: n.p.)

In the Orwellian year of 1984, before President Reagan’s first official visit to China, Time magazine published a cover story themed “China’s New Face: What Reagan Will See”. The image used was of a young Chinese man dressed in the traditional 1960s army-style overcoat, holding a bottle of Coca Cola at the Great Wall. The actual story went by the title “China: East Meets Reagan – A Nation with a New Look Prepares to Welcome an Old-Style Anti-Communist”, followed by two more reports on China: “China: Capitalism in the Making” and “China: Making Free Enterprise Click”.³ However, over three decades later, from the question posed by The Economist: “How the West got China Wrong” in March 2018,⁴ to the debates it triggered in Foreign Affairs over “Did America Get China Wrong?” in June 2018,⁵ then to the answer provided by Harvard scholar William Overholt, “The West is Getting China Wrong” in August 2018,⁶ – all showing that China can make changes to embrace what it finds attractive; however, if China is not attracted to following the path voluntarily, then America’s plan to induce change by using its “power and hegemony” to “persuade” China hasn’t delivered the result. The Chinese government has adhered to the same principle of “Chinese essence and Western utility” (zhongxue weiti, xixue wei yong) since the failed Westernisation Movement (1861–1895) in the late Qing Dynasty. Fredman’s comments offer a good footnote to its reflection on Sino-US relations: “Since the nineteenth century, the American urge to mould China in its own image has coexisted alongside the Chinese desire to use American technology and know-how to serve China’s economic development” (2015: n.p.).

The challenge in using soft power to blend attraction and persuasion is only bigger for an ‘authoritarian state’ like China than other democracies. According to Li, in China soft power is “primarily utilized to refute the ‘China Threat’ thesis, facilitate a better understanding of China’s domestic social-economic reality, and persuade the outside world to accept and support China’s rise” (2009: 31). However, a question worth pondering is: would a state-led persuasion campaign increase or decrease the attraction of a country’s culture, political values and foreign policy – the three sources of soft power defined by Nye? Nye’s answer to this question with regard to China was quite blunt, stating that Beijing is “trying its hands at attraction, and failing – miserably” (Nye, 2013: n.p.). Yet, ironically, “soft power” is probably more enthusiastically embraced by the Chinese government than anywhere else, even to the extent of becoming an obsession according to Shambaugh (2013b) and Tao (2015). It has gained considerable currency in both official and scholarly discourse in China, particularly after 2007 when it was adopted into the official lexicon: Chinese president Hu Jintao made it clear at the 17th National Congress that “cultural soft power” has become “an important source of national cohesion and creativity and a factor of growing significance in the competition in overall national strength”,⁷ and “building cultural soft power” was listed on the agenda in the twelfth Five-Year-Plan (2011–2015). After Xi Jinping took over in 2012, he not only continued to endorse this concept, but also linked it with the new vision of the China Dream, stating in a speech that: “enhancing national cultural soft power is crucial to the realisation of the two ‘centennial goals’ and the China Dream of national rejuvenation”.⁸ In 2014, addressing the central foreign affairs meeting, he again emphasised that the government “should increase China’s soft power, give a good Chinese narrative, and better communication China’s message to the world”.⁹

Possibly because of its frequent appearance in the Chinese official rhetoric, despite the academic and foreign policy debates the concept has induced in the USA, there was not much scholarly debate about the concept’s relevance to China but instead there have been extensive elaborations on its importance, almost as a timely cure found for China’s image problem following its economic and military rise. Therefore, of the myriad literature about China’s cultural diplomacy, the great majority has attributed its purpose to “building soft power”. To chime with the narrative of cultural renaissance in China, many scholars (Ding, 2008; Li, 2009; Glaser and Murphy, 2009) have pointed to the fact that the theory of “soft power” actually has much deeper roots in China’s ancient philosophies. For example, Laozi, the founder of Daoism, used the famous metaphor of water dripping through a rock to say “what is soft is strong”; Mozi, the founder of Mohism and the advocate of the doctrine of non-offense, argued that offensive uses of forces would sow the seeds of long-standing conflicts like theft and murder; and Sunzi, the ancient Chinese strategist, put forward the best strategy as “winning a battle without a fight”; Confucius has said “if those who are distant do not submit, one must cultivate virtue to attract them”, and in fact, the core value of Confucianism, which had been China’s dominant ideology for more than 2,000 years, advocates that a state should obtain its leadership status by setting a moral example, and win the allegiance of people through virtue, not by force or imposition of one’s values on others; Mencius, another great Confucian thinker, was known to elaborate on the value of non-coercion and the necessity for a ruler to cultivate his own virtue to attract others:

There is a way to gain the whole world. It is to gain the people, and having gained them one gains the whole world. There is a way to gain the people. Gain their hearts, and then you gain them.… When you are correct in your person, the whole world will turn to you.

(cited in Bell, 2006: 25)

Even in the USA, Joseph Nye is only considered the invento...