Soft Power With Chinese Characteristics

China's Campaign for Hearts and Minds

Ying Zhu, Kingsley Edney, Stanley Rosen, Ying Zhu, Kingsley Edney, Stanley Rosen

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351804356
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Politics

This book examines the Chinese Communist Party's attempts to improve China's image around the world, thereby increasing its "soft power." This soft, attractive form of power is crucial if China is to avoid provoking an international backlash against its growing military and economic might.

The volume focuses on the period since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, and is global in scope, examining the impact of Chinese policies from Hong Kong and Taiwan to Africa and South America. The book explains debates over soft power within China and delves into case studies of important policy areas for China's global image campaign, such as film, news media and the Confucius Institutes. The most comprehensive work of its kind, the volume presents a picture of a Chinese leadership that has access to vast material resources and growing global influence but often struggles to convert these resources into genuine international affection.

With a foreword by Joseph Nye, Soft Power With Chinese Characteristics will be invaluable to students and scholars of Chinese politics and Chinese media, as well as international relations and world politics more generally.

PART 1
Debating China’s soft power strategy

1
PROJECTION OF CHINA’S SOFT POWER IN THE NEW CENTURY

Reconstruction of the traditional Chinese world order

Suisheng Zhao

Once an ancient empire in East Asia, China began a steady decline in the 19th century and suffered defeats and invasions by imperialist foreign powers. After more than a century of struggle for rejuvenation, China has resurged in the 21st century to regain the glory it enjoyed two centuries ago. China’s rise has included building tangible economic-military power and an attempt to raise political-cultural power to enhance its statecraft. As a matter of fact, “The concept of soft-power advocacy has made a strong impression in China” (People’s Daily Online, 2006) after Joseph Nye made the conceptual distinction between hard and soft power. The utility of soft power has become one of the most discussed topics in Chinese media and academic circles. In the meantime, the Chinese government has surged in its investments in “soft power” diplomacy.

China has readily embraced the concept of soft power because, as Joseph Nye indicated, “in a global information age, soft sources of power such as culture, political values, and diplomacy are part of what makes a great power. Success depends not only on whose army wins, but also on whose story wins” (Nye, 2005). In particular, the concept offers a tool to ease the anxieties among some countries in East Asia where China had a long history of cultural and political dominance, about what sort of great power China is poised to be. China’s military modernization and muscle-flexing has produced mounting suspicions and growing frictions in its relations with some of its neighboring countries embroiled in territorial disputes. To calm fears of their neighbors, Chinese leaders have claimed that China’s rise will be peaceful because its great power aspirations are different from the imperialism and hegemony of the Western powers. To support the claims, Chinese leaders and scholars have evoked China’s past as a peaceful nation to project a benevolent governance and benign hierarchy of a China-centered East Asian order that is purportedly unique and more peaceful than its Western counterparts. Some Chinese scholars even went so far as to argue that imperial China resisted the temptation of expansion and won the admiration of its neighbors. The collapse of the Chinese world order, therefore, was a result of the clash of civilizations between the benevolent East Asian system and the brutal European-centered nation-state system. China’s rise is thus to restore justice in an unjust world and will bring peace and order to the region. A connection between China’s imperial past and its contemporary peaceful rise is thus established.

This chapter will start with an exploration of the Chinese rediscovery and reconstruction of the traditional Chinese world order in the 21st century and then place the Chinese reconstruction in the context of scholarly debate about the traditional Chinese world order and particularly its critiques. The third part examines the irony that while Chinese leaders have presented a harmonious world order to its neighbors, they have adopted a social Darwinist worldview and approach to maximize China’s power and security and expand its influence and control over its neighborhoods. The conclusion looks at the gap between China’s efforts at soft power projection and the results.

Reconstruction of the benevolent Chinese world order

World order is “an aggregate conception of dominant values, norms, and structures as well as of established patterns of actors’ behavior that give shape and substance to international society at any given time” (Kim, 1991, p. 4). The modern world order began to acquire its present shape and definition more than three centuries ago with the emergence of a nation-state system in Europe. The principle of state sovereignty has provided the general framework from which evolved specific state practices on war, peace, commerce and political competition. World order meant very different things to the Chinese prior to the coming of the Western powers in the 19th century. John Fairbank and his colleagues coined a concept of Chinese world order known as “a Sinocentric hierarchy” to characterize imperial China’s relations with its East Asian neighbors (Zhao, 2015). The concept, which has become a conventional paradigm ever since, portrayed China as an Asian Empire with a self-sufficient agricultural economy and workable bureaucracy, overshadowing other nations in the region, holding a different world outlook from the West and maintaining an ethnically based hierarchical regional order.

This Chinese centrality was based on the belief of “China being internal, large, and high and the barbarians being external, small, and low” (Yang, 1968, p. 20). The concept of legal equality or sovereignty of individual states did not exist. All countries arranged themselves hierarchically around the Chinese emperor known as the Son of Heaven (天子). China’s central position was manifested in a highly sophisticated tributary system, a term John K. Fairbank started using in the 1940s, that was, in effect, the only institution for international relations in the region (Fairbank and Teng, 1941, pp. 135–148). Imperial China considered other countries its cultural inferiors, in recognition of which they were expected to appear in the Chinese capital, make obeisance to the emperor and present tribute.

Although the tributary system sometimes embarrassed the tributary states and bore a heavy cost to China, it was described as valuable for both the tributary states and the tribute receiver. For tributary states, the presentation of tributes enabled them to trade with China through the legalization of controlled trade along their frontiers (Ch’en, 1968, p. 161). Politically, the tributary states received validation of their political power from the Chinese emperor in the form of patents of office and investiture. This was a valuable technique for the establishment of legitimacy by local rulers. The Chinese court also benefited from this system as the tribute received from neighboring countries was the ritual that acknowledged the superiority of the Chinese culture, recognized the greatness of the Chinese civilization, and acknowledged the existence of Chinese authority and, consequently, the inviolability of China’s frontiers. Economically, China was able to trade with its neighbors for items necessary without admitting China’s dependence on these items of trade with the barbarians, thereby preserving “the myth of China’s self-sufficiency” (Mancall, 1963, p. 30).

China’s centrality was regarded as a function of its civilization and virtue, particularly the virtue of China’s rulers. As Lucian Pye suggested, “the Chinese, with their Confucianism, created an elaborate intellectual structure of an ethical order which all enlightened peoples were expected to acknowledge and respect” (Pye, 1985, p. 41). The Chinese world order, therefore, was as much as an ethical as a political phenomenon. Harmony internationally and domestically was the product of the emperor’s virtue and the highest goal of a Chinese society. Thus, the Chinese emperor’s superior position exhibited through proper conduct, including ceremonies, gave one prestige among others and power over them. In the Chinese world order, hierarchical power relationship, therefore, was by definition more “moral” than in the West (Mancall, 1963, p. 31).

The prospect of China’s reemergence as a great power in the wake of the 21st century has led to a rediscovery of the benign Chinese world order by Chinese leaders and scholars. Assuring the world of China’s peaceful development, President Hu Jintao in his September 15, 2005, speech at the United Nations General Assembly presented the concept of harmonious world, which was derived from traditional Chinese thinking that “harmony” was at the core of dealing with everything from state affairs to neighborly relations (Liu, 2009, p. 479). After President Hu made the presentation, a China Daily story made it clear that the concept was part of China’s soft power projection because the ideas of taking the peaceful development road and building a harmonious society and a harmonious world help resolve doubts on China’s rapid development (People’s Daily Online, 2006). Another article in China Daily confirmed that

China hopes to dissolve the misconception of its development as the ‘China threat’ by making its traditional value systems known to the world…. Once they come to know the Chinese people better, they will find out that harmony is an essential part of Chinese tradition and a country that values harmony poses absolutely no threat to the rest of the world.

(China Daily, 2006)

Since coming into office, President Xi Jinping has enthusiastically pushed Chinese officials, journalists and scholars to tell the so-called China story to the world as part of China’s soft power offense. President Xi has become obsessed in citing Confucian classics and using Chinese history to explain China’s domestic as well as foreign policy positions. He even went so far as to speak in Beijing as he hosted leaders from India and Myanmar that “China does not subscribe to the notion that a country is bound to seek hegemony when it grows in strength. Hegemony or militarism is not in the genes of the Chinese” (Reuters, 2014). President Xi repeated in another occasion that the deepest spiritual desire of a nation has to be found from “the genes’ order (基因测序) of inherited national spirit (薪火相传的民族精神).” The pursuit of peace, concord and harmony (和平、和睦、和谐的追求) has been deeply rooted in the spiritual world of the Chinese nation and the blood of the Chinese people. China’s unswerving pursuit of peaceful development represents the peace-loving cultural tradition the Chinese nation has inherited and carried forward over the past thousands of years. He cited Confucian wisdoms such as “A warlike state, however big it may be, will eventually perish” (国虽大,好战必亡), “Peace is of paramount importance” (以和为贵), “seek harmony without uniformity” (和而不同), “replace weapons of war with gifts of jade and silk” (化干戈为玉帛), “bring prosperity to the nation and security to the people” (国泰民安), “forming friendships with neighbors” (睦邻友邦), “achieve universal peace” (天下太平) and “Great Harmony of Tianxia” (天下大同) to prove his point. He asserted that “China was long one of the most powerful countries in the world. Yet it never engaged in colonialism or aggression. The pursuit of peaceful development represents the peace-loving cultural tradition of the Chinese nation over the past several thousand years, a tradition that we have inherited and carried forward.” He thereby proclaimed that “the Chinese nation is a peace-loving nation” (中华民族是爱好和平的民族) (Xinhua News Agency, 2014).

As part of the rediscovery effort, Chinese scholars have reconstructed the Chinese world order. Portraying the Chinese order as a self-centered tributary system (自我为中心的朝贡体系) and the etiquette system of the heavenly dynasty (天朝礼治体系), one Chinese scholar found that Imperial China produced an open hierarchy as the foundation of the East Asian international system (东亚国 际体系的原始形态) (Guo, 2014). A traditional Chinese term, Tianxia (all-under-heaven, 天下), based on Wangdao (the royal ethics, 王道), has emerged as a uniquely “Chinese normative principle of international relations in contrast with the principles of sovereignty and the structure of international anarchy which form the core of the contemporary international system” (Carlson, 2011, p. 89).

In his book, All-Under-Heaven System (天下体制) and many articles, Zhao Tingyang, a Chinese philosopher, describes Tianxia as a universal system inherited from the Zhou dynasty about 3,000 years ago (Zhao, 2005). Designed to create the compatibility of all peoples of all nations, Tianxia presupposes the Oneness of the universe (天下归一) as the political principle of “inclusion of all” in the world. Tianxia commits to the Oneness as the intact wholeness that implies the acceptance of the diversities in the world where nothing is left out and no one is treated as an outsider (Zhao, 2006, pp. 29–41). This is a world order with the emphasis on harmony defined as reciprocal dependence, reciprocal improvement or the perfect fitting for different things. Guanxi (reciprocal relationship) thus became the organizational principle of the Tianxia system (Zhao, 2009, pp. 5–18). The Tianxia system, maintained by cultural attraction and ruling by virtue, is embodied in the Chinese ideal of perpetual peace. Notably different from the aggressive empires that existed in other places, imperial China was more concerned with establishing itself as an everlasting power than with the plight of endless expansion because of the unaggressive and adaptable characteristics of the Chinese culture (Zhao, 2014, p. 128). Qin Yaqing of Beijing Foreign Affairs University also states that

the core of the notion of Tianxia revolves around the idea of a “Chinese system.”… Tianxia is where nature and humanity intersect, a space where political authority and social order interact…. Order is always intrinsic in the system envisioned by the notion of Tianxia. Within the Tianxia system, structure is hierarchical because only such an arrangement could sustain its stability and harmonious order. Order could only be achieved when there is a clear stratification of classes and there is likewise an orderly relationship between them.

(Qin, 2011, pp. 42–43)

Tianxia is thus presented as a world system in contrast to the anarchic West-phalian system, which is regarded as conducive to discord and war. Chinese Social Sciences News (中国社会科学报) published a special session in 2014 to discuss the differences between the Tianxia system and the contemporary international system dominated by Western powers. Zhang Chi-hsiung of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica suggests that Tianxia was a harmonious world system expressed by the following equations: all-under-the-heaven = the Chinese world = center + periphery = Chinese + barbarians = we race + they race = kingdom + tributary = China + tributary = suzerainty + tributary states = Chinese world empire = tributary common community = China-centered common community > East Asian common community. The China-centered hierarchical order was a Tianxia common community (天下共同体), in which the center protected the periphery and the periphery subordinated to the center (中心保护周边，周边藩屏中心), forming a pattern of interdependence, co-existence and co-prosperity between China and its four frontiers of neighbors (形成中国与四邻互相依赖、共存共荣的格局). China never interfered in the internal affairs of tributary states. Nationality, autonomy and kingdom self-governance were developed. The traditional East Asian international system, therefore, maintained stability for more than 2,000 years (Chang, 2014).

Royal ethics (王道) is used to explain why the perpetual peace of Tianxia was created and maintained. Yan Xuetong of Tsinghua University led a project on China’s pre-Qin political thoughts, which determined that ancient Chinese thinkers advised rulers to rely on ethics (道), benevolence (仁) and morality (德) to win the world (取天下), and to take a defensive posture (非攻) using benevolent government (仁政) to rule the world (治天下) (Yan, Xu, et al., 2009). Citing ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi, Yan distinguishes three types of ethics in ancient China: royal ethics (王道), hegemonic ethics (霸道) and tyranny (强道). Royal ethics focused on peaceful means to win the hearts and minds of the people at home and abroad. Tyranny—based on military force—inevitably created enemies. Hegemonic ethics lay in between: frequently indifferent to moral concerns, it often involved violence against non-allies but did not cheat the people at home or allies abroad. Royal ethics would win in any competition with hegemony or tyranny (Yan, 2011). Xing Qi, Vice President of the Chinese Cultural Promotion Society (中国文化促进会), claimed that royal ethics played an invaluable role in the stabilization and prosperity of the Chinese cultural ring (中华文化圈) because the starting point of royal ethics was an internal holy process (内圣) rather than an external imposition to reach a harmony be...