Skip to main content

China pushes to expand its soft power through cultural exports

Posted , updated 
A Sichuan Opera actor performs fire breathing during a show of traditional operas.
In 2008 China's Ministry of Culture selected 551 artists with the official responsibility of carrying forward the country's intangible cultural heritage, including folk literature, music, and dance and traditional opera (pictured).()
A Sichuan Opera actor performs fire breathing during a show of traditional operas.
In 2008 China's Ministry of Culture selected 551 artists with the official responsibility of carrying forward the country's intangible cultural heritage, including folk literature, music, and dance and traditional opera (pictured).()
China is already a political and military superpower, but its leaders dream of competing with the United States’ cultural influence as well. Antony Funnell surveys the extent of Chinese ‘soft power’ so far.
Loading

The Chinese philosopher Confucius died in the 5th century BC, but he was reborn in the mid 2000s.

Actually, rehabilitated is probably a better fit. In 2004 he was hoisted from his grave (in the figurative sense, of course) and put to work in the service of a political regime that once sought to obliterate his place in history.

In November that year, Communist Party officials presided over the opening of China’s first ‘Confucian Institute’. Located in the South Korean capital, Seoul, it was designed as a way of softening the country’s image abroad. There are now hundreds of similar institutes right across the world.

The Chinese film industry is really domestically based. They'd love to have success overseas. It hasn't happened.

The following year, President Hu Jintao went one step further in the official revival of the great philosopher’s reputation when he informed the Chinese people of the deep links he’d discovered between Confucian thought and the sort of socialism preached by the CCP.

It was a long way from the dark days of the Cultural Revolution and the ‘Criticise Lin, criticise Confucius’ campaign launched by Mao and his wife Jiang Qing.

Press-ganging the ancient sage into the service of the Chinese Communist Party only makes sense, of course, when you remember just how unpopular the party’s image has long been.

There was a time not so long ago when the CCP didn’t really care about the rest of the world or what it thought, but this is the 21st century and image and branding are everything.

Current President Xi Jinping has sought to make a mark for himself as an image re-maker; seeking to scrub clean his party’s reputation through a major ongoing anti-corruption drive. He’s also championed the power of art and film to increase China’s international influence, to make it a cultural as well as a political and military power.

The official line is to 'send culture out into the world'.

Cultural Revolution propaganda poster depicting Mao Zedong and soldiers of the People's Liberation Army.
A propaganda poster depicting Mao Zedong. China observers say that culture has long been used as a weapon in China and soft power is a new form of that.()

Using culture as a form of international influence is what Harvard University's Joseph Nye famously calls 'soft power'.

‘It's not enough to have just soft power, but it does make a difference if you have it, if you can combine your soft and hard power into what I call smart power, then you are better placed than if you have the two competing with each other,’ he says.

Michael Berry, a professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, references Mao Zedong’s famous 1942 Yan’an speech to argue that culture has long been a political weapon in China.

‘To boil the content of that talk down, it was basically that art and politics, or art and propaganda are not separate things,’ says the professor. ‘That art should be a tool of politics and it should have an ideological function, otherwise it was irrelevant and shouldn't have a space in society.

‘So today you are seeing a little bit of a throwback to the policy that had dictated so much of Chinese cultural life for so long,’ says Berry.  ‘It never totally went away, but we are definitely seeing an upsurge of some of those policies.

‘In many ways Xi Jinping is embracing many aspects of the good old days of the socialist Mao era. You see some of that coming back in a strange form under Xi Jinping's leadership.’

Part of that 'strange form', as Berry calls it, was a speech delivered in October last year to leading creative figures in Beijing, in which President Xi exhorted Chinese artists not just to send their culture out into the world, but to make it ideologically pure.

Modern Chinese art, the president said, should embody traditional Chinese culture, and it shouldn't carry what he described as the 'stench of money' or become ‘the slave of the market’—statements which seem wildly at odds with the country’s market-driven economy.

‘It's a clear contradiction,’ says Berry, adding that China has long been a land of many contradictions, and that the tension between them is part of everyday life.

‘Just look at the way the regime describes what their economic system is, which is “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. Anyone who is close to China will tell you socialism as an ideology has been dead for a very long time in China, and what you are seeing there is capitalism gone wild.’

A black and white photo of Lu Xun in 1930
Lu Xun, pictured in 1930, is considered the father of modern Chinese literature
There is, however, an underlying logic in the Chinese leadership’s desire to promote Chinese culture internationally, he says.

‘People talk about trade imbalances all the time, but no one really talks about the cultural imbalance between China and the west.’

‘If you were to walk onto a college campus anywhere, say, here in the United States or in Australia, if you would ask a typical college student: “who is Lu Xun?” I don't think we'd find that many typical college students who could answer that question, although Lu Xun is the father of modern Chinese literature.

‘On the other hand, if you were to go to a Chinese campus and ask typical college students: “who is Ernest Hemingway?” Most of them would properly be able to give you at least a brief description of who that person was. You could play the same exercise for pop culture figures, for TV stars. The unbalance is very prominent.’

In that sense, the establishment of China’s Confucian institutes is about trying to redress that imbalance, particularly around Chinese language and literature.

According to Frankfurt-based researcher Falk Hartig there are now around 475 institutes and some 850 smaller Confucian classrooms spread across western capitals, the Asia-Pacific and Africa.

Hartig, who has lived and worked in China and is now based at Goethe University, first began researching the institutes and their mission in 2007.

The party line, he says, is that the institutes have been flourishing due to international demand.

‘This is very much the official narrative that China says: we are asked by foreign friends and want to help them so that they can learn more about Chinese culture and they can get access to Chinese language,’ he says.

Leaving their sheer number aside, according to Hartig it’s difficult to judge the institutes’ true influence and value.

‘The other question, of course, is related to quality; what kind of language courses are they offering? What kind of cultural activities are they offering? Also the big question is how can Confucius Institutes really influence the image of China. The impact of these institutes; it's rather hard to measure or quantify.’

In recent years there have been criticisms; accusations that some institutes are little more than propaganda vehicles for the Chinese Communist Party. In both the United States and Canada there have been closures as a result. Hartig says some of the criticisms carry an element of truth.

‘They are not really spreading communist propaganda, I would say, but nevertheless they are limited in what they can do and what topics they can deal with. I would say it's somewhere in between. It's not as friendly and harmless as some of the Confucius Institute people would suggest, but it's also not as sinister as some of the critics would say.’

Still, according to Hartig, continuing suspicion has clearly been a limiting factor for the institutes, particularly in the west.

‘I think only people who have a rather positive image of China would go to a Confucius Institute. So no one who really has issues with China would go to a Confucius Institute and afterwards would say: “Oh, the Confucius Institute really changed my perception of China.” I think it's something like preaching to the converted.’

Chinese President Xi Jinping gives a toast
Chinese President Xi Jinping gives a toast during the National Day reception marking the 65th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China on September 30, 2014 in Beijing, China.()

One of the great features of American soft power during the 20th century and into this millennium has been the US film industry. American films have long dominated international box office sales. They’ve also been highly influential in making American tastes and fashions universal.

China now has the second largest film industry in the world and according to the University of California’s Stanley Rosen, it’s likely to surpass Hollywood by 2018.

Rosen says Xi Jinping clearly sees potential in using Chinese cinema as an additional soft power instrument. However, he believes that co-opting the industry in such a way will not be without its difficulties. 

‘The Chinese film industry is really domestically based,’ says Rosen. ‘They'd love to have success overseas. It hasn't happened. I lecture in China on how to internationalise the film industry and increase soft power, but it just hasn't been successful, partly because the films are in Chinese, they have Chinese cultural and historical components—they don't resonate very well with the outside world.’

Even where Chinese films do take on a more universally appealing style, says Rosen, the themes they pursue are often more reflective of the American Dream rather than any kind of Chinese equivalent.

Poster for the Chinese film Tiny Times.
‘A movie like Finding Mr Right, a big hit in 2013, is all about leaving China. It's based on Sleepless in Seattle, the American film. It's based on succeeding in the United States. You find relatively few films in China that are successful that don't have a dream that is similar to the American Dream.

‘Even films like Tiny Times, which is all about ... leading the good life, buying fancy clothes, it's really all about materialism. That individualism, that striving for success for the individual rather than the nation, that's the American Dream. The Chinese dream of Xi Jinping is supposed to be national rejuvenation, even more than individual material success.’

Rosen says in reality many filmmakers pay lip service to the wishes of the state while continuing to make films they know will find a receptive Chinese audience.

‘You do what you need to do to succeed. You say at meetings that this is a great idea and so on and so forth, we have to do this, but you know it's contradictory. I've written some papers recently which look at some of what leading film authorities say they want. They want to have the international market, they want Chinese soft power to succeed, and in the same sentence they say we want our films to have socialist core values.

‘Well, there's a basic contradiction. If you want to succeed in the international market, you are not going to make films with “socialist core values”. You have to make a choice.’

Australian National University historian Douglas Craig doubts the Beijing leadership will ever achieve soft power success simply by promoting the country’s cultural attributes.

He argues the experience of the Soviet Union shows there is no direct correlation between a nation’s political and military power and its cultural influence.

‘In what was known as the Third World and in Africa during the Cold War, the Soviet bloc tried very hard to establish a cultural presence in those nations and by and large found it very difficult to do so.

‘What they decided to concentrate much more on was infrastructure development and development projects in the Third World, rather than what you might call propaganda or, in a more neutral way, cultural diplomacy.

‘Don't forget the Soviet Union, like the United States, was pushing an ideological message in the Cold War. The Soviet Union was selling itself as a Marxist-Leninist state that was involved with, and concerned about, social equity and equality. The United States was pushing a liberal democratic capitalist mode. So it was an ideological battle, but the ideology of the United States did prove to be much more attractive.’

Members of the The Shanghai Jiao Tong University Symphony Orchestra
The Shanghai Jiao Tong University Symphony Orchestra performs at the University of Michigan Confucius Institute()

Craig says he sees Beijing increasingly following the Soviet Union’s example, refocusing its soft power efforts away from a focus on culture and further toward economic aid. On that score, Xi Jinping and his colleagues have already had an early success.

Australia, South Korea and the United Kingdom have recently signalled their intention to join a new development bank proposed by China.

The AIIB—the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank—is a US$50 billion initiative that the University of California’s Stanley Rosen says is a clear challenge to the economic soft power influence America exerts through organisations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

‘If you talk to people in China, even read what's in the Chinese media, they were quite surprised, very surprised that they got such buy-in from the Western European powers despite heavy-handed American lobbying against it,’ he says.

‘It will have an impact on the World Bank, the IMF and so on because this is in some ways a competitor to these organisations controlled by the United States. So they are going to be very careful with this to show it's a model for the future of China's role in the international community. ‘

Harvard University’s Joseph Nye says there will be challenges ahead for China in trying to perfect its soft power capabilities whilst still maintaining one-party authoritarian rule. Recent Chinese sabre-rattling toward its Asian neighbours risks complicating matters further, he argues.

‘China today, when it tries to take areas like Scarborough Reef from the Philippines and so forth, is essentially using its hard power in ways which undercut its soft power.’

As Confucius once wrote: ‘Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.’

This article contains content that is not available.

Exploring new ideas, new approaches, new technologies—the edge of change. Future Tense analyses the social, cultural and economic fault lines arising from rapid transformation.

Posted , updated 
China, Computer Science, International Financial Institutions, Arts, Culture and Entertainment, Science and Technology