Pen is mightier than the sword: Novelists help China’s soft power push in Latin America
Premier Li Keqiang is bringing along another group on his trip to Latin America as he tries to boost China's cultural influence in the region - novelists.
The writers will attend a seminar in Colombia on cultural exchanges between China and Latin America and speak to an audience including Li and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, a social network account of People's Daily reported.
They include Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan, bestselling spy-thriller writer Mai Jia, and Chinese Writers Association chairwoman Tie Ning.
The trip marks a fresh push in Beijing's outreach efforts to build its soft power.
"The export of literature is the export of the spirit and ideology that will affect others' indigenous culture and way of thinking," the article said. "Li's trip is just the first step."
Although China wields strong economic influence in the developing countries, the presence of Chinese culture abroad remains scant. China's cultural exchanges with Latin America were in "a complete deficit", People's Daily said.
Hardly were Mo Yan's works known to the Latin American public when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, the newspaper said, although the award citation described his writings as a mixture of reality and fantasy reminiscent of Latin American literature giant Gabriel Garcia Marquez's works.
Mai Jia's spy stories set during the second Sino-Japanese war and last century's civil war in China enjoy slightly more recognition among Spanish-speaking readers. His debut novel Decoded was translated into Spanish and published in 24 Spanish-speaking countries last year.
Beijing has ramped up public diplomacy efforts in recent years as the leadership fears its foreign affairs initiatives have led to misperceptions at home and abroad.
China has stepped up community projects overseas such as building schools and health care facilities in Africa, and it set up the China Public Diplomacy Association in 2013.
Beijing Foreign Studies University professor Zhan Jiang said having writers on the official visit may increase the influence of Chinese modern culture in Latin America, given the shared interests in style and subject matter of their literature circles.
"I tend to agree that a country's soft power cannot be built by propagation. The works that have universal values will speak to the world," Zhan said.
Michel Hockx, director of the University of London's SOAS China Institute, said the writers had more of a role to play in cultural exchanges than boosting China's soft power.
"These three writers are involved not so much because of what they write, but because of their positions in the official Chinese Writers Association," Hockx said. "Tie Ning is chairwoman, Mo Yan is one of the vice-chairs, and Mai Jia is chair of the Zhejiang provincial branch of the association."
