Soft Power - not as black and white as we thought

Soft power and public diplomacy have been interpreted distinctively in China. To understand the differences, it first helps to consider how the Western world defines the concepts. Public diplomacy can be simply explained as seeking to manage the international environment through listening and advocating. Soft power, as originally put forth by Joseph Nye, is an attractive power that co-opts people rather than coerces them. While we tend to think of these concepts as standard, in reality they are Westernized notions. The distinction can be seen clearly with China.

Yiwei Wang, in “Public Diplomacy and the Rise of Chinese Soft Power,” provides an interesting analysis of how China understands the terms. The first notable distinction he mentions is the Chinese attitude toward propaganda. What has become a dirty word in much of the Western world has a positive connotation in China. Already this presents a huge gap in understanding and creates mistrust from foreigners. Similarly, the country’s early attempts at public diplomacy by instituting news spokesmen were aimed at spreading messages internally. This can be chalked up to translation problems, i.e. mistaking the “public” in PD to mean the Chinese public. It is also a result, as Wang explains, of the Chinese rule of virtue. The first instinct is for self-reflection and not outward examination.

Secondly, China also understands public diplomacy to be primarily about people-to-people diplomacy. A recent official report advised China “to enhance culture as part of the soft power of our country to better guarantee the people’s basic cultural rights and interests.” This is a significant contrast with U.S. public diplomacy efforts. The emphasis on people and culture is different from the American approach to public diplomacy which relies on media messages. Cultural diplomacy, while still important to the U.S., is seen as more frivolous and harder to measure.

Finally, Wang describes China’s difficulty with conceptualizing soft power in Western terms. Power in China, he says, relates to morality, and in practice it is connected with strategy. According to Gary Rawnsley, this is where China’s understanding of soft power falls short. He says China fails to understand that soft power is an intangible attraction.

Looking at it objectively, the Chinese blend of propaganda and public diplomacy is pretty logical. It makes sense that a state’s messages to the domestic public and foreign publics would be the same. But to a Western PD culture that neurotically tries to separate the two, China’s philosophy appears wrong – so wrong that we cannot accept it. The overarching distinction between conceptions of PD and soft power in China and the West is the difference in credibility. For China, credibility comes in the form of a top-down, official government message about government business. For the West, that’s propaganda and it’s bad. For China, credibility comes in the form of pandas at international zoos. For the West, those pandas are cute and cuddly and couldn’t be more different from the harsh Chinese authoritarian government.  While there shouldn’t be a problem with various conceptions of public diplomacy, when credibility doesn’t translate, the PD is in vain.