In a Tortoiseshell
For my Junior Independent Work for the Politics Department, this excerpt performs a literature review on how soft power is defined and exercised from the US/Western perspective versus Chinese/non-Western approach. The excerpt attempts to find its own definition of soft power in order to proceed with gathering the data and developing the methodology needed to empirically test hypotheses on the relationship between gender, income, and the receptiveness of Chinese soft influence in East/Southeast Asian countries.
Excerpt
The following paper seeks to examine how gender and income level in East and Southeast Asian countries affect public opinion on China. Specifically, it questions the primary “dimension of influence,” or how respondents perceive the nature of Chinese influence (e.g., military, political, economic, cultural). My literature review begins by covering the definition, execution, and usefulness of soft power, from both US/Western and Chinese perspectives. This research works to synthesize the three domains to provide a comprehensive study of public views in East/Southeast Asian countries in relation to perceptions of Chinese influence.
Joseph Nye defined soft power in the late 1980s as “the ability to get others to want the outcomes that you want” (Nye 2004). As opposed to conventional military hard power, which is coercive towards other states, soft power is a “co-optive” force that achieves states’ desired outcomes through attraction and persuasion. Nye’s three pillars of soft power are: political values, culture, and foreign policy. Scholars have engaged in many debates around soft power, including its usefulness and whether or not it can be considered independent from military or economic power.
The general consensus among scholars is that China lacks soft power relative to the other industrialized democracies despite its formidable economic strength (Huang and Ding 2006; Lum, Morrison, and Vaughn 2008). The thinking goes that China’s ideology is unattractive and its authoritarian political system prevents the flourishing of its civil society, a valuable source of soft power that the state cannot generate. Additionally, its aggressive actions in the South China Sea, “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy, crackdown in Hong Kong, and suppression of Uighurs in Xinjiang have not won it any favor among Western or regional audiences. However, some scholars dispute this mainstream view of Chinese soft power. Some directly point out a liberal democratic bias in the study of international relations (Keating and Kaczmarska, 2017), pointing out that conservative values and illiberal governance, such as in the case of Russia before the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, can be attractive in and of themselves and should not be ignored. Furthermore, some developing countries find China’s authoritarian state-led rapid development as a potentially attractive economic model to emulate.
China’s interpretation of soft power is less of an idealistic vision like Washington’s interpretation but rather a more pragmatic approach. To the CCP, the separation between hard and soft power is artificial; this line of argument notes that the United States’ attractiveness flows from its military might and economic heft. Repnikova (2022) recently provided an overarching analysis of Chinese soft power, noting its sustained and urgent effort to enhance its image, stating that “whereas Washington places democratic values and ideals at the heart of its soft-power promotion, China focuses more on practical matters, seeking to fuse its cultural and commercial appeals.” This approach has reaped limited gains in the West, but has resonated across the Global South. China’s substantial investments in public diplomacy include Confucius Institutes, international communication, education and training exchanges, and public diplomacy spectacles. Take the area of educational opportunity in Ethiopia as an example. “In contrast to the small number of highly competitive fellowship programs sponsored by the U.S. State Department, China offers thousands of scholarships to cover the cost of degrees and training programs for African elites and young people.” In other words, where the United States has quality, China more than makes up for it with quantity. Western critiques that such policies are merely economic or material inducements miss the point that although inducements in and of themselves are not soft power, they enhance China’s image as a generous, opportunity-providing, competent, and pragmatic country.
Additionally, a substantial body of research exists on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) launched in 2013 across developing countries. However, economic incentives do not necessarily lead to more positive opinions. Eisenman’s analysis of China—Africa trade patterns show that although market forces drive trade, anti-Chinese resistance narratives still exist that could threaten China’s image (2012). A recent working paper by Sun, Kapstein, and Shapiro seeks to measure political influence of the BRI in Southeast Asia through sentiment analysis of elected officials’ public social media posts in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia (2023). They find little support for the claim that Chinese investments are increasing its political influence. Moreover, one should be wary not to associate soft power with payments too closely as then the term would lose its distinctiveness as a dimension of power.
Bibliography
Eisenman, J. (2012). China—Africa Trade Patterns: Causes and consequences. Journal of Contemporary China, 21(77), 793—810. https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2012.684964
Huang, Y., & Ding, S. (2006). Dragon’s underbelly: An analysis of China’s soft power. East Asia, 23(4), 22—44. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03179658.
Keating, V. C., & Kaczmarska, K. (2017). Conservative soft power: Liberal soft power bias and the ‘hidden’ attraction of Russia. Journal of International Relations and Development, 22(1), 1—27. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-017-0100-6.
Lum, T., Morrison, W. M., & Vaughn, B. (2008). China’s “Soft Power” in Southeast Asia.
Nye, J. S. (2004). Soft power: The means to success in world politics (1st ed.). New York: Public Affairs.
Repnikova, M. (2022a). Chinese soft power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Repnikova, M. (2022b, August). The Balance of Soft Power: The American and Chinese Quests to Win Hearts and Minds. Foreign Affairs, 101(4), 44,46-51.
Sun, Y., Kapstein, E., & Shapiro, J. (2023). Chinese Investment and Elite Sentiment in Southeast Asia: An Event Study of Influence Along the Belt and Road. Empirical Studies of Conflict Project.
Author Commentary / Minh Duong
When I began brainstorming my motive for the junior paper, I knew that I wanted to study something on soft power in Asia. China is an emerging power in the world’s most geopolitically important region of the 21st Century, and I wanted to research how it yields its non-military influence in the region. There is a general public consensus that China lacks soft power relative to Western countries (plus Korea and Japan). However, like any great power, China has an incentive to develop and exercise its influence through non-coercive means as the use of hard power has become more costly and less effective over time. Therein lies the kernel of my excerpt’s motive, to interrogate how soft power is defined and exercised through American and Chinese lenses.
As I conducted my literature review, one major challenge was how to make sense of the overlapping and distinct features of scholars’ definitions on soft power. Western scholars tend to see soft power through an idealistic lens as the attractiveness of a society’s values, while Chinese policymakers carry a more pragmatic outlook on using economic and educational inducements as a means to curry favor. In the end, I decided to conceptualize soft power as “as any form of influence that does not involve hard military force, whether directly explicit or indirectly implied” for the purposes of studying the dimensions of Chinese influence on public opinion.
Like any other skill, writing clearly, concisely, and persuasively is something that can be developed through deliberate practice. I would say that just getting started with a first draft and plenty of time for revision is critical. It is an active process of constructing and distilling your meaning and argument, and as such needs time to be organically personalized and refined. The Writing Seminar and the Writing Center can give you the vocabulary and a general framework of principles for good academic writing, so take advantage of the resources available! As the Tortoise would happily say, “Slow and steady wins the race.”
Editor Commentary / Laura Zhang
A common question that may arise for freshmen after taking Writing Seminar is: when will I need to use concepts like motive and scholarly conversation again? Perhaps this question originates from the structured expectations of Writing Seminar, like how the student needs to use certain scholars to analyze their primary evidence, or how the motive needs to be phrased as a question in the introduction. Minh’s Junior Paper provides an answer to this post-Writing Seminar dilemma and exemplifies how motive and scholarly conversation can be used for independent work, but in a way that reimagines and makes these concepts his own.
Minh accomplishes many technical feats in this excerpt—he orients his reader to complex theories in International Relations, introduces competing perspectives in the existing literature, and carves out a space for his analysis in the conversation. In the first two paragraphs, Minh breaks down Nye’s concept of “soft power” in a succinct, uncomplicated manner, whilst hinting at the fact that this term has been contested within scholarly discourse. Minh then moves to describing the “general consensus” of soft power and contrasts it with China’s more “pragmatic approach” to soft power. This does two things: it acts as a literature review and hints at his scholarly and empirical motive. Not only is there a tension within scholars’ perceptions of China’s soft power, this tension arises from a Western/Global South perspective divide. Within this tension, Minh positions himself as the bridge—whilst he aligns himself with Nye’s conceptualization of soft power as excluding “military force,” he also views soft power as being interconnected with “economic influence,” also contextualizing the rising scholarly interest in BRI.
Freshmen—and students wishing for an example of how to develop their own method of interweaving motive within the scholarly conversation—can draw inspiration from Minh’s excerpt. His commentary also offers several gems of advice for an independent writing process: he begins with a topic he’s interested in, finds his motive before he starts developing his topic, and then begins to consider his unique contribution to the literature. His motive emerges in his text as organically as his writing process—a true reflection of his writing ideology of “slow and steady wins the race.” Motive and scholarly conversation do not have to look like they do in Writing Seminar—they can be reimagined, as Minh has done, in a way that serves the essay, instead of the essay serving them.
