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.

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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.”

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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.

In a Tortoiseshell

In this excerpt, I set up the scholarly conversation about physicians’ adoption of obstetric anesthesia in the late 19th century. I aim to highlight different historical camps and to reveal a question overlooked by historians. I am curious not only about how obstetric anesthesia came to be accepted by doctors, but also about how and why obstetric anesthesia was framed as a racially-specific intervention. In this manner, I aim to demonstrate my motive for closer analysis of primary sources, specifically Dr. James Young Simpson’s writings about obstetric anesthesia.

Excerpt

In 1847, Scottish obstetrician Dr. James Young Simpson began advocating among his colleagues for the use of chloroform to treat parturient pain.¹ At first, the overwhelmingly white and male American and European physician class was divided over whether to adopt this novel intervention.² Scholars have noted that the normative debate among physicians about the use of obstetric anesthesia hinged on defining whether parturient pain was pathological or physiological.³ Historians have offered various theories about how obstetric anesthesia became widely accepted by the medical community in the late nineteenth century. According to historian Judith Walzer Leavitt, some physicians believed that labor pain was natural, and they worried about the side effects of anesthesia on the mother’s health.⁴ Walzer Leavitt argued that the pro-anesthesia faction prevailed largely due to parturient women’s grassroots advocacy for pain relief during labor.⁵ Historian Jacqueline Wolfe endorsed Walzer Leavitt’s stance with an important caveat: altruism was not physicians’ only motivation for giving women the anesthetics they desired. Rather, physicians from America and Great Britain shared their nations’ worries about the declining birth rate among white women.⁶ According to Wolfe, nineteenth-century physicians set aside their concerns about the safety and efficacy of obstetric anesthesia in favor of addressing this social problem; by making birth less painful for white women, they could persuade these women to have more children.⁷ However, Wolfe did not detail exactly how physicians managed to label obstetric anesthesia as an intervention suitable for white women only, leaving this an open question in the scholarship. Examining the writings of Dr. James Simpson, the first obstetrician to promote chloroform as obstetric anesthesia, reveals that he justified its use by relying on medical myths that Black women were primitive and insensitive to pain in order to label parturient pain as a disease unique to white, civilized women. Employing this racialized logic allowed physicians to respond to concerns about white population decline while reinforcing their professional authority and upholding social norms regarding gender and race.While Walzer Leavitt and Wolfe highlighted the legitimate dispute about the safety of obstetric anesthesia alongside social pressures which spurred physicians’ acceptance of this intervention, they overlooked the implications of the obstetric anesthesia debate for the professional status of physician-obstetricians themselves. At the turn of the 19th century in Europe and America, male obstetricians were still struggling to usurp female midwives as the dominant professional authority on childbirth.⁸ If obstetricians established labor pain as a prevalent disease that could only be treated using anesthetics—inaccessible to midwives—then these physicians could better contest the inclusion of midwives in the birthing process due to their lack of specialized knowledge about pathology and their dearth of necessary medical supplies. However, pathologizing labor pain also risked undermining male physicians’ professional authority as it potentially posed a radical challenge to nineteenth-century gender roles in Europe and America. In her analysis of 19th century folklore about labor pain, Miriam Rich specified that the pains of childbirth helped justify mothers’ assignments as stewards of domesticity; labor pain was thought to render mothers too fragile to function outside the home.⁹ Thus, many physicians and common people reasoned that the experience of labor pain naturally predisposed women to serve as ideal family caretakers.¹⁰ Accepting parturient pain as a ubiquitous disease of childbirth could have weakened this convenient justification for women’s relegation to the domestic sphere. Because the physician class was nearly exclusively male, they benefited from the myth that women’s reproductive capabilities made them naturally suited for work inside the home and, implicitly, unsuitable to compete in the medical marketplace as a physician. Thus, male physicians were tasked with negotiating a professional tradeoff: rejecting labor pain as a disease could provide midwives an opening to regain control over the birthing chamber, but accepting this pathological classification risked destabilizing patriarchal values. Simpson cleverly resolved this dilemma by framing labor pain as a disease of civilization to which white women were uniquely susceptible. Under this definition, although the effects of labor pain were harmful to a white woman’s health, the existence of this pain signaled their pre-existing refinement, fragility, and sensitivity as byproducts of civilization, qualities that made a mother well-suited for the delicate work of nurturing children. By framing labor pain as a race-specific disease and consequence of civilization, physicians justified the intervention of obstetric anesthesia for their target audience of white, upper-class women while maintaining the overall cultural association between labor pain and domesticity alongside whiteness and advanced civilization.

Footnotes

1. Jacqueline Wolfe, Deliver Me From Pain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 24. ↩︎
2. Wolfe, Deliver Me From Pain, 27. ↩︎
3. Wolfe, Deliver Me From Pain, 28; Miriam Rich, “The Curse of Civilised Woman: Race, Gender and the Pain of Childbirth in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine,” Gender & History 28, no. 1 (2016): 68. https://doi-org.ezproxy.princeton.edu/10.1111/1468-0424.12177. ↩︎
4. Judith Wazler Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 117. ↩︎
5. Wazler Leavitt, Brought to Bed, 118. ↩︎
6. Wolfe, Deliver Me From Pain, 17. ↩︎
7. Wolfe, Deliver Me From Pain, 17-18. ↩︎
8. Wazler Leavitt, Brought to Bed, 38; Rich, “The Curse of the Civilized Woman,” 60. ↩︎
9. Rich, “The Curse of the Civilized Woman,” 58. ↩︎
10. Rich, “The Curse of the Civilized Woman,” 58. ↩︎

Bibliography

Rich, Miriam. “The Curse of Civilised Woman: Race, Gender and the Pain of Childbirth in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine.” Gender & History 28, no. 1 (2016): 57-76. https://doi-org.ezproxy.princeton.edu/10.1111/1468-0424.12177. 

Walzer Leavitt, Judith. Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 

Wolfe, Jacqueline. Deliver Me From Pain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

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Author Commentary / Sonia Cherian

I wrote this essay as my final paper for HIS 390: Formations of Knowledge: Historical Approaches to Science, Technology, and Medicine. I enjoyed learning about the philosophy of science as a tool to analyze values and epistemic virtues embedded in different practices of science. This class showed me that even though science is seen as an “objective” endeavor, scientific practice and findings can be shaped by a host of social and cultural factors which impact definitions of health and sickness. This notion that disease categories are historically and culturally contingent was central to my exploration of the development of obstetric anesthesia. When I began researching the history of obstetric anesthesia, I expected to uncover a story of empowerment: how could offering women the option to reduce childbirth pain be anything but a triumph for obstetricians and their patients? However, assessing the scholarly conversation and analyzing physicians’ primary source writings about obstetric anesthesia led me to a different conclusion. I realized that physicians relied on, and even reinforced, racist notions about which women experience pain in order to label obstetric anesthesia as a racially-specific intervention. Through my historical analysis, I discovered that this racialized definition may have appealed to the white, male 19th-century physician class as they sought to elevate their professional status while upholding gender norms. During my writing process, I first combed secondary sources about the development of obstetric anesthesia: this helped me identify my key primary sources, writings by James Young Simpson. However, only during my own close reading of the source did I uncover his racialized descriptions of parturient pain that had gone unmentioned in the secondary sources. I spent lots of time going back and forth between the secondary and primary sources to make sure that I had truly identified a “gap” in the scholarship, and to equip myself with historical context to better evaluate Simpson’s motives. Writing my introduction with the goal of laying out my motive helped me solidify my scholarly conversation and thesis.

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Editor Commentary / Katja Kochvar

Sonia and I are both students in the sciences, most familiar with concise and precise scientific writing. While the course Sonia wrote this essay for may have “science” in the name, the focus was placed squarely on historical analysis. Historical analysis is necessarily a process of imagination. It forces us to reconcile the facts, statistics, and accounts from primary sources with perspectives, ideas and interpretations from secondary sources. In analyzing history, we must not only decipher what happened, but question who tells the story of what happened and what their motivations might be. 

Sonia embraces this challenge by evaluating historical analyses from multiple secondary sources. She first lays out a historian’s interpretation of why parturient anesthesia was widely adopted by the medical community, namely that “grassroots advocacy for pain relief during labor” was the main driver. She juxtaposes this claim with an account from another historian, who instead proposes that “the declining birth rate among white women” was a broader concern and motivation for adopting anesthetics. Based on this interpretation, Sonia cleverly identifies a gap in the literature: how did concerns about white birth rates justify an intervention many physicians deemed unsafe and risky?

In answering this question, Sonia inserts herself in the past, fully immersing herself in the mind of a key physician, Dr. James Simpson, and the broader context of the era. This task requires immense creativity—it is no easy task to imagine the inner workings of a white male physician’s brain in the 1800s! Yet Sonia does not shy away from succinctly detailing the anxieties physicians felt about their precarious role as authorities on childbirth and defenders of patriarchal values. Her deep understanding of these concerns, paired with careful analysis of the primary source writings of Dr. James Simpson, allowed Sonia to follow the logic of physicians’ ultimate decision to adopt parturient anesthesia. What she finds is a story rooted in racist and sexist notions about who experiences pain and what treatment they are entitled to in a white supremacist society.

It is worth noting that the prompt for this paper was entirely open-ended; Sonia had the power, and burden, of choosing a topic of her own. While this task can be daunting for many students, Sonia allowed her own interests in medicine and careful reading of secondary sources to guide her to an unsolved scholarly puzzle. This essay can hopefully encourage other students facing big, broad prompts to follow your feelings—of curiosity, interest, indignation—to an interesting thesis. It is this process of finding your unique voice that often leads to the most creative writing solutions. 

At the heart of academic writing lies a deceptively simple challenge: how do you join a conversation that has been unfolding for years—or even centuries—without getting lost in the noise? Finding your place in the scholarly conversation means not only understanding the landscape of existing ideas but also identifying where your own questions, insights and curiosities belong. It requires careful listening, sharp inquiry and a willingness to rethink your assumptions through engagement with others. This process of discovery is often where innovation in academic writing begins.

In this section, we feature two writers who skillfully carve out space for their voices within complex academic conversations. The first paper, written for a History of Science course, challenges conventional narratives about 19th-century obstetric anesthesia. Instead of accepting the story of medical progress at face value, the author uncovers how racialized assumptions shaped physicians’ adoption and framing of anesthesia—an angle overlooked in previous scholarship. 

The second piece, a Junior Paper in the Politics Department, explores the concept of soft power in East and Southeast Asia. By comparing Western and Chinese approaches, the author synthesizes competing definitions and proposes a new conceptual framework to support their empirical research. In doing so, they stake out their own intellectual territory in an evolving global debate.

The accompanying reflections and editor commentaries shed light on the process behind these pieces — how each writer came to understand the existing landscape and ultimately found their own space within it. What emerges are not just strong final products, but examples of how deep engagement with a scholarly conversation can lead to original and thoughtfully crafted contributions to their respective fields.

— Natalia Espinosa Dice ‘26