China's soft power; Dwight H. Perkins reviews Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power is Transforming the World.
by Perkins, Dwight H.
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Joshua Kurlantzick, who has reported from Asia for journals such as US News and World Report and The Economist, focuses his book, Charm Offensive, on a broad array of China's activities beyond its borders. The book emphasizes what Kurlantznick calls China's "soft power," but he uses the term differently from how Joseph Nye, the originator of the term, defines it. Nye uses the term to refer to the influence that nations exert beyond their borders through everything from their music and cinema to their role as models of freedom and democratic governance. On the other hand, economic and military power represent "hard power."
By contrast, Kurlantzick includes China's trade and overseas investment in his definition of soft power. Furthermore, while much of the United States' soft power comes from the activities of private individuals and media portrayals of the nature of US society, this book is focused on Chinese government activities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As Kurlantzick points out, the United States has squandered much of its soft power through its misguided policies in the Middle East and its penchant for unilateralism, while Chinese influence has steadily grown.
But for what purpose is China using its charm offensive? The days when China's interests beyond its borders focused on revolutionary movements against established governments are long gone. Nor in any immediate sense is China threatened by possible military attack from a superpower, as it was in the 1970s from the USSR or in the 1960s from US military involvement in Vietnam. China's response to those perceived threats was not to expand its diplomatic efforts and win friends around the world. Instead, China built a "people's militia" designed to fight a guerilla war on an unprecedented scale, and it invested vast sums to move industry into its mountainous interior where it might resist potential air attacks.
China's current charm offensive focuses on winning friends abroad to achieve several concrete objectives. Its top objective, after securing its territory from external attack, is to isolate Taiwan and eventually achieve the island's political reintegration with the Chinese mainland. China relies on a variety of economic and diplomatic efforts to isolate Taiwan. In Africa and Latin America, China holds out the prospects of investment, foreign aid, and its large domestic market. Taiwan also offers foreign aid and technical assistance to those who maintain diplomatic ties with it, but it has nothing comparable to the lure of the booming Chinese mainland market.
Beyond Taiwan, China's overseas objectives involve a major economic and diplomatic effort to secure natural resources like oil and copper for its booming economy. This involves everything from securing long-term contracts with resource suppliers to directly investing in and owning these suppliers. The diplomatic component, among other actions, involves befriending resource-rich nations that the United States and others see as pariahs. With its policy of "non-interference" in the domestic affairs of other nations, China counters efforts by the United States and others to isolate countries such as Sudan, Iran, and Zimbabwe. China also cultivates friendships with nations such as Venezuela that currently have unfriendly relations with the United States, but in doing so, it is careful not to appear to divert oil supplies from the US market. Relations with developing countries, as China's low-key policy toward Venezuela indicates, do not trump China's high priority needs to avoid military confrontation and keep the US market open to Chinese exports.
A third objective of the charm offensive is to gradually supplant the United States and Japan as major influences around China's borders. Kurlantzick rightly points out the importance of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, through which China has greatly strengthened its relations with the Central Asian republics that were formerly part of the USSR. His discussion of Chinese influence in Burma, however, may be an even better example of China's success in establishing itself as the dominant player around its borders. The Burma policies of the United States and much of Europe, well-intentioned as they may be, have had the effect of removing most US and European influence from Burma for nearly two decades. As a result, China has had the field largely to itself. Because of China's massive business and diplomatic presence, Burma is not at all isolated in areas where it wants to be open, including the economy. However, it is isolated in precisely those areas where it is happy to eschew foreign contact, notably those of human rights and democratization.
Kurlantznick pays special attention to China's warm relations with Thailand. In its dealings with Thailand, according to Kurlantznick, one sees the full range of Chinese soft power. Thai legislators are regularly invited for tours of China, while the Confucius Institute (China's equivalent of the German Goethe-Institute or the US Information Agency) runs courses in Chinese for Thais. Moreover, overseas Chinese in Thailand--who compose most of the Thai business community and a large portion of the Bangkok population--are often courted to invest in China.
This book does a good job of describing the full range of China's efforts to win friends and gain influence overseas, as it does with Thailand. It is less effective, however, in putting these activities in a more complete context. Thailand, for example, is the one country in Southeast Asia where the ethnic Chinese minority is fully integrated into local society. Thailand also has a nearly two centuries-old policy of balancing foreign powers against each other. In the past, these powers were Britain and France, while today they are the United States and China. The charm offensive has helped China's cause, but, in my opinion, is not the main force behind the strengthening Thai-Chinese relationship.
Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, China's relationship with local Chinese minorities can be a mixed blessing. In Malaysia and Indonesia, politicians sometimes play on the Malay population's fear and dislike of the Chinese minority. Vietnam today has "friendly" relations with China. Yet its history, from a local point of view, is mostly a story of a thousand years of Chinese rule, followed by achieved independence and periodic wars to preserve it; the most recent war of that type was fought in 1979. Kurlantznick does not ignore this fact, but he often depicts the charm offensive in unqualified form and then presents the caveats much later.
Chinese advances abroad, however, are as much a product of US missteps as they are of Chinese accomplishments. For all of China's interests in acquiring natural resources and strengthening ties to its neighbors, dealing directly with the United States in a wide range of areas is China's top foreign policy priority. It is no accident that the current foreign minister and his predecessor had both first been ambassadors to the United States. As Kurlantzick points out, China's successes in weakening US positions around the world are often a direct result of mistakes by the US, ranging from unilateralism to its failure to even try to understand Middle Eastern societies on their own terms. I happen to agree with his generally very negative view of recent US foreign policy, but I doubt that non-partisan readers will find this a balanced critique. Yet his proposed changes to US foreign policy, which range from emphasizing multilateralism over unilateralism to rebuilding the US public diplomacy apparatus, are unlikely to be seen as controversial, except perhaps in neo-conservative circles.
While the points made in this book are not always argued as rigorously as one might hope, this is still the first book to describe in some depth the full range of China's efforts to gain friends and exert influence on the rest of the world. Its descriptions and analyses are readily accessible to the general reader with interest in foreign policy, and specialists will learn from it as well.
DWIGHT H. PERKINS is the Harold Hitchings Burbank Research Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power is Transforming the World is by Joshua Kurlantznick (Yale University Press, 2007).
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