作者：Martha Bayles 来源：American Interest
Is China’s brand of
coercive “soft power” a contradiction in terms? A new edited volume helps cut
through the morass.
hen
opening Soft Power With Chinese Characteristics, a timely new
volume that arrives amid a flood of COVID-19-fueled disinformation, it is
important to notice the irony embedded in the title. The phrase “with Chinese
characteristics” is used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) whenever it
borrows a Western idea or practice to utilize for its own purposes. For example,
in the early 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping was introducing market forces into
China’s dead-in-the-water planned economy, the new system was not described as
“capitalism”—that term would have conceded far too much ground to the enemies
of socialism. Rather it was dubbed “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
This touch
of Newspeak did not bother Deng’s free-market champions in the West; they knew
what Deng meant, and many a capitalist smiled knowingly at his motto: “It
doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white; if it catches mice, it’s a good
cat.” But the phrase “with Chinese characteristics” is no longer so benign. For
Deng, it was a way to camouflage the fact that he was moving the Chinese
economy in the direction of capitalism. For today’s Communist rulers, by
contrast, it is a way to camouflage policies that are profoundly
anti-democratic.
As explained
by media scholar Zhan Zhang, one of 20 academic contributors to this volume,
the Chinese meanings of “Western political language” (words like “democracy,”
“freedom,” “equality,” “justice,” and the “rule of law”) “differ significantly
from the meanings as understood in the West.” For example, “the basic European
respect for individual rights and freedom is not on the individual level in the
Chinese value system, but instead on the social level. This means that freedom
is not about one’s individual freedom, but is rather a collective freedom for
the group and society.”
It is
tempting to ask Zhang if she has ever heard of George Orwell. To be fair, she
is explaining the CCP point of view, not defending it. But the ghost of Orwell
hangs over this volume, because as many of the contributors make clear, what
the CCP means by “soft power with Chinese characteristics” is the exact
opposite of what political scientist Joseph Nye meant when he coined the term
back in 1990. And it doesn’t help that the term itself tends to get lost in a
semantic fog.
Over
the years, Nye has repeated the definition of soft power so often, he can
doubtless do it in his sleep. Here is an example from an essay he wrote in
2017: “Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes one prefers,
and . . . soft power is the ability to affect others by attraction and persuasion rather
than just coercion and payment.” In the words of
Georgia Tech researcher Dalton Lin and University of Taiwan political scientist
Yun-han Chu, the CCP’s pretense of using “persuasion” to get Taiwan to
surrender its independence “turns the soft power logic on its head and blurs
the line between attraction and coercion.”
In addition
to exposing the Orwellian aura of “soft power with Chinese characteristics,”
this volume reveals and critiques the larger information strategy of the CCP.
The first chapter, by the distinguished scholar and Hoover Institution fellow
Suisheng Zhao, delves into the CCP’s recently stepped-up effort to construct
and propagate a “narrative” intended to remind the world of China’s “century of
humiliation,” reassure it about China’s peaceful rise, and (most important)
ready it for the peaceful decline of the West, especially
America. With apologies to Zhao, and mindful that “narrative” is one of the
great weasel words of our time, I offer here my own synthesis:
To
begin with the moral of the story: The West is solely responsible for China not
being the world hegemon it so richly deserves to be. For 5,000 years before the
devastation wrought by the British and European colonial powers, the Middle
Kingdom and its constellation of loyal vassal states had been an island of
perpetual peace, political virtue, and social harmony—in stunning contrast to
the rest of the world, in which human life was nasty, brutish, and short.
But
then, toward the end of the fourth millennium, disaster struck in the form of
barbaric Western invaders who, insanely envious of China’s shining
civilization, laid waste to it in an orgy of violence, lust, and greed. This
was by far the worst event in history, because (let’s face it) the Chinese
people are humanity’s finest flower, and as such, they had the farthest to
fall.
But
the Mandate of Heaven cannot be destroyed. So, after the “century of
humiliation” had passed, a glorious Leader appeared, and led the Chinese people
to redemption in the form of a glorious Revolution, led by a glorious Party
which has struggled unceasingly to raise the Chinese people from the ashes of
Western-imposed misery. This mighty task has taken many decades, so
enormous was the damage. But thanks to the unerring wisdom of the Revolution’s
Founding Leader and his glorious Successors, especially the Present Leader who
has graciously agreed to remain Emperor—er, General Secretary—for life, the
Chinese people are now ready to reclaim their inheritance as the greatest and
most civilized race on the planet. And because China also commands the planet’s
greatest and most advanced technology, its new civilization is destined to
subsume not just Asia but the entire world.
Zhao is too
serious a scholar to present the CCP narrative in this fanciful way. What he
does do is highlight the contrast between the Party’s “reconstruction of the
benign Chinese world order,” blessed with tianxia (unity under
heaven) and wangdo (royal virtue), and its actual behavior,
which is that of a sovereign state in a “social Darwinian world” of cutthroat
competition among sovereign states. He quotes with approval the verdict of
seasoned China scholar June Teufel Dreyer: “Supporters of the revival of tianxia as
a model for today’s world are essentially misrepresenting the past to
reconfigure the future, distorting it to advance a political agenda that is at
best disingenuous and at worst dangerous.”
It may be
objected that the narrative of a “benign Chinese world order” cannot work as
soft power, because it is not likely to attract or persuade anyone who does not
belong to the implied master race of Han Chinese. Nor, I hasten to add, is it
likely to appeal to the millions of ethnic Chinese both inside and outside
China, who may feel patriotic toward their homeland but who know better than to
believe that it ever was, or will be, a paradise on earth. As for the “century
of humiliation,” the exploitation and brutality of the Western imperial powers
have been exhaustively chronicled, not least by Western historians working
under conditions of academic freedom that have almost never existed in China.
According to
Nye’s definition, the two aspects of power that are “hard” are coercion
(military force) and payment (economic clout). In 2007 Walter Russell Mead
attempted to clarify the concept of hard power by distinguishing between the
military aspect, which he called “sharp power,” and the economic aspect, which
he called “sticky power.” The metaphors were apt, but Mead’s new terminology
never caught on.
In 2017
there was another attempt to elaborate on Nye’s concept: a timely report from
the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) entitled Sharp Power: Rising Authoritarian Influence,
in which Chris Walker and Jessica Ludwig of NED, along with four regional
experts, offer detailed analyses of how the CCP (and the Kremlin) have been
using political pressure and economic clout to “pierce, penetrate, and
perforate the political and information environments” in four fragile
democracies: Argentina, Peru, Poland, and Slovakia. This new definition of
“sharp power” is one that deserves to catch on.
Still, the
semantic fog surrounding these terms is vexing to most people, which is why the
CCP can get away with calling its sharp power “soft.” I have never been a fan
of the term “soft power,” because during the 1990s, the inevitable connotations
of the word “soft”—weakness, frilliness, and (dare I say it?)
unmanliness—contributed to the decline of U.S. government support for a host of
activities under the heading of public diplomacy. Yet these activities, which
range from cultural programs to educational exchanges, foreign-language news
media to assistance with internet access, are not mere frills. If they were,
then every authoritarian regime in history would not have copied them as a way
to deliver their Big Lies in packages that mimic the more truthful ones coming
from the United States.
To readers
whose hackles rise at the very thought of a government being truthful, I
willingly admit that every government tells lies. But not every government
tells lies—or gets away with telling lies—to the same extent. When
President Trump claims that hydroxychloroquine, a common
treatment for malaria, is “a strong drug” that “we ought to try” against
Covid-19, there is an outcry in the press and an immediate correction from the
nation’s leading public health official, Dr. Anthony Fauci. When a spokesman
for the Chinese Foreign Ministry insinuates that the virus was
introduced into Wuhan by U.S. Army soldiers visiting in October, the rumor floods through every possible
channel of state-controlled media, and any “troublemaker” who dares to object
is swiftly and ruthlessly silenced. At the moment, there is a troubling
resemblance between the misinformation emanating from the White House and the
disinformation being propagated by the CCP. But if the two governments were
really the same, then the resemblance would be normal and we would not find it
troubling!
This is not
to suggest that the U.S. government has never used propaganda. In the lead-up
to America’s entry into World War I, both the British and the American
governments fabricated reports of hideous atrocities committed by the evil
“Hun,” then pressured the fledgling film studios to incorporate these
fabrications into movies to help shake the American public out of its
isolationism. This may have worked at the time, but by the 1930s, both London
and Washington realized how much damage their hate propaganda had done. Not
only did it inspire Hitler and Goebbels, it also fostered incredulity toward
early reports of Nazi atrocities.
This realization
led to a change of heart. There was plenty of lying and spying during World War
II and the Cold War, but when it came to communicating with large populations
in foreign countries, both Britain and America took the relative high road of
refusing to spread blatant falsehoods. Instead, they developed the craft of
public diplomacy, defined as any and all efforts to attract and persuade others
without resorting to gross deception. Pitted against the aggressive propaganda
of the Third Reich and the Soviet Communist Party, this approach was decidedly
asymmetrical. But it worked.
Can
this (relatively) truthful approach succeed in today’s era of digitally
enhanced authoritarianism? Since 2008, when the Russian Federation under
President Putin began the first of three incursions into neighboring countries,
the Kremlin opened what the RAND corporation calls “a firehose of falsehood.” That
firehose has two streams, one directed outward and the other inward. The
outward-directed stream seeks to pollute the global information space with
disinformation, conspiracy theories, and paranoid fantasies in the hope of
sowing division and cynicism among the citizens of liberal democracies. The
inward-directed stream pushes a “narrative” in which every tragic occurrence in
Russian history is blamed on the West, and only the current Great Leader can
restore the nation’s glory.
Clearly,
this Russian “narrative” resembles the Chinese one. Both are intended to beat back
the “thuggish domination” of Western “discourse hegemony.” This language,
quoted in the chapter by Daniel C. Lynch, a professor of Asian and
International Studies at Hong Kong University, was taken from a source at Wuhan
University’s Institute of Marxism. But it could just as well have been taken
from a Russian source, because both authoritarian “narratives” share a common
ancestor: Soviet Communism.
As noted by
co-editor Ying Zhu in her riveting chapter about the Chinese film industry, the
Soviets were teaching propaganda to the Chinese 20 years before Mao’s
Revolution. In 1928 the Kuomintang (KMT) enlisted the aid of a Bolshevik expert
in mounting an information offensive against its political rivals, one of which
was the Communist Party. As Zhu writes, “the KMT’s active political
intervention in [China’s] cultural affairs shared similar tenets and pedigree
with its archenemy, the CCP; both were trained by the Soviets.”
(emphasis added).
Authoritarian
propaganda is expensive. In a chapter entitled “The Ironies of Soft Power
Projection,” co-editor Stanley Rosen, a veteran China expert at the University
of Southern California, points to the contrast between the CCP’s huge
investment in “sharp power,” over $10 billion a year, and the U.S. government’s
minimal support of public diplomacy. Rosen also observes that, while U.S.
investment in soft power has been in decline since the end of the Cold War,
that decline has accelerated under the current administration: “What Trump has
done is to move from the American government’s benign neglect to active
sabotage of soft power.”
Rosen is not
unduly worried about this, because American soft power has many sources besides
the government. Indeed, foreign attitudes toward America are largely shaped by
nonstate actors of every stripe, from corporations to universities, foundations
to small businesses, NGOs to QUANGOS (quasi-autonomous non-governmental
organizations). Many of these nonstate actors are connected to the government
in some way. But even congressionally funded QUANGOs like Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty and the National Endowment for Democracy do not operate as
direct instruments of the state. As for the myriad contractors that partner
with government agencies, they often proceed (for good and ill) with minimal
oversight.
Because of
the major role played by non-state and quasi-state actors, some observers argue
that the U.S. government should quit investing in soft power altogether. I
disagree, because there are some things only the government can do, such as support
responsible foreign-language news reporting in countries where the media are
censored or corrupt; convey a fuller picture of American society, culture, and
institutions than is conveyed by commercialized popular culture; and (not
least) engage in the nearly lost art of explaining, defending, and seeking
support for U.S. policies in a way that involves listening as well as
lecturing.
To argue
that the U.S. government should support such activities is not to argue that it
needs to match the $10 billion budget of the CCP’s sharp power offensive.
Washington has never spent that kind of money on public diplomacy. Back in
1981, when President Reagan was gearing up for the final charge against the
Soviet Union, the Kremlin was spending $2.2 billion on overseas propaganda, as
opposed to the $480 million budget of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). Under
Reagan the USIA received a major infusion of cash, peaking at $881 million in
1986. But even that fell short of the billions being spent by the faltering USSR.
Speaking of
billions, there is one topic upon which all these authors agree: “Beijing is
using the strongest instrument in its soft-power toolbox: money.” China scholar
David Shambaugh (not a contributor) wrote these words back in 2015, when Xi and other Chinese
leaders had been traveling to “more than 50 countries . . . [to] sign huge
trade and investment deals, extend generous loans, and dole out hefty aid packages.”
The reader might ask what is wrong with that, since as Shambaugh continues:
“Major powers always try to use their financial assets to buy influence and
shape the actions of others; in this regard, China is no different.”
But here the
semantic fog thickens, because while Nye classifies payment, along with
coercion, as hard power, that hardly resolves the matter.
Where do we draw the line between a nation using its
economic clout to do legitimate business overseas, and the same nation using
its clout to bend a resistant population to its will? At present, the only
way to draw this line is on a case-by-case basis, as the aforementioned NED
report on sharp power does so well.
As it
happens, the same case-by-case approach is taken by several of the authors
in Soft Power With Chinese Characteristics. Not all use the term
“sharp power,” and some use “soft power” in a way that suggests either a lack
of knowledge or a studied indifference regarding the concept’s original
meaning. But in most cases, what these authors’ careful analyses of the CCP’s
methods in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and East Asia reveal a consistent
pattern of “soft power” being used as camouflage to cover the use of China’s
massive economic clout in ways that are patently manipulative, deceptive, and
coercive. In an era when many China scholars are playing it safe by letting
their research chill for several hours in the ideological refrigerator before
serving it up to the reader, it is refreshing to find such an impressive array
of experts willing to tell it like it is.
These
include the aforementioned Daniel C. Lynch, who probes the shaky condition of
the Chinese economy and asks whether it portends a shift to unabashed hard
power; Australian scholar Wanning Sun, who reveals the CCP’s growing control of
diasporic Chinese-language media; Latin American expert R. Evan Ellis, who
takes a hard look at Chinese sharp power in Latin America; historian Antonio
Fiori, who together with Stanley Rosen takes an equally sobering look at the
CCP’s activities in Africa; Taiwanese experts Dalton Lin and Yun-han Chu, who
mount a scathing critique of how the pretense of soft power is used to
camouflage the CCP’s coercive tactics in Taiwan; Hong Kong scholar David Zweig,
who gives a quietly devastating account of Hong Kong’s struggle to retain its
autonomy; and finally, a trio of authors: Yun-han Chu and Min-hua Huang
(in Taiwan) and Jie Lu (in Beijing), who painstakingly assess the delicate
balancing required by East Asian countries torn between China’s economic power
and America’s democratic ideals.
Speaking of
democratic ideals, it is hard to plow through this long, complicated, yet
invaluable book without asking yourself how the story will end. By “story” I
mean not the fabricated “narrative” being propagated by the CCP, but the true
history of this extraordinary civilization as it collided with modernity, was
engulfed by it, and then sought to engulf it in return. That true history is
only partly written, because of all the crimes committed by the CCP, the
greatest is its deliberate erasure of the past. That is why I admire writers
like Rowena Xiaoqing He, whose 2014 book Tiananmen Exiles captures
with a fine brush the subjective experiences of three pro-democracy activists
who came of age amid that heroic attempt to expand the liberties that blossomed
so briefly in the years following Deng’s economic reforms. As a member of that
generation, she recalls how difficult remembering can be:
Thoughts,
feelings, and fragments needed to be understood and woven together. I compare
it to the unfolding of a traditional Chinese water-and-ink painting. When you
first unfold the picture, you will see only pieces of water and ink here and
there. It is hard to tell where the sky is, which part is water, which is
cloud, which is stone, and which are the bushes. Not until you unfold the
entire picture will you discover the artistic meaning.
The phrase
“hearts and minds” is a dreadful cliché, but it is relevant here, because while
the truth of recent Chinese history lives on in the hearts of those who
witnessed it, they are getting older, and the young are being blindfolded by
the regime. All the more vital, then to produce bold, careful, scholarship like
this, which is capable of clarifying the mind even when the heart is muddied by
lies.
Appeared in: Volume 15, Number 5 | Published on:
March 30, 2020
Martha Bayles teaches humanities at Boston College
and is the author of Through a Screen Darkly: Popular Culture, Public
Diplomacy, and America’s Image Abroad (Yale University Press, 2014).
She is a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at
the University of Virginia, and at the Hudson Institute in Washington. She is
also a contributing editor at The American Interest.
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来源时间：2020/4/18 发布时间：2020/4/18
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