Page 2 of
2 BOOK
REVIEW The uses and
limits of 'soft power' Charm
Offensive by Joshua
Kurlantzick
19th century,
as a rising power China began to reconsider the
world system it had accepted when it was weaker"
(p 23).
Because China's growth plays on US
economic and political insecurities, many
contemporary books on China's rise overemphasize
the country's real capabilities. The risks China's
government must navigate as
well as the difficulties inherent in following
through on the explicit policy commitments and
investments promised by Beijing's soft-power
strategy could hamstring China's soft power.
Kurlantzick understands that China may be
overextending itself in its attempt to fill every
gap the United States' diminishing soft power is
leaving open:
Still a developing country, China
could overplay its hand, making promises to
other nations that it cannot fulfill. China's
diplomatic style of signing many agreements
during foreign visits by its top leaders earns
it considerable initial goodwill and positive
media coverage. But often the agreements are
merely letters of intent.
In Latin
America and Asia, when officials from local
boards of trade and investment follow up, they
sometimes find that Chinese officials had laid
no groundwork to put these letters into
practice" (pp 98-99).
While far from
conclusive, Kurlantzick's point is important:
China is growing, but beyond its eastern coastal
cities much of the country still lives in Third
World conditions, with a growing income and
lifestyle gap suggesting that the best use of
China's soft power is within its own borders.
Whether China's leadership will be able to
pull off its goals of staying in power (to remind
us of this, Kurlantzick quotes Deng's statement
that the country must not "lose its
dictatorship"), building the vitality of the
domestic economy, governing a country of
increasingly disparate economic conditions, and
flowing into the soft-power space vacated by the
US remains to be seen.
While Beijing's
political leaders clearly understand the role soft
power directed toward their countrymen should
play, Kurlantzick can be added to the growing list
of scholars who worry that the country seems more
interested in advocating nationalism as a way of
directing its frustration and angst over ongoing
economic dissonance between the coast and the
inner provinces than in encouraging political
reform.
Born of necessity, Beijing's
emphasis on internal nationalism is essential to
preventing the country from focusing on the
profound disconnect between the mandates of
Marxism and the opportunities of capitalism:
Recognizing that communism held little appeal
in a nation urging its citizens to get rich as
quickly as possible, the post-Tiananmen
leadership, eventually headed by president Jiang
Zemin, needed to offer a substitute ideology to
keep the population united.
What they came
up with, as the China expert Jasper Becker
describes, was a kind of updated nationalism. This
drew upon China's history of patriotism -
nationalism had played a role in the
early-20th-century revolutions that eventually
brought Chiang Kai-shek to power (p 23). When
finished with Kurlantzick's book, the reader
inevitably feels that the questions asked and
issues raised have as much, or perhaps more, to do
with the United States' decline in soft power than
the nascent rise of China's soft power. After
September 11, 2001, the US had its attention
understandably focused on the threat of terrorism
rather than on the implications of turning a blind
eye toward China, or the shortcomings of
unfettered US-led economic globalization.
But even had US focus on the "global war
on terror" been effective, judicious and
constructive, the country would have vacated some
areas where it was exercising its soft power,
which would have created openings into which China
could squeeze. That the US so badly mismanaged the
post-September 11 world has, among other things,
clearly increased China's ability to project
itself around the world.
The exercise to
understand China's foreign policy in its
yet-infant stages is certainly important, but
Kurlantzick forcefully reminds us that China is
emphasizing soft-power strategies because it sees
this as the United States' weak point: "In Chinese
publications, Wang Jisi, one of China's elite
intellectuals, noted that America's weakness was
its soft power, not its hard power. And after the
Iraq war began in 2003, the scholar Biwu Zhang
found, Chinese authors agreed that America had
suffered 'a serious setback in terms of soft
power'" (pp 32-33).
This book is about two
things: the rise in China's utilization of its
growing soft power, but also a vacuum of soft
power and influence an emasculated United States
is leaving. While many authors would gravitate
toward only one of these two aspects, Kurlantzick
is able to weave both together, and we are the
better because of his ability to do so.
Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power
Is Transforming the World by Joshua
Kurlantzick. Yale University Press, May 28, 2007.
ISBN-13: 978-0300117035. Price US$26, 320 pages
(hardcover).
Benjamin A Shobert
is the managing director of Teleos Inc
(www.teleos-inc.com), a consulting firm dedicated
to helping Asian businesses bring innovative
technologies into the North American market.
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