The Contest of the Century

by Geoff A. Dyer

  Prasenjit Duara, an Indian scholar of China now based in Singapore, described the mood of some of the young Chinese nationalists this way: “Day 1: Eat at McDonald’s; Day 2: Throw rocks at McDonald’s; Day 3: Eat at McDonald’s.” There is, he says, “a simultaneous superficiality and depth of nationalist feelings” in modern China. In each of the big nationalist outbursts, the Communist Party has for a moment looked vulnerable, as if the events might spin out of control, but it has then managed quickly to turn off the tap. After a NATO bomb hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, hundreds of Chinese students spent the next few days protesting outside and vandalizing the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. The atmosphere was feverish. Western residents of the city at the time said that for a couple of days they felt under threat if they stepped outside. And then the protests stopped. A Chinese friend of mine who was at university in Beijing at the time recalls turning up for class one morning to be told by a teacher to get on a bus, which dropped all the students off outside the U.S. Embassy. The next day, the bus was there again to take them to the embassy. On the third day, lectures went on as normal.

  The anti-Japan protests in 2005 followed the same path. The week before the big Shanghai demonstration, there was a large protest in Beijing, and the week after, Guangzhou and Shenzhen held demonstrations. Then the movement fizzled, and the students returned to their classes. When we left Shanghai three years later, the cigarette shop on our block still had Japanese characters in the window. Duara’s observation also captures the central ambiguity at the heart of the Li Yang phenomenon, the simultaneous fascination with and distaste for the West. The generation of Chinese who have been through “patriotic education” is the same generation that is exposed to the world through the Internet in ways that their parents could never have dreamed of and is attracted to all the same symbols of American consumerism. A year or so before I left Beijing, a new Apple Store opened, which I must have walked past fifty times. But I never once entered, for the simple reason that there was always a queue outside to get in.

  Yet, at the same time, each cycle of nationalist spasms seems to get a bit bigger and a little more autonomous, further outside the control mechanisms of the state. Nationalist pressure has been an important factor in some of the disputes in the South China Sea, and has become increasingly influential in the argument with Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. In both cases, the populist online pressure found common cause with the sections of the military that want to take a more confrontational approach. As the protest waves become more intense, the leadership finds its room to maneuver more limited. The events that have produced demonstrations in recent years have been relatively minor—a stray bomb, a handful of textbooks, some unruly protests during an Olympics torch relay—yet each managed to create a paroxysm of angst that left the country temporarily off-balance. It begs the question of what might happen in the event of a major international incident—a 9/11-style terror attack, or a genuine confrontation with the Japanese navy in the East China Sea. The raw, popular nationalism does not dictate Chinese foreign policy, but at the very least it makes it hard for the government to back down or make concessions.

  For the U.S. and other Western countries, the broader lesson is that they have to be aware that there will always be this emotional tension in the background of their relations with Beijing, a trauma which has yet to be fully resolved, and which makes its leaders at times hair-trigger sensitive to perceived slights. One of the most difficult tasks for American politicians will be to find a way to engage with the Chinese people over sensitive issues, from political reform to territorial disputes, in a way that does not step on any of these trip wires. At the same time, the U.S. has a responsibility to pressure its ally Japan to, at the very least, refrain from provocative gestures that revive historical tensions. By inflaming South Korea as well as China, such stunts harm not only Japan’s influence in the region, but also that of Washington.

  Chinese liberals argue that it is the political system that nurtures the particular virulence of today’s nationalism. Hard-line views are very much a minority, they suggest, but, because political and historical debate is so curtailed, there is no room for nuance or context, and emotions are easily manipulated. Japan has a nationalist right wing whose views are often toxic, but their impact is diluted and absorbed by a more open political debate. If that liberal view is correct, then it is possible to imagine that, in the long run, political reform might draw some of the poison from Chinese nationalism. The anger of a small minority can multiply in strength under an authoritarian government that does not want to appear weak; but in a more open system, shrill voices find it harder to dominate the debate.

  That is the theory, at least. Maybe a democratic China would have a more comfortable sense of its own identity and place in the world, as liberals and many in America hope. But it is equally possible to imagine a very different scenario, in which a loss of control by the Communist Party leads to even stronger nationalist pressures. The students who have taken part in anti-U.S. or anti-Japanese protests know one basic truth, that this is almost the only way they can safely take part in popular demonstrations. The Communist Party’s most vulnerable flank is at the nationalist, populist right. A party that loudly claims the mantle of national salvation cannot afford to look weak in the face of perceived slights. If the Communist Party’s grip on power ever did start to loosen seriously, it is not too hard to imagine an embattled Chinese leader searching for an anti-America or anti-Japan cause and placing it at the center of his agenda.

  6

  Soft Power

  HARMONIZING THE WORLD

  THE LARGE NEON SCREENS on the corner of New York’s Broadway and Seventh Avenue are among the most visible and prestigious advertising sites in America. The signs are sixty feet high by forty feet wide and are seen by many of the half-million people who daily pass through Times Square. The spaces have been rented by Coca-Cola and by the Prudential insurance company; HSBC had its name in lights for a decade. The new name on the signs is not quite so familiar to most New York tourists: Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, the propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party. As well as renting the neon advertising screen, Xinhua has also taken the top floor of the forty-four-story skyscraper at 1540 Broadway—only a block away from the sumptuous new New York Times building designed by Renzo Piano with silver birch trees in the atrium.

  The financial pressures that are slowly strangling many of the world’s media groups do not appear to be hampering Xinhua. In 2010, the agency opened a new twenty-four-hour English-language news channel called CNC World, which the group’s president, Li Congjun, described as an attempt to “present an international vision with a Chinese perspective.” Beijing has long complained of unfair treatment from what it calls “the Western media.” Officials believe that if the world could just find out more about the reality of China, about its history and progress, then people would think very differently about the country. They want more good news, and if the BBC and CNN will not provide that service for the world, then Xinhua and the other arms of the official Chinese media will.

  A decade ago, China was thought of as an inward-looking, developing country with modest international ambitions, whose leaders cared about little other than the next month’s GDP figures. But it is hard to think in quite the same way about a country that has such grand global ambitions for its media groups. China wants to crack the Western monopoly on news. According to several informed reports, China spent around $8.7 billion in 2011–12 on the overseas operations of just four news organizations—Xinhua, Chinese Central Television (CCTV), the English-language China Daily, and China Radio International. The entire budget for the BBC World Service is around $400 million a year. With big budgets come big goals. Beijing mainly wants to improve China’s image in the world, but it also hopes that Chinese news organizations can loosen the grip that American values of democracy, individualism, and human rights have on the international media business. “While our media empir
es are melting away like the Himalayan glaciers, China’s are expanding,” Orville Schell, the director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, was quoted as saying—in the New York Times.

  Like many of the trappings of modernity, from Maglev trains to the Nobu restaurant chain, soft power has become an obsession in contemporary China. Originally coined by the American academic Joseph Nye, soft power is the idea that the more attractive a country’s culture and society, the more influential it will be. America’s international dominance, so the theory goes, rests not just on its military power or its economic weight but also on the fact that so many other countries around the world have sought to copy its rules, institutions, and way of life. Nye defined soft power as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payment.” In some ways, China takes the basic idea of soft power more seriously than the U.S. The first academic in China to take up the theme was Wang Huning, a scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai, who has since become one of China’s most senior foreign-policy officials and a member of the party’s Politburo. His ideas have been adopted at the top levels of the Chinese leadership. In his keynote speech to the important Communist Party Congress in 2007, Hu Jintao gave the concept his official stamp of approval, telling the audience: “We must enhance culture as part of the soft power of the country.” Whole university departments in China are now devoted to soft power, and the Foreign Ministry has opened a special department to improve the country’s image. There is even a new museum in Beijing celebrating public diplomacy, the art of national image boosting.

  For Beijing, soft power is a tool to present a less threatening image to the world, to massage anxieties caused by the country’s rise. But there is also a hard edge to the soft-power fascination. Some Chinese scholars argue that it is also an essential part of a project for challenging America. Shen Jiru, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, argues that soft power was central to the U.S.’s winning the Cold War, the mass appeal of its popular culture helping to curtail international support for the Soviets. The Soviet Union had been equal to the U.S. for a time, he says, but “lost the whole game due to a flaw in its soft power.” China, he urges, should not make the same mistake. For many of the officials and academics pushing the promotion of Chinese soft power, this is much more than just a PR campaign, but part of a broader struggle for influence and respect. China is taking on the U.S. at its own game in a global cultural contest.

  China’s soft-power push is both a window onto its expanding ambitions and an important emotional crux in the emerging rivalry with the U.S. If the feeling takes root in the U.S. that China is presenting a worldview that will be attractive to large parts of the world, this will add real political edge to the competition. The temptation will grow in the U.S. to elevate the rivalry to a form of ideological contest, with echoes of the Cold War. There are already a few hints of this in official American reactions to the investments China is making in its media sector. “During the Cold War we did a great job in getting America’s message out. After the Berlin Wall fell we said, ‘Okay, fine, enough of that, we are done,’ and unfortunately we are paying a big price for it,” Hillary Clinton told Congress in 2011. “We are in an information war and we are losing that war. Al Jazeera is winning, the Chinese have opened a global multi-language television network, the Russians have opened up an English-language network. I’ve seen it in a few countries, and it is quite instructive.”

  Soft power can come in lots of shapes and sizes. Some academics in China believe that the country should be promoting its model of economic management, particularly to other parts of the developing world, as a way of making the country more influential. A few even suggest that China’s political system could be exported. But most of the discussion about soft power in China has focused on culture and the idea that the best way to make the country seem more attractive to the outside world is through the potential magnetism of Chinese civilization. The big media investments are the most visible element of China’s soft-power project, but beneath the surface there are, in effect, two central ideas about the attractiveness of Chinese culture: an attempt to establish a sort of modern Chinese aesthetic that the rest of the world might find enticing, and an effort to tap into the wisdom of ancient thinkers to flesh out a non-Western worldview. China wants to present itself to the world as a culture that is both new and old.

  ——

  When he was sixteen, Yan Xuetong was sent to work on a farm in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, right near the border with Siberia. It was the height of the Cultural Revolution, and, like many members of his generation of urban youth, he was taken from his home and school and instructed to learn the greater wisdom of a peasant life. It was an unimaginably harsh existence. During the winters, they sometimes had to haul around large sacks through the snow, barefoot. For months, they would go without vegetables. The brutalities of the Cultural Revolution changed young Chinese in different ways. Some never overcame the emotional scars from that time, and suffered an adult life of depression or even suicide. Others developed a toughness and resilience that, in a perverse way, have served them well as society and the economy opened up. For Yan, who was from a family of scholars, the conclusions he drew were more philosophical. Mao Zedong’s mad experiment with enforced anarchy, he decided, had destroyed the country’s ancient ethical tradition of sincerity and replaced it with lying and hypocrisy.

  Nearly four decades later, Yan is one of the most prominent public intellectuals in China and a professor of international relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He has written extensively about American foreign policy and Chinese military strategy. In recent years, however, he has turned to a project that has its roots in his disillusionment during the Cultural Revolution. He is trying to find ways to reconnect with what he sees as China’s ancient ethical traditions, in particular the idea that China and the world should be governed by what he calls “humane authority.” China, he believes, needs to re-establish the sense of morality that used to guide its behavior, both at home and abroad.

  If that sounds a little esoteric, Yan has some fairly robust ideas about why it is a subject worth paying attention to. The quest to recover a Chinese ethical tradition, he believes, is a central part of the soft-power contest that a rising China faces with the U.S. The U.S. and China are in, he says, a “race for global supremacy,” and an integral part of that competition will be a “battle for the hearts and minds” of people around the world, which will “determine who eventually prevails.” The search back into China’s philosophical traditions is not just an academic exercise, but part of a broader effort to present a vision of China and Chinese-inspired ideas that can challenge American modernity. “America’s ideology is still much more influential around the world than China’s,” he told me. And he wants that to change.

  These are interesting times in China’s universities. After three decades during which Chinese society kept its head down and concentrated on getting ahead, it is starting to come up for air. Among some Chinese intellectuals, there is a hankering to generate new ideas about how global society is organized, to provide Chinese solutions to the world’s problems. In a similar vein to Yan Xuetong, Zhao Tingyang at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has become a star of the Beijing intellectual scene with a series of works about the concept of tianxia—literally, “all under heaven”—another idea from the classical philosophy that attempts to define a vision of international harmony. Just as the Chinese authorities have embraced soft power to present a more positive image to the world, some Chinese intellectuals are brimming with optimism about the lessons that Chinese ideas can present to the world.

  One of the striking features of the way China has embraced soft power is the suggestion that China now sees its values and culture as exportable. China and the U.S. have one very powerful thing in common, a sense of exceptionalism, the deeply felt belief in the superiority of their cultures and societies. American exceptional
ism has an evangelical quality, the idea that its institutions and values are by their nature universal and should be copied by others; in recent times however, Chinese culture has been presented as being more exclusive. Chinese have tended to believe that their strengths were tied up in a history and set of values that are unique to China and which cannot be easily adopted by outsiders—at least by those countries outside the traditional Sinocentric world of East Asia. But the soft-power push indicates the beginning of a very different sort of attitude to Chineseness, a confidence that China now represents something that can be introduced in other countries, that it has things to teach the rest of the world. Amid official rhetoric about the “revival” or the “rejuvenation” of China, which has been given new impetus under Xi Jinping, China is reconnecting with an older tradition when it considered itself a natural cultural magnet for the world that surrounded it. “The Chinese have always prided themselves on being civilized as bearers of universal ideals,” Wang Gungwu, the doyen of overseas Chinese historians, has written. China is dabbling with its own ideas of universal values.

  “Five years ago, no one talked about this. People said it was crazy to talk about these sorts of things, that only our grandchildren might have to address these sorts of issues,” Yan told me. “But when you are the biggest power in the world, you have to provide leadership. The new leaders that are taking over in China now, they will face a debate about future strategy and how we use power that the leaders of the past two decades did not.”