The Peaceful History of Chinese Expansion

Earlier this week Stephen Walt had a guest post from Yuan-kang Wang on his blog taking issue with the ‘official version’ of historical China’s peaceful nature that feeds into the narrative of ‘peaceful rise’

As you might expect on a realist’s blog the message is not the uniqueness of Chinese history but how much it shares with the history of other states.  Wang takes issue with three claims.

Myth 1: China did not expand when it was strong.

Myth 2: The Seven Voyages of Zheng He demonstrates the peaceful nature of Chinese power.

Myth 3: The Great Wall of China symbolizes a nation preoccupied with defense.

In each case he argues that the ‘official version’ leaves out the violent bits of the history.   Well worth a read.

British Council Kicks Confucius Institutes

Earlier in the week the International Herald Tribune carried an article discussing concerns over the effects of Confucius Institutes on discussion of China in the universities that host them.   The story ends with a nice paragraph

Bruce Cumings, a tenured historian at the University of Chicago who signed a petition protesting the Confucius Institute there, said that although he is on the board of the university’s East Asian study center, he heard nothing about the institute “until the day it was opened.” But such a low-profile approach, he said, is only possible while China itself remains calm. The network of institutes “are time bombs awaiting the next Tiananmen,” he said.

What really caught my attention were some quotes from the Chief Executive of the British Council, Martin Davidson where he

 says that the comparison, often made by Confucius Institute defenders, between his organization…and the Chinese effort, only goes so far. “We are a stand-alone organization operating out of our own premises. They are being embedded in university campuses,” he said in an interview. “The real question has to be one of independence. Are we seen as simply representing the views of the government? Or is there a degree of separation?”

The story makes the point that western cultural relations organizations aren’t based on university camputes

And according to Mr. Davidson, none adopt the same homogenous approach to their native cultures found in Confucius Institutes. “No one would regard Zadie Smith or Grayson Perry as someone controlled by the British Council,” he said.

“The Chinese are very clear on what they are trying to achieve,” said Mr. Davidson. “They want to change the perception of China — to combat negative propaganda with positive propaganda. And they use the word ‘propaganda’ in Chinese. But I doubt they have to say, ‘We’ll only give you this money if you never criticize China.’ The danger is more of self-censorship — which is a very subtle thing,” Mr. Davidson said.

The full story is here

Hu Jintao and Cultural Construction in China

The journal of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party recently published a speech by Hu Jintao on the development of China’s socialist culture, its cultural industries and its ‘cultural soft power’.  There’s a translation here – whatever the changes in China Communist Party rhetoric hasn’t changed: ‘we must implement the Party’s mass line’ etc.   Stephen Walt characterizes this as the party’s war on Harry Potter.  Part of this is the apparent internal threat implied by foreign culture but also the damage to China’s international position by its own lack of cultural industries that can compete.  Reading Hu’s speech the biggest problem seems to be the mismatch between the economic development of contemporary China and its cultural development (read legitimation of rule by the Party.

This emphasis on socialist culture is seen to be of the factors behind the current clampdown on  entertainment culture to accompany the assault on political dissent.  The government has ordered TV stations to reduce the amount of entertainment programming that they show and to encourage socialist values.  Getting rid of programmes like Super Girl is equivalent to banning X Factor in the UK (insert name of mega popular programme where you live.)

I think that notwithstanding its controls on media and the ‘great firewall of China’ the Communist Party is overestimating its ability to shape Chinese culture.  The history of  20th century ideologically driven regimes (and propaganda more broadly) shows that entertainment is a persistent problem because in general  people would prefer to be entertained than educated.  The Nazis, The Soviets, The Saudis (and Lord Reith of the BBC) were all forced to modify their cultural offerings by the fact of competition with foreign broadcasters.  In each case the direction of movement was towards more entertainment in an effort to hold on to their audiences regardless of restrictions on reception of foreign broadcasts.

The point has sometimes been made that the ‘great firewall of China’ is not a massive obstacle to determined netizens but relatively few people are motivated to overcome the obstacle.  You wonder whether taking away entertainment programming will provide a stronger incentive to look for foreign material or for Chinese citizens to make their own.  It will be interesting to see how long it is before Super Girl’s younger sister returns to the screen.

The Public Diplomacy Challenge for Rising Powers

There’s quite an active debate in China about soft power and the public diplomacy requirements of being a rising power (eg Ding 2008) so I was really interested by this New York Times story about negative regional reactions to the rise of Brazil.  Brazil is seen, in some quarters at least, as using its financial resources to finance infrastructure projects that threaten national sovereignty in Argentina, Bolivia. Guyana, Peru.  The article quotes a Bolivian politician: ‘just as China consolidates regional hegemony in Asia, Brazil wants to do the same in Latin America.’  There’s scope for an interesting comparative study here.

I’ve always  liked Choucri and North’s (1975) idea that rising powers exert ‘lateral pressure’ . Economic and demographic growth generates a search for resources and opportunities, which in turn create new political interests.  Economic growth provides new resources for military spending with the effect that the frictions over investments and access and resources become security issues. For the neighbours the combination of a pattern of conflicts combined with expanding military resources mark the rising power as a problem.  What I like about lateral pressure is the implication that it is a natural consequence of growth rather than something that is planned.   The implication of this is that the process of an ‘antagonizing’ is piecemeal.  It’s not something that governments plan to do and may derive from actions that are nothing to do with government.  Choucri and North based their model of conflict on the period before 1914 and I think that in thinking about the current international system this is an interesting period to keep in mind with its combination of rising powers and popular nationalism mediated through interacting national media systems that tended to magnify international issues (eg Hale 1940, 1971)

Rising powers tend find it difficult to recognize their impact on their neighbours and hence to manage the situation diplomatically.  One source of this is the conviction that what’s good for  them is also for the neighbours.  The kind of infrastructure projects discussed in the NYT article are good for some of the people in the neighbouring states but also create losers and opponents who can then harness the power of nationalism against the project.   Where the exuberance of growth is coupled with a sense of grievance or entitlement then the propensity to overlook or overreact to negative reactions is reinforced.   In the Brazil case some of these conflicts are more internal to the neighbouring states but still have an impact on international relationships.

From a public diplomacy( and a broader diplomatic)  perspective rising powers need to understand that negative reactions are not just about misperceptions or a sense of a military threat.  These reactions are rooted in objective changes generated by the process of growth which need to be managed regardless of the rights and wrongs of the situation

Choucri, N., and R.C. North (1975) Nations in Conflict: National Growth and International Violence. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman & Co.

Ding, S. (2008) The Dragon’s Hidden Wings: How China Rises with Its Soft Power. Lexington Books.

Hale, O.J. (1940) Publicity and Diplomacy. New York: Appleton Century.

Hale, O.J. (1971) Germany and the Diplomatic Revolution: a Study in Diplomacy and the Press, 1904-1906. Octagon Books.

More on Chinese Public Diplomacy and Soft Power

My colleague Gary Rawnsley was asked to prepare a statement on Chinese public diplomacy activities  for the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission he’s posted the text on his blog here.

Shanthi Kalathil at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown has just put out a paper reconsidering the state of Chinese soft power.

Li Zhang on the Media and EU China-Relations

The latest volume  in Palgrave’s excellent International Political Communication series edited by Phil Seib has just hit the shops it’s News Media and EU China Relations by Li Zhang, who’s now at the University of Nottingham. The book is based on her PhD supervised by yours truly so it definitely deserves some promotion.

This is a really ambitious piece of work that deserves attention beyond the people working on EU-China relations (of whom there are a surprising number because the EU funds them to work on it!).  The book traces the evolution of Chinese media coverage of the EU and the evolution of coverage of China in The International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times and The Economist over the period since 1989.   Previous studies have shown that these are outlets that are widely read in the EU policy community. The content analysis shows how the coverage of China has expanded and transformed over the intervening period.  In 1989 China was a political story by the middle of the last decade it was an economic story.  This is not to say that political and human rights stories disappeared they just lost their salience.   This is an interesting story in itself but the study ties the evolution of the media coverage to the development of EU policy towards China.  Interviews with policy makers testify to the importance of  the media as an input into the policy process while interviews with UK, US and Chinese journalists provide insight into the factors that have shaped coverage. (There’s some interesting material on evolution of Xinhua news agency).  The evidence provided here suggests that the causal direction runs from the media coverage to policy rather than the other way round.

If you are interested in China’s image or media impact on foreign policy there is a lot to get your teeth into here.

Chinese Soft Power

Last week I went to Amazon and searched for soft power -  there are a stack of forthcoming books on soft power many of them about China.  Given my own scepticism about the usefulness of the concept I was interested to see that Shaun Breslin of Warwick University has just produced a paper on ‘The Soft Notion of China’s “Soft Power”‘ critiquing the lack of precision in the use of the concept.  It’s available here.

Colin Alexander on China and Central America

Colin Alexander is another of our PhD students, he’s working on the competition between China and Taiwan in Central America.  He’s got a post at the USC Center for Public Diplomacy Blog on China, Costa Rica and Oscar Arias’s pursuit of the office of UN Secretary General