Comprehensive view of china’s soft power

 

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『Comprehensive view of china’s soft power』

 

What is soft power? To unpack this concept, we need to overlook various perspective of this. Those perspectives are public diplomacy and cultural interexchange and media influence and so on. But in my opinion, soft power is carried by the power of ordinary audience. Because soft power is rely on receiver’s emotion , their motivation or interests could be the most powerful actor in process. For example, we often think Sweden or Norway might have a clean environment and we have a credibility of their food resources. It is not matter that the food from Sweden is really clean and have more nutrient thing. The clean and credible image comes to our mind when we think about Norway or Sweden. Therefore, even this kind of common thought could be a soft power. Soft power is an ability to get attraction by people’s preconceived idea rather than correct information or payment.

 

Also we can add ideas or values or principles to this preconceived idea. That is the critical characteristic of soft power. Soft power is transformative. Due to soft power could be transformed by communicative activity like media or public or non-governmental inter-change, we need to listen carefully for everyone as much as we can.

 

Nowadays china’s soft power is also influence on south Korea.  As The density of foreign trade between Korea and china has been skyrocketed, the relation of two country is getting close. With this situation, China seems to be the biggest chance for every industry. Therefore lots of people in korea study abroad to china and also have lots of governmental exchange between two countries.

 

Then let’s talk about china’s soft power. Unfortunately China is less successful as a soft power than it may otherwise be. Then let’s find some examples of affecting china’s soft power. The first one is about disclosing various information. Now PRC is a one of biggest country that affects in the world economy. Therefore there are lots of people who have interests in china and researching china.

 

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But PRC government often blocks the detail information, statistics, so researchers have hard time for making researching paper about china. That mays cause negative effect of reliability estimation. Credibility is one of most important factor of deciding soft power. As the professor said, credibility is like virginity of woman. When they lost that, it really hard to recover, therefore PRC should take care of this.

 

The second one is PRC’s image made by Chinese people in abroad. consciousness or behavior. As the boost of income level, more and more Chinese people go abroad. In this situation, their behavior can make PRC’s image. Unfortunately their image is not good for foreigners before. For example they were often criticized by noise or rude behavior in worldwide tour site. It may also cause negative effect of foreigner’s consciousness for PRC.

 

The last one is PRC’s image made by government. PRC often makes decision suddenly and announces some policy when it is unexpected. For example; recently, The PRC government suddenly control their exchange rate for stabilizing their economy. And this situation makes a big shock in foreign currency market. It might be more careful and considerate to be image of super power china. China needs to observe the prevailing global norm and universal idea.

 

Here are some examples of spreading China’s soft power. Chinese government is trying to do various efforts to spread their culture. Typical examples are Confucius Institute and CCTV world. PRC endeavor to spread not only language but using media channel to advertise Chinese value and broadcast some issues from Chinese perspective to the world.

 

On the other hand Confucius Institutes is issued in US. Chicago university banned the rejoin with Confucius Institutes by the reason that they advocate too much to china’s perspective and advertise their own policy. It is the outcome of aggressively assisted by PRC government. They worried the direct intervention of Chinese government using Confucius Institutes. It might be include hostility of extension of china’s soft power.

 

All in all; To solve those problem, absolutely pay attention to listening. It doesn’t mean the problem of the number of communication channel. The problem is realizing how big the power of audience affects. Have an open mind to listen what they thought. There is a simple preposition. Actions always speak louder than words. Successive effort would create the credibility of china. And it would be called ‘the soft power of china.’