Research Outline for China’s Cultural Soft Power

Such a general concept is culture that to give it a strict and precise definition would be difficult. Many philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, historians and linguists have tried to define culture from their own perspective. It is estimated that as many as two hundred definitions have been given, although what has been offered is far from being universally acknowledged or satisfactory. The reason why the concept of culture is so general is that cultural phenomena are almost omnipresent.

Cultural soft power enriches soft power but has distinctive Chinese characteristics as follows.

As a product of advanced human thinking and cognition, “category” is a foundational concept that is highly general and structurally stable. It captures the essence of things and general relations among them, and is, therefore, methodologically significant.

While state perspective, social perspectives, or other perspectives can be used to judge cultural soft power, the human perspective is the most objective standard of all. After all, there would be no government without officials; likewise, there would be no society without its members. The cultural soft power of a state or a society has to boil down, eventually, to people.

A core value system and its specific core values are the soul of a nation, the essence of its culture, and point to the direction for a country to advance. The major content of China’s “core socialist value system” includes: guiding ideology of Marxism, the common ideal of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the national spirit of China with patriotism as the core, the spirit of the times of reform and innovation, and the socialist concept of honor. “Core socialist values,” an expression of the core socialist value system, advocate prosperity, democracy, civility, harmony, freedom, equality, justice, the rule of law, patriotism, dedication, integrity, and kindness.

At the time when Comrade Xi Jinping took over as General Secretary in 2012, China was facing a series of domestic and international conflicts, problems, and challenges: slower economic growth, corruption scandals, terrorist attacks and so on. Internationally, it was quite clear that the Asia-Pacific re-balancing strategy aimed at China, and that the USA was encouraging Japan and the coastal countries in the South China Sea to stir up trouble in the South China Sea Area and the Diaoyu Islands, encroaching China’s sovereignty and making it difficult to build new-style relations between the United States and China. Despite so many affairs domestic and foreign and such an arduous task of governing the country, Xi still spared no effort to point up the importance of culture, and has drawn an outline of enormous significance for strengthening China by cultural means with the soul being the core values, the root being the excellent traditional culture, and the foundation being the cultural soft power under the leadership of the CPC.

The advancement of any country depends on both material hard power and cultural soft power. A country could easily be defeated without strong hard power; it would just collapse without external forces, however, with poor cultural soft power. Then how can China’s cultural soft power be strengthened? The following three aspects are essential.

The introduction of the “Chinese Dream” is welcomed by the Chinese people and also commands worldwide attention. At the same time, cultural soft power research is in full swing, exhibiting no signs of slowing down. Then what is the relationship between cultural soft power and the realization of the Chinese Dream?

On 24th–25th April, 2012, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor Joseph S. Nye, Jr. came to China and gave speeches at three universities—Peking University, Renmin University of China, and Shandong University. On their way from Beijing to Shandong province, Joseph Nye and the author of this book Zhang Guozuo talked about soft power, culture, Marxism, freedom, democracy, human rights, foreign policies, Sino-American relationship and other topics.

On the afternoon of June 19th 2013, Director of China’s Cultural Soft Power Research Center Prof. Zhang Guozuo hosted Dr. Marc Abramson and Luke Tullberg. The former guest is a China expert of the U.S. Department of State, first secretary of Embassy of the United States in Japan and sinologist, while the latter is a consul of the Embassy of the United States in China. The topics covered soft power, universal values, the Nobel Prize, Voice of America, the Korean Peninsula conflict, the Diaoyu Islands dispute, the South China Sea dispute, the right to speak, Sino-American relations, Sino-Japanese relations, etc.